The only photograph that Juana Ruiz has of her father was taken in 1936, when he was a young soldier in uniform – she was only one when he disappeared from their lives forever. Now she has 27,440 euros to remember him by, thanks to the Republic of France.
You see, her father, like literally hundreds of Spaniards ended up in the Nazi concentration camps of Mauthausen & Gusen (Austria) after being sent there from French soil by the Vichy Government. According to Spanish Government records, 130 men from Jaen died in these camps – that’s just the province of Jaen, so imagine the total national number.
The Spanish Civil War took her father, Juan Ruiz, born in 1910, to Barcelona, and from there, like thousands of refugees, over the Pyrenees to the false safety of France. The French rounded them up and kept them in camps, sometimes little more than open land, fenced in by barbed wire, next to the Atlantic beaches.
His wife (Juana’s mother) tried for the rest of her life to find out what had happened to her young husband, but died without discovering the truth – only her surviving children, in their 80’s themselves, were to find out.
In 1959, the International Red Cross, at the instigation of the Spanish branch, discovered a clue on the Nazi list of inmates for these camps, and then early the following year, the family received official confirmation: Juan Ruiz had died at Gusen in 1942. By this time Juana’s mother had already died. He had been deported from France in 1941.
Spanish investigator, Pilar Pardo, who tries to track down the descendents of these Nazi victims so that they can received their French pension, points out that Spanish Republican prisoners began to be moved to German concentration camps from just after the fall of France in 1940, continuing all through 1941. There, they were worked to death in a local quarry. Gusen, which is next door to Mauthausen, was the destination of the inmates who had lost their ‘usefulness’ in the other camp – a one-way ticket.
Even though descendents like Juana are at the end of their lives at their advanced age, they have grandchildren and children with mortgages and debts that can well use the money – money from hell.
(Regional News: Jaen, Andalucia)