Basque History of the World

by Mark Kurlansky

  In 1970, Franco’s government admitted for the first time that Guernica was bombed from the air. In 1998, the German government finally apologized to the Basque people, but the Spanish government never has, and it continues to deny Basques access to military records of the incident. In 1999, the Spanish legislature passed a resolution admitting that Franco had lied about Guernica.

  THE BASQUES WERE still fighting. Rementeria went back to defend Bilbao. “Everybody thinks it was over with Guernica but it wasn’t There were a lot of fronts, we went to them and fought on.”

  In the rubble that was Guernica at the end of April 1937, the ancient stone bridge over the river remained intact, as did a few archways in the center of town. The rest was blackened heaps and collapsing walls. But at the edge of town where the mountains begin, a pillared nineteenth-century building still stood, with a straight oak tree in front. In the days after the bombing hundreds of homeless survivors, mostly women, gathered in front of the oak, sleeping on mattresses soaked from the effort to put out the fires. George Steer and other correspondents listened to their stories. “They conversed in tired gestures and words unnaturally short for Spain,” Steer later reported. “And they made the funny noises of bombers poising, fighters machine-gunning, bombs bursting, houses falling, the tubes of fire spurting and spilling over the town. Such was the weary, sore-eyed testimony of the people of Guernica, and it was only later that people who were never in Guernica thought of other stories to tell.”

  The pillared building with the oak tree in front of it are both still standing. Farther up the mountain, Juan José Rementeria can see the top of the tree from his apartment window.

  Among the mysteries surrounding the attack is the question: Why Guernica? Many believe it was because of its symbolic importance. Yet the oak was not touched. Some theorize that the Requetés, the Navarrese troops, had asked the command not to damage that place. Or maybe it was just missed because it was at the edge of town. Maybe the Germans, not knowing Basque history, thought it was just a tree.

  * * *

  10: The Potato Time

  Silent and antisocial, if the Basques want to communicate with others, they sing.

  —Pío Baroja, FANTASÍAS VASCAS

  * * *

  THE BASQUES HUNG ON, dug in around Bilbao, fiercely and futilely defending every foot of ground. Unlike the Carlist sieges of the last century, little olive oil was left, nor was milk or meat. The only plentiful food was Mexican chick peas. In the old Basque tradition, Bilbao controlled the import of Mexican chick peas for all of Spain and when war broke out the warehouses were packed with the nation’s supply.

  A British destroyer flotilla based in St. Jean-de-Luz, careful not to compromise neutrality by carrying any implements of war, tried to bring food into the city. The Basque government procured a supply of grain and started making state bread, a heavy, bitter, dark bread which offered a maximum of nutrition by including all parts of the grain. The Basques were not accustomed to this type of dark whole wheat bread and it was popularly believed to be toxic. Among the alleged side effects, it was said to cause miscarriages in pregnant women and madness in men. But the tenday food ration was a pound of rice, a pound of chick peas, a pound of vegetables, and a half pound of cooking oil per person. Bilbao was crowded with refugees from the cities and towns already destroyed. Not only Guernica and Durango but Eibar, Munguia, Muxica, Elgeta, Markina, Bolibar, Arbacegui, Yurre, Castillo y Eleijabeitia, Amorebieta, Lemona, Fika, Rigoitia, and Galdakano had all been destroyed or seriously damaged from bombing. Many of the survivors had fled to Bilbao.

  According to George Steer, domestic cats became a source of meat. It had long been rumored that cat was a peacetime delicacy in the poorest neighborhoods of Bilbao. Steer even supplied the following recipe:

  First, the cat was caught, then laid in salt for twenty-four hours, then basted. A magnificent sauce of sherry and mushrooms and various spices was then prepared to drown the last carnivorous flavors of pussy, and the whole was said to resemble jugged hare, and even in the case of plump lady cats to give jugged hare points and a beating.

  —George Steer, THE TREE OF GUERNICA, 1938

  But the correspondent, who termed chick peas “the yellow menace” complained that by January 1937 cat Bilbaíno was not the same anymore. There was no longer any salt or sherry and anyone who could find mushrooms ate them immediately.

