The Impostor
Page 25
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A few months after his first visit to Flossenbürg, Marco went back there to attend one of the reunions of former prisoners which had periodically taken place since 1995; in this particular year, it was held on June 26. After this, Marco became a diligent visitor to these gatherings. It would have been at one of the first reunions he attended that he met Johannes Ibel, and something happened that Ibel would not forget.
Ibel is a historian. He had taken a position at Flossenbürg in early 2000, shortly after the Flossenbürg Memorial Foundation began operating in the former SS headquarters; his job consisted of establishing a database of all information of every prisoner who had passed through the camp, a task that was to take him five years. From his first visit, Marco had been eager to establish documentary evidence of his presence at the camp and, like any former prisoner who made the request, he had been given photocopies of the pages from the registers in which his name was likely to appear—in his case, those pages where the Nazis had noted the names of Spanish prisoners—with the caveat that it was possible his name would not figure, since the lists were incomplete. On the day Ibel met him, Marco showed him a photocopy of one of the pages and indicated a name. There I am, he said, that’s me. Ibel looked. He was accustomed to the handwriting of Nazi officials at Flossenbürg and immediately noted the information: the entry Marco had indicated was prisoner number 6448, a Spaniard whose first name was Enric, but whose surname was not Marco but Moné. Ibel pointed this out; Marco insisted and launched into a garbled explanation about the workings of the clandestine struggle, the need to use false names to confuse and disorient the enemy. There is no doubt, he said, pointing to the photocopy again. That’s me. Ibel studied the entry: it stated that the Spaniard was from Figueras, had been admitted to the main camp on February 23, 1944, and transferred to the Beneschau subcamp on March 3 of that year, at which point the historian remembered (or he may have remembered it later) that neither of these dates tallied with those Marco had given him, or those he remembered Marco giving him, but he didn’t want to argue. He said simply: If you say this is you, it must be you. There’s no doubt, Marco said again. It’s me. And then he asked Ibel to issue him with a certificate stating that he had been Flossenbürg prisoner number 6448. Ibel was bewildered. I can’t do that, he said. Why not? asked Marco. Because we cannot be certain that you were that person, said Ibel, then gestured to the photocopy and added, we can give you another copy of the register, but not a certificate stating that you were a prisoner here. Marco cannot have been particularly satisfied with this response, but he must also have realised that it would be unwise to pursue the discussion. He did not pursue it.
The incident had no negative repercussions, and from that moment, everywhere he went, our man misappropriated the camp number of Enric Moné, whose actual name was Enric Moner; everywhere but Flossenbürg, obviously. Despite the fact that his behaviour had briefly aroused the suspicions of Ibel—who also concluded from Marco’s responses to his questions about the last days of the camp, that he was merely repeating hearsay—Marco continued to be invited to survivors’ reunions by the foundation. He attended every year, or almost every year, alone or with his wife or with Spanish friends or acquaintances, laid flowers on the stone commemorating the Spaniards who had died, acted as a guide for visitors, or gave talks about his experience in the camp at nearby schools. The Foundation treated him as just another survivor, and he acted like one. He even managed to strike up a friendship of sorts with other survivors, as, for example, with Gianfranco Mariconti—an elderly Italian partisan who had fought against the fascists during the Second World War and, after his arrest in 1944, spent the last year of the war in Flossenbürg—with whom he corresponded; the two men met up on a number of occasions unrelated to the commemorations in Germany and in Italy, alone or with their wives. All of these things allowed him to identify with the camp, with the survivors of the camp, with himself as a survivor of the camp. The identification was radical and complete: to understand Marco it is important to understand that, in a sense, Marco did not pretend to be a camp survivor, or at least after a certain point he was no longer pretending, at a certain point Marco became a camp survivor just as, at a certain point, Alonso Quixano became Don Quixote.
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I am looking at a photograph of one of the annual reunions of former prisoners of Flossenbürg. The picture shows all the survivors who were still alive when the reunion took place, or all the survivors who were still alive and could or wished to attend. It’s a colour photograph, the atmosphere is summery—everyone is wearing short-sleeved shirts and light jackets—probably taken in July, since that was when the reunions were held, I don’t know which year, but it must be between 2000 and 2004, when Marco was attending. I don’t know whether all the survivors present are in the picture, because it is poorly framed and looks as though people sitting to the right may have been cropped out. Most are men, though there are four women (Flossenbürg was originally a camp reserved for men, but towards the end, women comprised almost a third of the prisoners); one of the men, on the far right of the photograph, is wearing a prisoner’s uniform; unsurprisingly, all of them are old or very old. Marco is there, right in the middle of the photograph, where he will be most visible—the second row down, sixth from the left. He’s wearing a blue, short-sleeved shirt and dark trousers, his hands are clasped, his fingers interlaced, his thick moustache and his thinning hair are dyed black; he’s staring at the camera, and although the image is blurred, in his eyes and on the lips hidden by his moustache, it is just possible to make out a smile. He looks calm, relaxed, happy to be where he is, among his former comrades in captivity. If you didn’t know he was not one of them, nothing would give it away. In fact, he is one of them.
