Days of fury and books

Nicholas II Library in the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg, Russia Alexander Krasovsky / Universal Images Group via Getty

The only German university to grant an

Albert Einstein was the one in Rostock, a port city in the north of the country where on August 26, 1992 the news was the fire of a refugee shelter: there was the hangover of a few days of riots caused by neo-Nazi extremists who surrounded the building and they ended up burning it. There were no victims among the asylees, mostly Vietnamese who had fled their country and escaped as best they could. That August 26, 1992 was a Wednesday and that week Sarajevo had experienced a black Monday with more than a hundred victims after a three-hour bombing; the city at war woke up that Wednesday, in addition, with two pieces of news to digest:the destruction of its beautiful library under the artillery of the Serbian ultra-nationalist Army and the imminent inauguration of an international conference in London where the UN was to assume the disintegration of Yugoslavia. While books were being destroyed in eastern Europe, in the west two texts were legislatively sewn: in Spain, the BOE was about to publish the first reform of the Constitution that adapted the 1978 Magna Carta to the European integration proposed in the Treaty from Maastricht.

That same day, the town of Barcarrota, in Badajoz, sought to confirm on television news the situation in which Bradenton, an American city with which it is officially twinned, had remained. Hurricane

had been sweeping through Florida for days and was about to

hit

Miami. Barcarrota and Bradenton are cities united by the figure of Hernando de Soto, the Extremaduran who landed in Tampa Bay in 1539, surely the first European to see the Mississippi River. In homage to this explorer, Chrysler sold automobiles under the DeSoto brand until 1960.

Precisely a university professor of Hispanic literature was fleeing the tropical cyclone in his old DeSoto, oblivious to what was happening in Extremadura. In Barcarrota, in the same month of August, the bricklayer Antonio Pérez prepared the upper floor of the ancient house of Antonia Ascensión Saavedra. The worker told the owner that when he knocked down a partition, he had come across some sandwiched books. There were 10 copies, all from the mid-16th century: an unknown edition of

, a treatise on exorcism, another on palmistry, a book by the persecuted Erasmus of Rotterdam ... and next to them a piece of paper with the Star of David. The books had withstood the elements of man and time. Someone in the 16th century guarded them suspiciously to protect them from the fires of the Inquisition. The news of the Barcarrota library took many months to be made public; revealed in the media, and even without internet, the finding amazed that American professor, who nervously opened his semester seminar on the picaresque novel with the story to his students of the news of the new

located in Spain. Like today, August 26, 2021, on August 26, 1992 life did not stop, and in an incessant cycle of destruction and creation there were people escaping and exploring, there were books that were reborn and that disappeared. In every time and place there are persecuted and persecutors, hidden and revealed treasures, that is why it is necessary to remember those who flee, those who believe, those who preserve. And to those who read what we write.