After two years of fighting, the remains of a plane, his plane, disappear in the waters of the Mediterranean. Ramón, with a load of bombs, had been headed for Barcelona. He was going there to kill those who had been his comrades, as well as the lovely lunatic he himself had been.
MACHADO
The border, winter of 1939: the Spanish Republic is falling apart.
From Barcelona, from the exploding bombs, poet Antonio Machado manages to flee to France.
He is older than his years.
He coughs, walks with a cane.
He gazes at the sea.
On a scrap of paper he writes:
“This sun of childhood.”
It is the last thing he writes.
MATILDE
Palma de Mallorca jail, fall of 1942: the lost sheep.
Everything is ready. Standing in formation, the prisoners wait. The bishop and the civilian governor arrive. Today Matilde Landa, a Red and leader of other Reds, convicted and confessed atheist, will convert to the Catholic faith and will receive the holy sacrament of baptism. The repentant woman will rejoin the flock of the Lord and Satan will lose one of his own.
It grows late.
Matilde does not appear.
She is on the roof, no one sees her.
From way up there, she jumps.
Her body explodes like a bomb against the ground of the prison yard.
No one moves.
The ceremony is carried out as planned.
The bishop makes the sign of the cross, reads a page from the Gospels, exhorts Matilde to renounce evil, recites the Apostles’ Creed, and anoints her forehead with holy water.
CHEAPEST JAILS IN THE WORLD
Franco signed death sentences every morning while he had breakfast.
Those not put before a firing squad were locked up. Those who were shot, first dug their own graves. And those who were imprisoned, first built their own jails.
Labor costs were zilch. The Republican prisoners who built the infamous Carabanchel Prison in Madrid, as well as many others throughout Spain, never worked less than twelve hours a day and got a handful of coins, nearly all of them invisible, as payment. What’s more, they received other benefits: the satisfaction of contributing to their own political rehabilitation, and a reduced sentence on this earth since tuberculosis would take them sooner.
For years and years, thousands upon thousands of criminals guilty of resisting the military coup did more than construct prisons. They were also forced to rebuild destroyed towns and erect dams, irrigation canals, ports, airports, parks, bridges, highways. They laid new railroad lines and left their lungs in the coal, mercury, asbestos, and tin mines.
And, prompted by bayonet thrusts, they erected the massive Valley of the Fallen monument, in homage to their executioners.
RESURRECTION OF CARNIVAL
The sun shone at night,
the dead fled their graves,
every clown was king,
the insane wrote the laws,
the beggars were lords,
and the ladies gave off sparks.
And in the end, when Ash Wednesday arrived, people pulled off their masks, which did not lie, and put on their faces until next year.
In the sixteenth century, Emperor Charles in Madrid decreed the punishment for carnival and its wantonness: “If a lowly person, one hundred lashes in public; if a nobleman, six months in exile . . . ”
Four centuries later, one of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s first decrees was to outlaw carnival.
Invincible pagan fiesta: the more they forbade it, the more eagerly it bounced back.
FORBIDDEN TO BE BLACK
Haiti and the Dominican Republic are two countries separated by a river called Massacre.
In 1937 it already had the name, which turned out to be prophetic: on the banks of that river thousands of black Haitians who had been cutting sugarcane on the Dominican side were chopped to bits with machetes. Generalissimo Rafael Leónidas Trujillo, mousey face, Napoleon hat, gave the order to exterminate them in order to whiten the race and exorcize his own impure blood.
Dominican dailies did not hear the news. Neither did Haiti’s papers. After three months of silence, something was published, a few lines, and Trujillo warned against exaggeration, for the dead numbered no more than eighteen thousand.
A long discussion ensued and in the end he paid twenty-nine dollars a head. In reparations.
INSOLENCE
In the 1936 Olympics, Hitler’s country of birth was defeated by the soccer team from Peru.
The referee, who disallowed three Peruvian goals, did what he could and more to avoid displeasing the führer, but Austria lost 4 to 2.
The following day, soccer and Olympic officials set things straight.
The match was annulled. Not because an Aryan defeat at the hands of an attacking line, known for good reason as the Black Steamroller, was inadmissible, but because, the officials said, fans had run onto the field before the end of the match.
Peru left the Olympics and Hitler’s country won silver.
Italy, Mussolini’s Italy, took the gold.
BLACK WINGS
At the same Olympics, staged by Hitler to consecrate the superiority of his race, the star that shone brightest was black, a grandson of slaves, born in Alabama.
Hitler had no choice but to swallow the bitter pill, four of them actually: the four gold medals that Jesse Owens won in sprinting and long jump.
The entire world celebrated those victories of democracy over racism.
When the champion returned home, he received no congratulations from the president, nor was he invited to the White House. He returned to the usual:
he boarded buses by the back door,
ate in restaurants for Negroes,
used bathrooms for Negroes,
stayed in hotels for Negroes.
