"New project honors thousands of Jews who braved Catalan Pyrenees to escape Holocaust"

"The Lleida Provincial Council is promoting a project entitled ‘Persecuted and Saved’ that aims to identify and mark the principal paths through the Catalan Pyrenees taken by 80,000 fugitives, 20,000 of whom were Jewish, in order to escape the Nazi horror during the Holocaust. 

They will also show the prisons and concentration camps set up to hold those who were caught. The project has already received a good deal of interest from Israel, with Alon Bar, Ambassador of Israel to Spain, visiting the key sites.

Furthermore, Walter Wasercier, CEO of Israel’s principal airline, EL-AL, and Joan Reñé, President of Lleida’s Provincial Council, have met in order to discuss setting up weekly chartered flights between Israel and Lleida-Alguaire Airport.

 

Reñé claims that the project is an opportunity to “recover the historical memory and publicize the little-known events that occurred here during the Holocaust.”  Bar summarized the importance of the project with a Hebrew saying, “to save a soul is to save an entire world”. 

He also expressed thanks to the Catalan people, many of whom risked their lives to help save Jews and other refugees who were fleeing from Nazi barbarism.

A chance for Jewish people to find their ‘roots’

Bar believes that many Jewish people may find their roots while exploring the sites that their relatives used to escape tyranny and certain death. Over 20,000 Jewish refugees are believed to have passed through the Pyrenees, often taking the harshest and most difficult routes in order to avoid capture by Nazi soldiers patrolling the area.

Better Catalan understanding

Reñé also believes the project is a good chance for Catalans to better understand and appreciate the history of the area and the role that their parents and grandparents played by helping the starving and freezing survivors that made it over the mountains."

Source: Vilaweb here.

"Who Killed Walter Benjamin?" - Screening of documentary in Barcelona

This new film by David Mauas will be shown in Barcelona on Monday the 16^th of September. (Details: here.)

 
"In September 1940, after seven years of exile, Walter Benjamin crosses the Pyrenees in a desperate attempt to escape the Nazis.

According to the official version, Walter Benjamin did make it across the French-Spanish border successfully. But when he arrived in the Catalan town of Portbou, a sudden change in legislation impeded his entry into Spain and he was obliged to spend the night at a local hotel under the close vigilance of three guards, whose orders were to deport him the following morning.

In utter despair, Benjamin took his own life, swallowing an overdose of morphine. The local doctor, however, declared it a natural death and Benjamin was given a Catholic burial in the municipal cemetery, under a wrong name.

Did the doctor conceal some hidden cause of Benjamin´s death? Was there really a change of legislation? Was Walter Benjamin aware that Portbou was a pro-Franco town virtually occupied by the Nazis?

Who killed Walter Benjamin… reaches for answers among the suspicious circumstances of his death. Giving at the same time, a portrait of a frontier town anchored between two fronts, constant witness of evasion, persecution and false hopes..."

UPDATE on Barcelona neo-Nazi bookseller

By his own standards, Pedro Varela Geiss is not wasting his time in prison.

He is refusing to participate in organised discussions about racism, calling them "brainwashing" sessions, instead preferring to spend his free hours reading and making sure that his fellow prisoners know they can read his newly-introduced range of right-wing ideology.

Read more here.

Not such a Happy New Year for Barcelona Hitler-worshipper

In the continuing story of Barcelona neo-Nazi bookshop owner Pedro Varela, the latest chapter sees him due to return to court.

Currently serving a prison sentence for similar offences, Varela is likely to be released this March but is now facing new charges from the German regional government in Bavaria. They are making the claim that he has vioalted “intellectual property laws by publishing and distributing” Mein Kampf, the anti-Semitic, nationalist book by the 20th century dictator Adolf Hitler.

With the typical doublethink of a bigot, Varela maintains that he is being persecuted, despite having a long history of peddling ideas that persecute entire groups of people.

Varela’s defence lawyers have admitted that he has made a “significant” amount of money selling his self-published copies of Mein Kampf.

A statue of Hitler was found concealed in Varela’s book storeroom when the shop was raided in 2006.

What Franco did for the Holocaust

The reality wasn’t just that the dictator’s propaganda was entirely untrue. He had in fact been very tempted to play his part in resolving the “Jewish problem in Europe.”

At the end of World War II, Franco largely succeeded in convincing the world that he had contributed to saving thousands of Jews from extermination at the hands of the Nazis.

Thanks to the patient work of a Jewish journalist, Jacobo Israel Garzón, the only document addressing the issue that still survives has surfaced in the National Archive’s collection. It was originally issued by the regional government of Zaragoza. It has since been published in the history magazine Raíces. This is the story behind it [in Spanish from El Pais.]

Picasso and the Nazi

“There is a beautiful story about Picasso. It was during the Nazi occupation in France. The great painter was summoned to Gestapo headquarters. He found a Nazi officer studying one of Picasso’s most famous paintings. The canvas depicted the brutal destruction of the town of Guernica by the Nazis during the Spanish civil war.

The Gestapo man looked with menace at Picasso and pointed to the painting. ‘Did you do this?’ he asked. Picasso looked at the Nazi and said ‘No, you did.’”

[Greek actress and politician Melina Mercouri talking about “a moment when the artist and the citizen were one.”]