Basque History of the World (28 page)

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.
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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.

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HIS 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.

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HE
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ASQUES 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 from 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: