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'Maddi and the borders': the imagined life of the Gipuzkoan heroine of the Resistance deported to Sachsenhausen

2023-03-15T08:18:37.589Z


Edurne Portela literaturizes the biography of María Josefa Sansberro, a woman who helped European citizens flee from the Nazis


In 2020, the last Spanish survivor of the concentration camps died in France.

His name was Juan Romero Romero.

It cannot be ruled out that there is another Republican who was there and still alive, but it does not appear in the censuses that the memorial entities have been able to prepare for decades.

So that today we are already in that situation that worried the survivors so much: who and how would the concentration experience be transmitted when there were no more direct testimonies of it?

The proposal that Jorge Semprún raised in one of his Buchenwald novels, and which has already generated controversy, was the fictionalization of said experience.

The novel cannot and should not persuade in the same way as the testimony, although the difference between the two discourses is not in the degree of veracity or intensity.

They are different discourses that have a different impact on the recipient and in both cases they can be cultural forms of ethical and political resistance.

The novel

Maddi and the borders,

which is a moving display of sensitivity, evidences it.

In the epilogue where she explains what her literary operation has been, Edurne Portela is clear: she wanted to "activate an anti-fascist memory."

Portrait of the author Edurne Portela.

Asis Ayerbe

Maria Josefa Sansberro

Maddi

he was unable to testify to his experience.

History crossed the life of this anonymous woman, she made a commitment to change it and her biography, like that of so many women in history in lower case, was devoured by oblivion.

She was born in 1895 in the Gipuzkoan city of Oiartzun, she died on November 13, 1944 in the Sachsenhausen camp.

After divorcing her husband, in 1929 she began to run a hotel on the outskirts of a small town in the French Basque Country.

This daughter of the farmhouses would become a frontier woman.

If it first seems that she practiced some low-intensity smuggling, she already participated in evasion networks in the Civil War.

With the hotel occupied by German troops, she doubled the risk and set up various escape networks for European citizens fleeing the Nazis.

And the Gestapo arrested her and tore her apart.

The jump from the document to the novel is risky, because the invention might not be credible, but the narrator who shows her adult adventures conveys the true truth.

The historians who found the data to reconstruct his biography suggested that Portela write his life.

Not writing History or history, but imagining her from within.

The jump from the document to the novel is risky, because the invention might not be credible, but the narrator who shows her adult adventures, hardly integrating the outside world into her own experience, conveys the true truth.

A type of truth that testimony can hardly access, always focused on the traumatic relationship with others, while here we permanently dive into an intimacy stressed by the wound that comes from his life before the hotel and the struggle to resist.

Until she faints, losing even control over her own thinking.

That tension is in the tone and is seen in a naked way in Maddi's soliloquies when praying and losing faith when pain becomes her vital center after torture.

Those agonizing chapters, where the tradition of concentration literature resonates and especially

The long journey

leads to an end that the reader knows from the first page.

But that ending is not the key.

The essential thing is to have arrived there feeling like her, feeling that she lived like this.

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Source: elparis

All news articles on 2023-03-15

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