2
In May 2005, when the scandal about Marco broke, many people wondered how our man could have duped so many people for so long with such a monstrous lie. Like any question, or at least like any complex question, there is not one answer but many; here I will list seven of them.
The first, unsurprisingly, is that Marco is not only a superlative conman, a shameless charlatan, a peerless trickster and an exceptional storyteller, but also a phenomenal performer, a “magnificent actor” as Vargas Llosa calls him, capable of completely immersing himself in his character: just as, at a certain point in the Seventies, Marco stopped playing a former anti-Franco resistance fighter and became a former anti-Franco resistance fighter, at a certain point in the early years of the twenty-first century, Marco stopped playing a former prisoner of the Nazis and became a former prisoner of the Nazis.
The second answer is that the more monstrous the lie, the more believable it is to most people. This is the very basis of political totalitarianism, and no-one has described it better than a genius of totalitarianism: Adolf Hitler. “The masses,” Hitler argues in Mein Kampf, “more readily fall victim to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” Given that an emphasis on truth betrays the liar, I hardly need to point out that, in the passage quoted above, Hitler isn’t arguing in favour of the “big lie,” but denouncing it in the name of truth.
The third answer is no less important than the previous two, but it is less evident. It has sometimes been implied that the Marco affair could only have happened in Spain, a country with a complex, flawed ability to assimilate its recent past, one where there were few victims of the Nazis compared to other European countries (among other reasons because it didn’t take part in the Second World War, or did so only as a German ally), where even in the early twenty-first century there were few reliable studies about Spanish victims of the Nazi genocide and where the Holocaust doesn’t have
a major role in the collective memory, or what we usually call the collective memory. I too believed that these things were true, or at least plausible, which is why in my article “I am Enric Marco,” I wrote that one of the things that made Marco’s case possible was “our relative ignorance of the recent past generally and of Nazism in particular,” and continued, “although Marco promoted himself as a remedy for this national failing, in fact he was the finest proof of its existence.”
This isn’t false but, at least at first glance, it isn’t remotely certain either. Because the truth is that, from the very moment the Second World War ended, there were many people of many different nationalities who claimed to have been in the Nazi camps when they hadn’t been, or people who embellished or embroidered or exaggerated the reality of their time in the Nazi camps, perhaps because, as Germaine Tillion says, the madness of the camps fostered such fantasies. Norman Finkelstein offers two more tangible reasons for the phenomenon: “Because enduring the camps became a crown of martyrdom, many Jews who spent the war elsewhere represented themselves as camp survivors. Another strong motive behind this misrepresentation, was material. The post-war German government provided compensation to Jews who had been in ghettos or camps. Many Jews fabricated their pasts to meet this eligibility requirement.” Only some of these impostors attained the notoriety of Marco, obviously, but a few of them surpassed him, or almost did so. Among them is Jerzy Kosinski, whose fabricated memories as a child victim of the Holocaust, titled The Painted Bird, was hailed in 1965 as one of the greatest denunciations of Nazism and became a fundamental text on the subject of the Holocaust—it won many prizes, was translated into countless languages and became recommended reading in schools. Or the case of Binjamin Wilkomirski, who became famous in 1995 when he published Fragments: Memories of a Childhood, 1939–1948, in which he narrates as real his fictional internment in Auschwitz and Majdanek. Or that of Herman Rosenblat, who, in a false memoir entitled Angel at the Fence, recounts how as a child in a Nazi camp he had struck up a friendship with a girl who gave him food, a girl he met again many years later in an improbable coincidence, and to whom he was still married when the book was published in 2008. Or the case of Misha Defonseca, a Belgian woman who in 1997 published Misha: A Mémoire of the Holocaust Years, in which she relates that in 1941, when she was just six years old, her parents were arrested as Jews and sent to a concentration camp and that she spent the next four years wandering through Germany, Poland, Ukraine, Romania and Yugoslavia before returning to Belgium via Italy and France, when the reality is that she was not Jewish and never left Belgium during the war years. The list of great impostors could be longer: for twenty years Deli Strummer gave talks in the United States about her experience in the Nazi camps until, in 2000, it was discovered that she had significantly distorted the truth about her past during the war; Martin Zaidenstadt, having been a prosperous businessman, spent his retirement offering his services as a guide and begging for money from visitors to Dachau, claiming he had been a prisoner there. All of these people are or were Jews, or claimed to be. This fact is not incidental. As Marco himself could have attested when he began to research his character as a camp prisoner, the Holocaust—the vast, systematic extermination of millions of Jews—and the “Deportation”—the imprisonment in the camps, use of slave labour and murder of hundreds of thousands of non-Jews—are very different things; it isn’t always easy to distinguish between them, because the two sometimes overlap or interconnect, but the fact is that the Holocaust left much less of a