Stolperstein installation in Albacete

Hello,

First of all, I would like to thank the Governor of the Province, the Members of Parliament and Senators, the Mayor, the members of the Municipal Council in general, and Unidos Podemos in particular. My thanks also go to the German artist Günter Demnig, creator and installer of these memorial stones, without whom this act would not have been possible.

My name is Jean Ocana, son of José Ocana García. During the Spanish Civil War my father was a supply officer in the Republican Army. He was responsible for receiving refugees fleeing the northern fronts, as well as the thousands of volunteers of the International Brigades who came to Albacete to defend the values of the Republic.

Once the war ended, he was sentenced to death by the Franco regime and had no choice but to go into exile in France. (Can you imagine what it means to walk across half a country in search of freedom?) After crossing the Pyrenees he was immediately interned in the concentration camp of Argelès until the outbreak of the Second World War, when he volunteered in the French Army. In June 1940 he was taken prisoner by the Germans, spent several months in a Stalag in Germany, and was then deported to the extermination camp of Mauthausen in Austria, where he remained until his liberation on May 6, 1945.

Mauthausen was a Category III camp, an extermination camp through forced labor — the most terrifying kind. Deportees died from a bullet to the neck, an injection of benzine to the heart, by throwing themselves against electrified barbed wire, from typhus, hunger, cold, or exhaustion. They were worn out after climbing several times a day the 186 steps of the quarry (equivalent to an eleven-story building) carrying stones weighing around 40 kilos on their backs, under blows from whips and kicks. For many, death lurked before the end of the day, with the gas chamber and the crematorium as the final destination, reduced to dust and oblivion: the Final Solution, as Hitler called it.

The people we remember today are some of those 10,000 Spaniards who, from August 1940 to May 1945, were deported to Nazi extermination camps. More than 7,000 Spaniards were exterminated, including 96 from Albacete.

That is why these stones honor the sacrifice of these brave men, fighters for freedom, who defended the values we enjoy today, who endured war, exile and deportation — and above all oblivion, because when the time came to account for what those years had been, no one made known to the world the tragedy lived by Spanish deportees. Only in the minds of the survivors were those horrors forever engraved.

In a certain way, we also pay tribute to their wives, most of them condemned, who remained standing out of dignity when the victors sought to bring them to their knees; women for whom there was no escape, often alone in raising their children in the face of ostracism, beatings — such as those suffered by my mother — and rape.

It is never too late to denounce the complicity of Francoism in the tragic fate of Spanish exiles. Franco was not a passive accomplice, nor did he look the other way. He was the instigator who ordered this extermination, sealed in Berlin, according to the declaration made by the commandant of Mauthausen:

“Spaniards, surely you had never heard of Mauthausen until today. It is the Spaniards’ camp, the camp of death. You entered through this gate, and every last one of you will leave through these chimneys.”

With this event we pay a well-deserved tribute to these people, so that they may not disappear into the ashes of oblivion, into general indifference, and as Günter so rightly says:

“A person is only forgotten when his or her name is forgotten.”

For us, as family members, this tribute is of inestimable value after so many years of silence and humiliation. In this world of immediacy, of the absolute trivialization of everything, of lies, this act is our way of restoring dignity to the human being.

Finally, I would like to recall the trial in Madrid of Julián Besteiro, socialist president of Parliament during the Second Republic. When the court asked him where the gold of the Republic was, he replied:

“The gold of the Republic lies in the walls of those shot, in the cemeteries, and in exile.”

One may say that the gold of the Republic was also in the Nazi camps, and today it is here in these stones; their shine will blind unreason and illuminate consciences.

Thank you.

ALBACETE — 2 Avenida de la Estación — April 2, 2022