For years, he earned a living running for money. Before the start of baseball games he would entertain the crowd by racing against horses, dogs, cars, or motorcycles.
Later on, when his legs were no longer what they had been, Owens took to the lecture circuit. He did pretty well there, praising the virtues of religion, family, and country.
BLACK STAR
Baseball was for whites only.
In the spring of 1947, Jackie Robinson, grandson of slaves, broke that unwritten rule, played in the major leagues, and became one of the best.
He paid dearly for it. His errors were twice as costly, his good plays worth only half. His teammates would not speak to him, the fans told him to go back to the jungle, and his wife and children received death threats.
He swallowed his bile.
After two years, the Ku Klux Klan decreed that the game that Jackie’s team, the Brooklyn Dodgers, was to play in Atlanta would not take place. The move backfired. Blacks and whites cheered Jackie Robinson as he came on to the field, and when he went off a crowd chased after him.
To hug him, not to lynch him.
BLACK BLOOD
The first transfusions used blood from lambs. Rumor had it that they made you sprout wool. In 1670, such experiments were outlawed in Europe.
Much later on, around 1940, Charles Drew came up with new techniques for processing and storing plasma. In light of his discoveries, which were to save millions of lives during the Second World War, Drew was named the first director of the Red Cross blood bank in the United States.
He lasted eight months in the job.
In 1942, a military directive prohibited mixing black blood with white blood in transfusions.
Black blood? White blood? “This is utter stupidity,” Drew said, and he would not discriminate against blood.
He understood the matter: he was a scientist, and he was black.
So he resigned, or was resigned.
BLACK VOICE
Columbia Records refused to record the song and the composer had to use a pseudonym.
But when Billie Holiday sang “Strange Fruit,” the walls o
f censorship and fear came down. She sang it with her eyes closed, and the grace of her voice, born to sing that very song, turned it into a hymn. From then on, every black man lynched became much more than a strange fruit swinging from a tree, rotting in the sun.
Billie,
who at age fourteen achieved the miracle of rapt attention in the whorehouses of Harlem where she sang for her supper,
who hid a jackknife in her stocking,
who did not know how to defend herself from the beatings of her lovers and husbands,
who lived a prisoner of drugs and jail,
whose body was a map of needle pricks and scars,
who always sang like never before.
IMPUNITY IS THE DAUGHTER OF OBLIVION
The Ottoman Empire was falling to pieces and the Armenians paid the price. While the First World War thundered on, government-sponsored butchery did away with half of the Armenians in Turkey:
homes ransacked and burned,
columns of people fleeing without clothes, water, or anything else,
women raped in town squares in broad daylight,
mutilated bodies floating on the rivers.
Whoever escaped thirst or hunger or cold died by the knife or the bullet. Or the gallows. Or by smoke: in the Syrian desert, Armenians driven out of Turkey were forced into caves and suffocated with smoke, in what foreshadowed the Nazi gas chambers to come.
Twenty years later, Hitler and his advisers were planning the invasion of Poland. Weighing the pros and cons, Hitler realized there would be protests, diplomatic outrage, loud complaints, but he was certain the noise would not last. And to prove his point, he asked:
“Who remembers the Armenians?”
THE GEARS
German battalions swept through Poland, village by village, exterminating Jews by the light of day or in the glow of truck headlamps.
The soldiers, nearly all civilians, bureaucrats, workers, students, were actors in a tragedy scripted in advance. They would become executioners. They might feel violently ill, but when the curtain rose and they went onstage, they would play their parts.
In the town of Josefów, in July 1942, Reserve Police Battalion 101 had its first taste of combat against fifteen hundred old folks, women, and children, who offered no resistance at all.
The commanding officer gathered his troops, all novices in this sort of battle, and told them if anyone did not feel up to the task, he could give it a pass. Just step forward. The commander spoke and waited. Very few stepped forward.
The victims, naked, awaited death lying face down.
The soldiers bayoneted them between the shoulder blades, then they all fired at once.
FORBIDDEN TO BE INEFFICIENT
Home was next door to the factory. The bedroom window looked out on the chimneys.
The manager went home every day at noon, sat with his wife and five children, recited the Our Father, ate lunch, and then went for a stroll in the garden filled with trees, flowers, chickens, and songbirds, never for an instant losing sight of the industry chugging on.
He was first to arrive at the factory and last to leave. Respected and feared, he could appear without warning anywhere, anytime.
He would not tolerate waste. High costs and low productivity made him despair. Lack of hygiene and clutter made him ill. He forgave any sin except inefficiency.
It was he who substituted the lethal gas Zyklon B for sulfuric acid and carbon monoxide. It was he who built crematoria ten times as productive as the ovens at Treblinka. It was he who managed to produce the greatest quantity of death in the shortest possible time. And it was he who devised the best death camp in the entire history of humanity.