paper trail than the Deportation, particularly in eastern Europe, where millions of people were exterminated, sometimes without leaving any paper trail. One can only conclude that Jewish impostors had fewer difficulties than non-Jews, and from this that the best-known impostors were Jews. It’s true that in many European countries, particularly in eastern Europe, Marco’s task would have been much more difficult; even in France, where many more were deported to the camps than in Spain, where survivors were grouped into associations immediately after the war, where the status of déporté required passing a series of tests and where deportees were entitled to claim a pension and enjoyed certain privileges. To be fair: all, or almost all European countries—and indeed the vast majority of countries in general—have a complex, flawed ability to assimilate their recent past, because no country can boast of a past without war, without violence, without a shameful episode, and because, like Marco, countries do everything in their power to avoid knowing or recognising themselves for what they are; so it is perhaps not true that Marco’s case could only have happened in Spain. Perhaps. But, without wishing to pander to traditional Spanish masochism, it should be recognised that, largely because of the forty years of dictatorship that followed the Civil War, Spain was a more fertile ground than almost any European country to produce Marco’s case, the proof being that in 2004, only months before he unmasked Marco, Benito Bermejo exposed Antonio Pastor Martínez, another false Spanish deportado who acquired almost the same level of notoriety. As far as I am aware, nowhere else in Europe experienced two such similar cases.
This is the third answer, the third reason why Marco was able to dupe so many people for so long: Spain’s historic delay in attaining democracy and our general indifference to the most bitter period of recent European history.
The fourth response is that, if you study the case carefully, Marco didn’t fool all that many people—only those who were easily fooled or wanted to be fooled—and certainly didn’t fool them for very long. Marco publicly declared he had been a prisoner of the camps in 1978, in the books by Pons Prades and Maríano Constante, but until 1999, when he made his first visit to Flossenbürg and became a member of the Amical de Mauthausen, his character as a deportado showed few signs of life, and even these were private and infrequent, almost secret, as though the character were dormant. This means that, at least in his role as a fake prisoner of the camps, Marco didn’t fool people for thirty years, as is usually claimed, but for only six: from 1999 until the scandal broke. As for the number of people he fooled, there can be no doubt that it was large, but most were schoolchildren, while the vast majority of people, including journalists, teachers, historians and politicians had no idea, or only the most superficial notion of the Deportation, and didn’t have the data to refute Marco’s deception, nor did they take the trouble to verify whether what he said was true. He did not, however, fool genuine survivors of the camps, or not all of them: we don’t know the opinion of the real prisoners of Flossenbürg—who met him on only a handful of occasions where linguistic barriers proved useful in protecting his deception—but we do know that a number of Spanish deportees had their suspicions, that they discussed their suspicions before he was exposed, that Marco managed to spend as little time with them as possible and had a talent for avoiding them. We also know that he didn’t have anything to do with the larger Spanish associations—the Amical Francesa and the F.E.D.I.P. (Spanish Federation of Deportados and Political Prisoners)—which were based in France because after the Second World War the majority of Spaniards who had been in the camps remained in France, just as we know that by the time he joined the Amical de Mauthausen, there were very few survivors, most of whom were in poor health. I don’t wish to be misinterpreted: nothing could be further from my intention than to play down Marco’s deception, which is extraordinary; as everywhere in this book, or almost everywhere, so in this very paragraph, I am simply trying to be even-handed.
The fifth response partly explains why Marco wasn’t unmasked by any of the genuine survivors who suspected him. “Public impostors are surrounded by a sort of curious protective silence,” writes the psychiatrist Carlos Castilla del Pino. “There are almost always those who know about the imposture but dare not reveal it. The obscure reasons for this silence can sometimes mean that the deception carries on for years. The complicity is not always self-serving, and those involved are not accomplices in the strict sense of the word.” The question is, what were the obscur
e reasons for the silence of Marco’s unwitting accomplices? I will venture two explanations. The first is obvious: in recent decades there has been a “sacralisation of the Holocaust” (the phrase is from Peter Novick); this, combined with a gradual eclipse of the witnesses to the Holocaust, has led to a sacralisation of the witnesses to the Holocaust, who have ceased to be victims and become heroes or secular saints, and no-one likes to be a wet blanket, to go around poking people in the eye, certainly not in the case of a heroic, sacralised witness to the Holocaust while dancing at the permanent funereal celebration of the Holocaust. The second explanation is no less obvious: although it may seem improbable that there were other cases of imposture among Spanish camp survivors (other than Marco and Pastor), it isn’t remotely improbable that some of those who came together through the Amical de Mauthausen might have succumbed to the temptation of embellishing or embroidering their pasts, and that none of them would wish to cast the first stone.