Miguel Campos Delgado was a 24-year-old Canarian baker when the Civil War broke out. The complaint of a neighbor who took advantage of the conflict to settle a previous fight led him to prison, then to a concentration camp in Rota (Cádiz); to a work battalion in Morocco… There he managed to escape and cross into French territory, to finally join the Free French Forces, where he was assigned to the ninth company, known as On August 25, 1944, Campos was one of the Spaniards who, after participating in several battles against the Nazis, triumphantly toured the Champs-Élysées of liberated Paris. That ordinary man born in the Tenerife town of Güímar who not long ago had decided to earn his bread by doing so was already a brave wounded and decorated soldier.
The Minister of Territorial Policy and Democratic Memory, wanted to begin by proudly remembering his countryman the inauguration speech of the exhibition on La Nueve that will be hosted from this Tuesday until July in the Campo del Moro gardens, in Madrid. “Her daughter, María Teresa, has lived with the sorrow that her mother died without knowing that her husband had been a hero.” “Knowing the protagonists of La Nueve, exploring their lives, understanding why they fought,” he added, “provides us with tools of incalculable value to face the current moment, when it seems that the principles of international law and the values that emerged after the Second World War have been broken. Today we celebrate here the victory that paved the way towards a world with new rules by germinating the seed of pacifism as the only possible path for the survival of humanity,” he declared, referring to the
The story of La Nueve, of which 127 Republican Spaniards were part, was silenced for years. The curator of the exhibition, the historian Diego Gaspar, explained how “censorship and oblivion” hid the epic from the Spanish, on the one hand, because the Spanish dictatorship was not interested in making it known, and on the other, because the French also tried to impose a story of heroic and national resistance, disdaining the help of foreign fighters. That began to change in the 1970s, when historians questioned the established discourse and began to highlight the name of some of those tracked tanks that had helped liberate Paris in 1944, with unequivocally Spanish names: “Guadalajara”; “Brunete”; “Guernika; “Don Quixote”…
The minister delegate to the armed forces and former combatants of the French Republic, Alice Rufo, invited to the opening ceremony of the exhibition, recalled this Tuesday in the Campo del Moro gardens that triumphal parade after the liberation of Paris: “The crowd cheered them without knowing that among those soldiers there were combatants from Spain who had become true brothers in arms for the French. Many were decorated with the legion of honor, but too many did not receive the recognition that their commitment deserved. In all In Spain, there were a large number of combatants willing to defend freedom. For us, they are examples of bravery at a time when conflicts are worsening on an international scale and predatory and bellicose logics are resurfacing.”
The exhibition remembers the journey of some of the men of La Nueve, such as Luis Royo Ibáñez, a Catalan shoemaker, soldier of the Second Republic, who arrived on foot at the French border in 1939. Or Amado Granell and Federico Moreno, who had previously tried to flee from Franco’s regime aboard a ship packed with Republicans, the , directed by a disobedient captain, Archibald Dickson. He was in charge of collecting a shipment of oranges, tobacco and saffron, but in the port of Alicante that April 1939, he found a human carpet of desperate men, women and children fleeing from Franco and took them aboard the old ship bound for the French colony of Oran, in Algeria.
The path that led those ordinary men to become heroes had begun in the Civil War. The majority of Spaniards who would end up being part of La Nueve tried to defend republican legality and, when Franco won, three years later, they fled to France, which, as the then Prime Minister, Manuel Valls, admitted in 2015, “They were humiliated. They wanted to take away their dignity. Those who fled in search of freedom expected a different type of reception. That is not France.” The neighboring country not only did not welcome the Spanish exiles with open arms, but sent them to internment camps, separating entire families. That painful reception did not prevent years later, some of those men from fighting shoulder to shoulder with the French to free them from what they considered a common enemy: fascism.
The exhibition also pays tribute to Spanish women of the Resistance, such as Marina Vega, whom this newspaper . “Between 1942 and 1944 I made two trips a week to France. I don’t know how many people I could have brought with me. I deduce that they would be French Jews fleeing the Nazis. Also some English.” “If the Nazis caught you, you had a cyanide pill in your pocket. You put it in your mouth; if the danger passed, you spat it out, and if you saw that they were about to make you talk, you swallowed it. It’s an automatic death. I had companions who did it. Another killed himself in a cell by banging his head against the wall,” he then told EL PAÍS.
Fernando Martínez, Secretary of State for Democratic Memory, highlights the “role of women” in the Resistance and celebrates that the exhibition is now a reality. “It should have been seen in Spain a long time ago. Spaniards should know the contribution of their compatriots in the defense of freedoms in Europe.”
