The book “Spaniards in the Nazi camps” by Amalia Rosado Orquín
The Spanish female deportation to the Nazi concentration camps, despite being one of the darkest episodes of our recent history, is still little known. This book brings our deported women out of the historical gloom, making visible especially the experiences of those who, after the civil war and fleeing from Franco’s repression, went into exile in France, where they were imprisoned for joining the ranks of the Resistance. Their role as fighters against Nazi oppression led to their imprisonment in the camps of the Third Reich. There the Spanish women were identified as political prisoners with a red triangle.
In the camps they experienced the most hurtful dehumanization and not only experienced the same degree of humiliation and torture as the men, they also suffered specific sexual, medical-reproductive and maternal violence, the latter also affecting their children.
These events, despite their brutality, continue to be ignored in our country without being integrated as part of our history. The scarce pedagogy that has been done about the female deportation gives us the measure of the scarce interest that exists, even today, about certain somber and uncomfortable events of our past. The latter has meant that the life stories of Spanish female deportees are placed in ignorance, or at best in a dubious limbo where there is a tendency to appeal more to sentimentality than to reflection. Limiting ourselves to observe these atrocious facts from ignorance will shock our senses, but it will not teach us. Only from a perspective that bets more on knowledge than on appealing to the impact of sentimentalism will it be useful for us to learn. Our research intends to be a direct interpellation to reflection. That is why the approach used in this book emphasizes not only what happened to these women, but more importantly, the reasons that provoked their deportation and the consequences that resulted from it.
Compiling their collective ordeal, this book describes the double victimization suffered by Spanish women in the Holocaust as told by its protagonists, survivors of camps such as Bergen Belsen, Mauthausen, Ravensbrück, Buchenwald and others. After their liberation with the end of World War II, our female deportees could not return to Spain, and their stories were placed in the shadow of male narratives and the oblivion imposed in our country during the dictatorship. Although Spanish women also contributed to the defeat of Nazism, their role as protagonists of history was never truly recognized, obviating their achievements because they were women and constraining them in their role as victims. This stereotypical view is a product of their time and the historical context in which they lived. These two issues explain the underrepresentation of women in general and the invisibilization of Spanish women in particular, placing them as great absentees and unknowns of the European deportation.
It is necessary to confront a historical approach from the perspective of women’s resistance rather than oppression, distancing them from the overused and univocal narrative of passive victim with which they are so often identified. The protagonists of this book defy this narrative as they are a clear and convincing example that women not only suffer history, they also make it. Understanding the history of women as oppressed subjects is essential to unravel patriarchal mechanisms, but it is also essential to expose stories of resistance such as that of these Spanish women, making other different female models visible and giving them value. We need these references to understand our past, but above all to establish new future paths, and this is not possible without vindicating figures of courage and resistance as exemplified by our deported women.
Now that they have all disappeared, it is not easy to illuminate the shadows in which so many of them were plunged. We hope that our research will be an instrument that will help to place them in the worthy place they deserve to be, thus perpetuating the valuable legacy they left us.
Adopting a gender approach, this book analyzes in depth the reasons for the deportation of Spanish women and reflects on the conditions in which it took place, accounting for the differentiated violence that was exercised against women and highlighting the active role played by the deported Spanish women in one of the darkest episodes in the history of Europe. A universal and inclusive account that fills many gaps in the construction of our recent past.