  People looked to the sky, not only fearing attacks but hoping that the long awaited planes of the Republican air force would come to save them. Steer was convinced that those planes would have saved Bilbao. But they had come from Barcelona and bad weather had forced them to land in French territory. The French, respecting the neutrality agreement, would not allow them to continue. But the enemy planes came and dropped bombs regularly.

  Only the Soviet Union and Mexico were willing to supply weapons and they could no longer reach Bilbao. The British and French were not going to enter this civil war but after Guernica their sympathies, and especially public opinion, were clearly with the Basques. Aguirre appealed through the Catholic Church for other countries to shelter Basque children. Britain agreed to take 4,000 children. France placed no limits at all on Basque refugees. These two countries, together with Belgium, Denmark, Switzerland, Mexico, and the Soviet Union, took in a combined total of more than 20,000 Basque children. The British Royal Navy assisted with the evacuation. The children were all vaccinated before they left, and each child was served coffee, milk, and a fried egg as they made their way to sea, saluted by the mournful honks of fishing boat horns. In England the children were installed near an airfield and needed to be constantly reassured that the incoming aircraft were friendly. At the sound of an airplane engine they would begin shouting “bombas!”

  Unlike most of the loyalist governments in Spain, the Basque government functioned reasonably well, even in a democratic spirit, until its final day, an accomplishment widely credited to Aguirre. In contrast to the blood bath in other parts of Spain, the Basque government carried out fewer than 30 death sentences. The one great blemish on Aguirre’s record occurred on January 4, 1937. The Condor Legion had briefly attacked Bilbao, and an angry mob retaliated by storming the municipal jails. The Basque government had sent a police force from the UGT, the Socialist Trade Union, to liberate the prison, reasoning that if they had to fire into the mob to avert a massacre it would not be as politically divisive as having their own Ertzantza police turning against the population. But the Socialists did not save the prisoners; instead they supervised the attack. Finally, Telesforo de Monzón arrived at the head of a column of motorized police at what was already a scene of carnage, with bullet-pocked walls and murdered prisoners lying by broken down doors. He calmly informed a UGT official that if he did not remove his men from the prison they would all be shot.

  But 224 political prisoners had already been killed.1 Aguirre, usually known for his calm, was outraged and after an investigation of the massacre, had six UGT officials sentenced to death for failing to protect the prisoners. After that, Aguirre was reluctant to hold prisoners, and his government worked closely with the Red Cross arranging releases and exchanges. He unilaterally released 113 women prisoners under Red Cross supervision, including Pilar Careaga, whom Franco would one day appoint mayor of Bilbao.

  The Compañia Fano, Batallon Otachadiano, fighting on the Elgeta front, Guipúzcoa, 1937. (Euskal Arkeologia, Ethnografia eta Kondaira Museoa, Bilbao)

  Among the Basque Nationalist Party families held by the rebels was Ramón Labayen and his mother. Separated from his wife and son, Ramon’s father, mayor of Tolosa and Basque Nationalist Party activist, had already escaped from Guipúzcoa to France. Under a Red Cross-arranged exchange, a British destroyer went to Bilbao and took the prisoners held by the Basque government, while Labayen, his mother, and others held by the rebels were delivered to the St. Jacques Bridge over the Bidasoa. “I understood that it was scary,” recalled Ramón, “that a lot of my father’s friends had been killed.”
They walked across the two-lane bridge to the side with the tricolored French flag, and caped gendarmes led them down the curved road into Hendaye.

  For two months 15,000 men had labored to surround Bilbao with barbed wire and trenches, clearing entire forests to deprive the invader of cover. They dug 124 miles of fortifications. The fortifications around Bilbao, the so-called iron ring built by Captain Alejandro Goicoechea, might have been formidable, had the captain not changed sides and turned the blueprints over to the enemy. By late spring 1937, artillery and air force were wearing down Bilbao’s defenses. Most of the Basques in Bilbao, having never trusted Madrid and the Republic, believed that the Republican government had abandoned them. Fearing a Guernica-style destruction, the Basque army withdrew, and the enemy entered Bilbao unopposed, taking possession of its steel mills, armament plants, and explosives factories. When a priest in a Hampshire, England, refugee camp informed the Basque children that Bilbao had fallen, the young refugees were so upset that they attacked the priest with sticks.