In 1947, Rudolf Höss was hanged at Auschwitz, the concentration camp he built and ran, amidst the flowering trees about which he wrote a number of poems.
MENGELE
For reasons of hygiene, the threshold to the gas chambers was an iron grating. There, the attendants wiped the mud from their boots.
The condemned, in contrast, entered barefoot. They entered by the door and left by the chimney, after being dispossessed of their gold teeth, fat, hair, and anything else of value.
There, in Auschwitz, Dr. Josef Mengele carried out his experiments.
Like other Nazi sages, he dreamed of nurseries for growing the super-race of the future. To learn how to eradicate hereditary defects, he worked with four-winged flies, legless mice, midgets, and Jews. But nothing excited his scientific passion like twin children.
Mengele used to give chocolates and affectionate pats to his child guinea pigs, even though most of them turned out to be useless for the progress of science.
He tried to turn several pairs into Siamese twins, slicing open their backs to connect their veins: they died, apart, howling in pain.
With others he tried to change their sex: they died mutilated.
With others still he tried to change their voices by operating on their vocal chords: they died mute.
To beautify the species, he injected blue dye into the eyes of dark-eyed twins: they died blind.
GOD
Dietrich Bonhoeffer is imprisoned in the concentration camp at Flossenbürg.
The guards make all the prisoners watch the execution of three condemned men.
Someone standing next to Bonhoeffer whispers:
“So, where is God?”
And Bonhoeffer, who is a theologian, points to the hanged men swinging in the dawn light:
“There.”
A few days later, it is his turn.
LOVE ME DO
Adolf Hitler’s friends have lousy memories, but the Nazi enterprise would not have been possible without their help.
Like his colleagues Mussolini and Franco, Hitler got approval early on from the Catholic Church.
Hugo Boss dressed his troops.
Bertelsmann published the training manuals for his officers.
His airplanes flew thanks to fuel from Standard Oil, and his soldiers traveled in Ford trucks and jeeps.
The maker of those vehicles and author of The International Jew, Henry Ford, was his muse. Hitler thanked him with a medal.
He also decorated the president of IBM, the company that made it possible to track and identify Jews.
The Rockefeller Foundation financed Nazi medicine’s racial and racist research.
Joe Kennedy, father of the president, was the U.S. ambassador in London, but might as well have been the German one. And Prescott Bush, father and grandfather of presidents, was an associate of Fritz Thyssen, who used his fortune to further Hitler’s cause.
Deutsche Bank financed the construction of the concentration camp at Auschwitz.
IG Farben, the giant chemical conglomerate, which later on changed its name to Bayer, BASF, and Hoechst, used concentration camp prisoners as guinea pigs and workers. These slave laborers made everything, even the gas that killed them.
The prisoners also worked for other companies, like Krupp, Thyssen, Siemens, VARTA, Bosch, Daimler-Benz, Volkswagen, and BMW, which provided an economic foundation for the Nazi madness.
Swiss banks made a killing buying the gold jewelry and teeth of Hitler’s victims. The gold crossed the border with astonishing ease, while the gates remained hermetically sealed to flesh and blood trying to escape.
Coca-Cola came up with Fanta for the German market smack in the middle of the war. During that period, Unilever, Westinghouse, and General Electric also boosted their investments and profits in the country. When the war ended, ITT received a multimillion-dollar settlement for damages to its factories in Germany caused by Allied bombing.
PHOTOGRAPH: THE FLAG OF VICTORY
Mount Suribachi, Iwo Jima, February 1945.
Six Marines plant the flag of the United States at the summit of the volcano they have taken after a bitterly fought battle with the Japanese.
The photograph by Joe Rosenthal will become a symbol of the victorious homeland in this war and wars to follow, and will be reproduced by the
millions on posters and postage stamps and even on Treasury bonds.
In reality, it shows the second flag of the day. The first, much smaller and hardly appropriate for an epic image, was planted a few hours earlier without any showmanship. And the moment it records as victory occurs when the battle is not yet over; in fact it is just beginning. Three of the six soldiers in the picture will not come out alive, and seven thousand more Marines will die on this minuscule island in the South Pacific.
PHOTOGRAPH: MAP OF THE WORLD
Yalta, Crimean Coast, February 1945.
The victors of the Second World War meet.
Churchill, Roosevelt, and Stalin sign secret agreements. The great powers decide the fate of several countries, whose people will not learn of it for two years. Some will remain capitalist and others will become communist, as if such a tremendous historic leap could be achieved by a name change decided from outside and from above.
Three people draw a new world map, establish the United Nations, and give themselves veto power, which guarantees they will remain in charge.
Richard Sarno’s and Robert Hopkins’s cameras record Churchill’s impassive smile, Roosevelt’s face already visited by death, and Stalin’s shrewd eyes.