Retirada woman

In January 1939 over 100,000 refugees from Spain arrived in Argelès-sur-mer France. The tiny village didn't know what to do with the influx and set up concentration camps on the beach. No one talked about it until about a decade ago when oral histories, photos and stories began to emerge. This history has been captured in a museum and memorials throughout the area, thank goodness.

Fast forward to today. There is a man in Argelès that looks like my dad's twin. When I first mentioned it to him, he put up barriers, but little by little we are now smiley-chatty people. It helped when I showed him a photo of my dad and also when my daughter picked him out of a crowd as looking like her grandfather.

He is usually with a woman that seemed a good deal older. As a cougar myself I thought it might be his wife but it could be his mother. It was nothing I would ask, of course.

Then in a conversation the other day, she revealed she had come up from Spain in February 1939, in the second wave of refugees. That would make her somewhere in her late 70s or early 80s. She would have been too young to talk about the freezing walk over the mountains.

Growing up in America I read about history in many eras, but living here I've met people who experienced it first hand. Llara's German host who lived through the U.S. Bombing of Nürnberg, a co-worker whose mother was grabbed by the Nazis as they walked down the street in Evian are just two examples. The woman was destined for Auschwitz but the war ended before her deportation. I am waiting to be introduced to a man who fought alongside of Dany Cohn-Bendit in 1968 in Paris. That makes history real.

When I can stand in front of the tombs of William the Conqueror, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Elizabeth I, the place where Mary Queen of Scots was crowned, the battle field of Bull Run, the events of the past transcend time.

History should be real to us. As they say those who don't know history are doomed to repeat it.