  Franco had achieved a great victory—at least according to Franco. His German allies, though pleased with the strategic importance of Bilbao’s industry, wondered why Franco had needed a three-month full-scale campaign to seize a mere twenty-five miles of Basqueland.

  In the next six months, the victorious rebels arrested 16,000 suspected Basque nationalists and executed almost 1,000 of them, while the Basque army, pushed into neighboring Asturias, fought on. Basques were arrested, even shot, for having a relative who was a Basque Nationalist or giving a meal to one. These arrests were triumphantly announced in the Fascist newspaper.

  Finally, on August 26, the Basques surrendered. Mussolini, hoping to negotiate an end to the Basque front, had gotten Franco to guarantee that if the Basque army surrendered, military prisoners would be turned over to the Italians and no actions would be taken against civilians. Political leaders and soldiers, by agreement, were evacuated on two British ships under Italian escort. But under orders from Franco, his navy blocked the port, and after a four-day standoff, the Italians, having once again obtained Franco’s guarantee of no reprisals, handed over the prisoners. Hundreds of executions followed.

  Thousands of Basques fled to French Basqueland or to Cuba and Latin America. Aguirre and Telesforo de Monzón, after an emotional champagne farewell to their guard in Asturias, were flown to Biarritz in French Basqueland. The Basque government became the Basque government-in-exile, recognized by the United States, France, and Britain.

  The Basque Nationalist Party decided that Sabino Arana should also go into hiding. Fearing the grave at Sukarrieta would be disturbed, the Basque government had his remains reburied in Zalla, but the location was a party secret. Young Ramón Labayen used to ask his uncle Doroteo Ziaurriz, a former party chairman, “Where is Sabino?”

  “Shh. It’s a secret,” his uncle would tell him.

  Some stayed. Franco’s duplicity and the massacre of prisoners had, more than even Guernica, earned him a lasting animosity that would plague him for all his decades in power. Many Basque soldiers escaped to continue fighting. Juan José Rementeria continued battling for Catalonia along the Ebro and remained in combat until 1939 when there was no more fighting. Then he returned to Muxica, his rural village near Guernica. “When the war was over I went home. To Muxica. Some were shot. But I just went home.” And he remained silent for the next thirty-six years until Franco died.

  THIS WAS WHEN Basques learned to eat potatoes—or anything else they could find. There was little food for refugees in French Basqueland, and there was even less for those who stayed behind in Franco’s shattered and bankrupt Spain. In St. Pée, Jeanine Pereuil, working in her family pastry shop across the street from the fronton, saw refugees come in and offer gold bridgework as collateral for bread.

  The Basque refugees in French Basqueland established ties with Europe’s other countryless nations, especially the Welsh, Bretons, and Flemish. Breton nationalists sent their newspapers to St.-Jean-de-Luz. But life changed dramatically with the German invasion of the Lowlands and France.

  Fleeing through Nazi-occupied Europe, sometimes wearing a fake mustache or other disguises, Aguirre managed to get to New York, where he established a new headquarters. Monzón escaped on a ship out of Marseilles and arrived in the United States eleven months later.

  Thousands of Basques from Spain had been deported to German labor and concentration camps. More than 2,000 Basques, along with captured combatants from the International Brigades, the foreign volunteers who fought for the Second Republic, were in a camp in the neighboring French region of Béarn. Many Basques were also among the estimated 20,000 Republican prisoners in concentration camps, notably Mauthausen in Austria, where thousands were executed. The preoccupation of the Basque government with these prisoners scattered through Europe led to relations with not only international relief organizations but the intelligence services of Britain, France, and the United States.

  After an initial hunt for important leaders, the Gestapo searched among Basques principally for leftists, not nationalists. The Nazis had experienced some success in appealing to Flemish and Breton nationalism, claiming that by standing up for European racial purity, Nazism was defending the rights of these ancient peoples. Heinrich Himmler, a particularly virulent racist from a devout Catholic family, had discovered that Basques were devout Catholics who believed they were the original European race.

