Luis Garrido Orozco

My name is Luis Garrido Orozco. I was born in 1948 in Corme-Ecluse, a small village in the Charente-Maritime department. My father was from Tornadizos de Ávila and my mother from Madrid. They met in exile, in the Marseille region, in early 1943. I studied in Bordeaux, I am a physicist, and I live in Nantes.

These two juxtaposed documents come from the archives of the Ministry of Defence in Madrid. They can be found in the dossier on my father, Albino GARRIDO SAN JUAN: judicial investigation 112474 - folder 4490. This investigation was carried out by the military tribunal of the Madrid region. My father, born on 5 February 1919, was very young at the start of the Spanish Civil War. From the outset, he fought to defend the Republic. On 28 March 1939, after 32 months of war, he had to surrender to Franco's troops. After a short stay in the ‘Pantano de Cijara’ camp, near Castilblanco, he was interned, along with thousands of his comrades, in the terrible Castuera concentration camp in the province of Badajoz. 

Franco's concentration camps had a threefold mission: classification of prisoners, repression and re-education. The two documents provide a perfect illustration of how these processes were set in motion. The one on the left is the first page of the report that the mayor and leader of the Falange in Tornadizos de Ávila sent to the head of the Cijara concentration camp. In it, they list the actions against the Glorious National Movement - that's what the unfaithful military called their coup d'état against the Republic - that they impute to my father. In the left-hand margin of this report, the word ‘Incomunicar’, i.e. ‘Put in secret’, stand out. This simple word expresses the result of the analysis of my father's case carried out by the classification commission of the Castuera camp.

This decision to place prisoners in solitary confinement is shown on the document on the right, by a letter ‘A’ drawn in red pencil and by the assignment to barrack no. 80. Prisoners whom the new regime considered to be the most dangerous were placed in category A and, as time went by, they were locked up in barrack no. 80. This was the antechamber of death. In the first few months of its operation, hundreds of Republican prisoners were murdered in Castuera.

On 7 June 1939, my father and around thirty of his comrades were taken from barrack no. 80 and locked up in another, smaller one, near the camp exit. They understood that their end was near.  The unexpected chance they were about to receive had a name: Antonio VALVERDE FERRERAS. This captain had just been appointed head of the concentration camp and, with courage, he opposed these extra-judicial killings. My father and the others would return to the deprivation, promiscuity and uncertainty about the future that comprised the ordinary life of the camp.

On 4 January 1940, my father and five comrades took their fate into their own hands and escaped from Castuera. They walked for 79 days and, on 22 March 1940, four of the fugitives, including my father, managed to reach the French border via the Somport pass.