Remembering

The white caps dotted the Mediterranean as the wind chilled the 500 people gathered on the beach. The 45 minute walk from the Marie had been warm, almost windless, but now it had picked up. Two rude huts, air whistling between the gaps in the planks, re-creations of the original camp buildings, did little to protect us.
We were there to commemorate the 100,000 people who had been forced into the concentration camp, little food, no sanitation and little water, 70 years before. One of the speakers was a granddaughter of a Retirada, a Republican fleeing Franco’s forces.
They were not just soldiers, although there were soldiers among them, including some Germans with the names Schumacher and Hermann. These men would be buried in the Retirada cemetery on route to the beach.
Among that frightened group were women and children who two weeks before had set off from the Barcelona area, mostly on foot, abandoning homes and possessions to find safety. In an oral history one man tells of his brother freezing to death in his mother’s arms as they trekked across the Pyrenees in January. His tale matched that of too many others in sadness.
The 2000+ residences of Argelès did little to welcome this influx of refugees. Concentration camps up and down the coast were the solution. WWII had not yet started, but it would, although no one knew that as they rolled out the barbed wire to contain the immigrants.
Seventy years later the children and grandchildren of the Retirada make up a healthy proportion of the area. They have melded into French culture, some forgetting the treatment of their forebears as unwanted immigrants, whose sin was not wanting to live under a Fascist regime and to fight for their beliefs.
Many of the people on the beach carried the yellow and orange/red Catalan flags with a strip of purple, the symbol of the Republican Army. In the background was high beach grass and behind that the snowy peaks of Canigou contrasted to the almost royal blue sky.
My unhappiness at the dead batteries in my camera seemed inconsequential compared to the suffering that had gone on seventy years before. The ceremonies over, unlike those in the concentration camp, we walked back to the village, went home to warm houses and good meals.
That nightmare is over on the beach, but all over the world, people are still struggling to find a place where they are safe from myriad dangers including the welcome they receive when they escape one horror to find another awaiting them.