  The Germans offered scholarships to the university in Munich for young Basques wishing to do research on the origins of their race. Ramón Labayen, then a teenager in St.-Jean-de-Luz, remembered a few Basques taking the scholarship. But though the Basques had often responded without scruples to any ruler who promised to recognize their autonomy, this time they were not fooled by these Germans who had been seen in cockpits over Guernica. Basques in France were experiencing German rule. In St.-Jean-de-Luz they saw the town jeweler, a World War I veteran, forced to wear a yellow star, which he defiantly pinned over his Croix de Guerre, France’s highest combat medal. Labayen remembers a Jewish schoolmate whom French gendarmes took out of class and turned over to the Germans. Labayen never saw him again.

  THE BASQUES FOUND themselves in a familiar circumstance. Europe was at war, and a crucial border ran through their homeland. The Germans, the French, and the Spanish watched the passes. But the Basques, knowing the footpaths, could approach and descend from the passes without being seen.

  If one of the French underground units delivered to the Basques a shot-down flier, a political refugee, or a Jew, Basques could get him across the border.

  Across the border was Spain, a nominally neutral country that, in reality, was Hitler’s ally. Most of the cross-Pyrenees refugees who were caught by the Guardia Civil were taken to a camp at Miranda de Ebro on the southern edge of Basqueland. And many of the Basques, if caught, risked being shot.

  But for the French underground, a more difficult border than the Pyrenees was between the two zones of France. The Germans had divided France into one zone under direct German occupation and another governed from the resort town of Vichy by a French puppet government under Marshal Philippe Pétain. Starting at Arnéguy—at the entrance to the Roncesvalles pass— the dividing line between these zones split Basse Navarre, headed north, then turned east to the Swiss border. The entire line was watched by German troops. The land west of the Roncesvalles pass, including all of Labourd, was in the German occupied zone, the same zone as Paris and northern France. A refugee could be taken from northern France to Paris and delivered to the Basques in St.-Jean-de-Luz and through the passes of Labourd without ever changing French zones.

  Basques discovered that the pass near Sare had particularly lax sentries. Sleepily, the sentries, Austrians who had no enthusiasm for watching someone else’s mountains, performed their rounds at the exact same time every day in exactly the same way. The Basques would move the refugees up the Nivelle Valley, past the St. Pée Gestapo headquarters in the large stone house across the street f
rom Jeanine Pereuil’s pastry shop, to the mountain village of Sare, up into the forest, where horses grazed on the rich, wooded pastureland. When the refugees had no more trees for cover, and found themselves in fields like green domes next to the rocky crests, they were in Spain—Navarra.

  For a time, the Basques were even helping Germans across, deserters, who went to a certain hotel to make Basque contacts. But then the Gestapo came, pretending to be deserters, and arrested the entire network of operatives, most of them never to be seen again.

  Torture, execution, disappearance—the Germans made the risks clear. But to the Basques, it was an opportunity to go on fighting. To them, the current war was a continuation of the one they had already fought. The Americans had to be made to see that it was all the same fight, that Europe had to be purged of not just Hitler and Mussolini but Franco too.

  The Basques, especially Aguirre, had confidence in the United States, with a mixture of an old Basque belief in Amerika and a new belief that the United States was the antidote needed to cure this ancient European sickness—the endless struggle among nations that had been both Basque and European history. It is interesting that this dedicated Basque nationalist saw assimilation, the ability to blend tribes, as America’s strength. In May 1942, from his exile in New York, Aguirre added to the American edition of his autobiography:

  Hear me, American readers. Perhaps others have been quiet about this, but I am going to be brutally frank. This huge war, the most decisive and cruel in history, rests on you more than anyone. Dollars, war materials, tears, blood—in order to win, you are going to have to give more than any other people in the world . . . Everything depends on you, this new man that you are, symbolic fusion of all races and lands, all who can hope are hoping, those who will fall for the Cause, those who suffer for the Cause, and those who trust it is the holiest of Causes.