Francisco Valsells Bielsa 1887 - 1941

Born 5.2.1887 in Calaceite
Died 9.10.1941 in Gusen

Biography

Among the 927 Spanish refugees who, on the morning of 20 August 1940, were escorted by German soldiers and French gendarmes from the Les Alliers camp to the station at Angoulême, was a family of six from the small Aragonese town of Calaceite: husband and wife Francisco Valsells Bielsa and Leoncia Casasús García and their children Bautista, Joaquín, Pilar and Dominga. Shortly before the town was taken by Franco’s troops, on 1 April 1938, they had fled from Calaceite to Catalonia and then, when Barcelona too could no longer be held, to the French border where they, like hundreds of thousands of their fellow countrymen and women, camped in the open before the neighbouring authorities brought themselves to let the refugees into the country on 28 January 1939. Immediately after crossing the border, the Valsells Casasús family were separated by the Garde mobile. While Francisco and the eldest son Bautistia were herded into one of the precarious beach camps on the sands of the Mediterranean coast, Leoncia and the other children where taken to Cognac, where they helped with the harvest on a nearby estate. At the end of the year they were reunited at the Les Alliers camp. It was their tragedy that, after the German attack on France and the ceasefire agreement at Compiègne on 22 June 1940, Angoulême remained in the zone occupied by the German Wehrmacht.

At the station, the refugees were loaded into twenty freight trucks. Shortly after four in the afternoon, the train moved off. Hopes that they were being taken to unoccupied southern France were soon dashed. Through cracks in the walls, the position of the sun and the station names told the deportees that the train was heading northeast, slowly and with stops of several hours between stations. Only once, already into Germany, were they given something to eat and, in order to relieve themselves, were able leave the trucks for a few hours.

Early in the morning on the fifth day, the train stopped at Mauthausen, a place of which the travellers had never before heard. For hours nothing happened, until the doors were unbolted and the deportees were given a watery soup to eat by men in striped jackets. Clearly the camp administration had not been informed that there were women and children on the transport. Urgent telephone conversations must be imagined from the camp administration in Mauthausen to the Reich Main Security Office in Berlin, from Berlin to Madrid and back again; consultations between the German ambassador von Stohrer and the Spanish foreign minister Serrano Suñer. Then SS men climbed into the trucks and drove all the men, including the old, the war wounded and any adolescents who already looked capable of working out onto the platform. ‘Raus!’, the first German word that the Spaniards learned. And the second and third: ‘Wie alt?’ – ‘How old?’ The women screamed, clung to their sons or tried to explain to those in uniform, in Spanish and with their hands, that they were just eleven or twelve years old.

Francisco and Bautista Valsells disappeared amidst the tumult of fists and shouting. Certainly there was no chance to even bid farewell to their family, and all Leoncia’s attention was focused on the thirteen-year-old Joaquín, who had also been considered fit for the camp but had climbed back into the truck in an unobserved moment. His mother threw a blanket over him and his sisters sat so that he couldn’t been seen from the outside. After a final check to be absolutely sure no-one had escaped their notice, the SS men bolted the doors again. The train moved off. Over sixty years later, in conversation with the Catalonian filmmakers and authors Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis (El convoy de los 927), Joaquín Valsells was to recall this event. Still ignorant of what Mauthausen meant, he immediately feared that he would never see his father again. ‘He was someone who had always enjoyed a good standard of living and who wasn’t used to putting up with hardship.’

The odyssey of the women and children left in the trucks lasted an entire week and followed a zigzag route – first to the north where, during a stop close to Berlin (probably Fürstenberg), they noticed emaciated figures in prisoners’ uniforms. Then to the west back to Angoulême through Lorraine, Alsace. And on to the south to the Spanish border. On 1 September 1940 they were registered by the Spanish military authorities in Irún and interrogated, then sent back to their home regions. To Andalusia, to Murcia, to Asturias, to Catalonia, to Aragón. In some cases to be interrogated and locked up again.

