11.09.08 - 10:02 -
"Render unto Caesar what is Caesar's." That is what Evelyn Mesquida aspires to with her book "La Nueve," which resurrects the important role played by Spanish Republicans in World War II as shock troops for the Free French Forces.
"To date, these men have been forgotten. It's like a homage, like a recognition, a way of telling them thanks," Mesquida told Efe.
Published by Ediciones B and with a prologue written by Spanish storyteller, essayist and politician Jorge Semprun, "La Nueve" hits store shelves on Wednesday in Spain and will be published next year in France, where Mesquida predicts that "it will be very controversial" because the French "are convinced that they did everything and they don't like hearing the opposite."
But her effort in putting out this book goes beyond just recalling the historical role played by the Spaniards in the war in France: "I wouldn't like to die without France having paid them the homage it owes them."
The author, who was a correspondent in Paris for three decades up until last year, says that the soldiers who sought refuge in France after the Republican defeat in the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War, continued the struggle against fascism and Naziism and were integrated into the French armed forces.
They fought with French troops in many battles and when in 1943 the acclaimed Gen. Philippe Leclerc formed the famous 2nd Armoured Division, many of the Spaniards were in the ranks.
Most of them were regrouped into a batallion made up of four companies, each one with more than a third of its troops being Spanish, except for the 9th Company - from which the book gets its title - an almost entirely Spanish unit, whose commander, Raymond Dronne, made no bones about calling his men "fighters for freedom."
With Leclerc, the 9th trained in Africa and England, landed in Normandy, liberated Paris, fought through the toughest battles to eventually liberate Strasbourg and managed to drive to Hitler's mountain retreat in Berchtesgaden, as Mesquida admiringly discusses in her book.
This is a book that took the author countless hours of work at night, on weekends and during vacations for an entire decade to compile the testimony of survivors and other documentation that was not easy to unearth because French history had virtually erased the Spaniards' contributions.
The spark of curiosity to pursue the exceptional story was born in Mesquida on the day someone showed her a photograph of the men who liberated Paris in August 1944: "They were Spaniards, they were in England, they were dressed in American uniforms and were in a French company. For me that was incomprehensible."
She decided to throw herself into the project. In her search for information on the Spanish troops, Mesquida got to know men who were younger than 20 when in 1936 they took up arms for the first time to defend the Spanish Republic and who didn't abandon it until eight years later.
Some of those she met refused to talk to her, so walled up were they in the silence of decades. For others, it was already too late.
But still others, in contrast, shared their recollections with her, and something that surprised Mesquida about them was their "normality."
"They're not ... perfect men," the author says, "but they all have a tremendous quality and an incredible force, which was what made them know what they were fighting for, fighting against fascism and with total conviction."
Another thing that surprised her was that the men all "spoke of betrayal because apparently they had promised all of them that they would go to Spain and they fought with the road to Spain before them."
Sistematically, Mesquida asked each man at the end of his interview "Would you do it again?" and all, without exception, answered "Yes."
Before the Normandy landings, there were 144 Spaniards in the 9th Company, but now, of the 16 who survived the war, only two are still alive - Lluis Royo and Rafael Gómez.
Mesquida says that getting "official" French recognition of the role the men played while some of them can still experience it would have special significance for her. Now, she is immersed in the search for the men who inspired "the first foci of the Resistance in France" and, she says, they were also Spaniards.