Leoncia and her children spent another ten days travelling in Spain. They covered the final twelve kilometres to Calaceite from the nearest train station at Valle del Tormo on foot, together with others returning to the town. They arrived at daybreak. The gate was locked, the family’s house and oil mill (fábrica de aceite) confiscated. They found accommodation with one of Leoncia’s sisters, living henceforth as lepers, telling no one what they had lived through or experienced. They knew that at night, neighbours were still being taken by members of the Guardia or Falangists and being shot outside the town. Joaquín: ‘Here we were all blind, deaf and dumb. You can’t talk about that, or that… Once I was charged with blasphemy because I swore at the mule during threshing. And there were Sundays when the Guardia Civil picked me up from home and forced me to attend Mass. What’s more, for over two years we had no news of my father or brother. Whom could we have asked? How could we have found anything out?’

Indeed, until February 1943 the Spanish prisoners at Mauthausen were not allowed to write to their relatives. By this point, Francisco Valsells, as Joaquín had already feared, was no longer alive. Father and son had been transferred to the Gusen camp in January 1941, where Francisco, at the age of 54, died from a petrol injection, from exhaustion, from illness, under the beatings of a Kapo or the boots of an SS man.

At the beginning of 1942, Bautista, along with forty other young Spaniards, was assigned to a work detachment of stone masons who worked as forced labourers for the Poschacher company. They were popular with the adult prisoners not just because they used their advantageous position to smuggle in food and news, but because they were cheerful, obliging and defiant. In his posthumous memoirs (De Calaceite a Mauthausen, 2006), the former mayor of Calaceite, Raimundo Suñer Aguas, wrote that as one they opposed the company operator’s order to load the trucks at a run. Furthermore, they took on the risk of getting negatives of photos of the camp, which fellow countryman Francisco Boix had stolen from the records department, out of the camp by hiding them in their shoes. A woman in the town, Anna Pointner, helped as best she could and hid the photographic material in her garden.

Among the documents in the family’s possession, now part of the Mauthausen Memorial archive thanks to the initiative of historian Benito Bermejo, are eleven postcards sent by Bautista to his mother between 24 February 1943 and 28 May 1944. ‘[N]o more than 25 words, only personal family news’ was allowed and the contents were checked by both the camp administration and the censor’s office in Barcelona. Leoncia had received the first news about where husband and son were in a letter from the consular department of the German embassy in Madrid dated 8 September 1941:

Both protective custody prisoners (‘en prisión preventiva’) ‘are enjoying full health’. It was two years before Bautista, writing between the lines, set this cruel lie straight. On 10 July 1943 he wrote: ‘Since 9 October 1941 I am alone, don’t suffer for me’. And on 13 November 1943: ‘don’t wait for Francisco.’ So we know the exact date of his father’s death, but not the exact circumstances, since Bautista survived the liberation of the concentration camp by only a few months. He died in 1946 in the small French town of Fumel, Département Lot-et-Garonne, in an industrial accident. According to eye-witness reports, he got his foot stuck in a railway track or switch, was unable to get free in time and was hit by a train. He had never seen his mother or siblings again.

Apart from the camp postcards only one of his letters remains, which he wrote to his brother in August 1945 – two months after his release from Mauthausen – from France. ‘Unforgotten and beloved brother… .’ No word about the harrowing years that lay behind him, instead a confirmation of his desire to make up for his lost youth with cinema visits, dancing, a forthcoming trip to Paris. He encouraged Joaquín to enjoy life as much as possible, complained that his job prospects were poor as well, and expressed the vague hope of seeing the family again.

There remain, too, a few photos. Bautista alone and in the company of his friends from the Poschacher work detachment whose fathers also died in Gusen: Jesús Tello Gómez, Jesús Grau Suñer, Pedro Suñer Nielles. Grau and Suñer also came from Calaceite, as did an attractive girl with pinned-up hair and wearing a floral blouse, who had written on the back of her picture: ‘Keep this fond memory of this your friend, who will not forget you for as long as she lives and holds you very dear. Maria Roig’. Photos, promises of a future that for him was not to be. And finally a photo of his father Francisco, in profile, with a serious expression, as if he already knew what awaited him. It would be a comfort to know that Bautista was with him when he died.

Years after the end of the war, Leoncia Casasús was awarded compensation from the German government for the murder of her husband. When the priest in Calaceite heard about it, he tried to convince her to donate the sum to the parish. Joaquín: ‘He said to my mother, who was very Catholic: “Thanks to God’s grace you’ll now get this money, and with it we could build a new chapel.” She replied: “Padre Vincent, where was God when they killed my husband?”’

 

Erich Hackl

Translation into English: Joanna White

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