Image by Mika Baumeister.
Spanish antifascist Mercedes Núñez Targa’s memoir Bearing Witness: Prison Stories from a Woman’s Fight Against Fascism is a powerful and passionate read. Although essentially bereft of beauty because of the topic of its content, the book was recently released in English by Pluto Press. It was first published in fascist Spain by Ebro, the publishing house of the Spanish communist party in 1967. Targa died in 1986 and remained a lifelong fighter against fascism. The text includes stories from her time spent in Franco’s prisons after the fascist victory in Spain followed by what is essentially a journal from her years in the Nazi concentration camp system after her arrest by the Gestapo for her membership in the French resistance. Naturally, her testimony tells of the daily horrors of both penal systems: the beatings and torture by the Spanish fascists in Madrid’s Venta prison and the torture, death, brutality and fear in the presence of the gas chambers and crematoria at the Buchenwald death camp run by the Nazi regime.
Bearing Witness includes stories about exceptionally brutal guards, turncoat detainees, and heroic deeds of the resistance inside the prisons. One particular guard at Buchenwald carries an especially hated place in Targas’ memories. His family name was Bach and he delighted in torture and exceptional cleanliness. Targa tells of him appearing in front of the detainees, dandified and without a hair out of place. She notes the contrast between his fresh appearance and the disheveled even dirty conditions of the inmates. The usual reason for his appearance was to choose women to interrogate; such interrogations almost always meant torture and occasionally resulted in the death of the prisoner being interrogated. Her remembering the righteous delight she felt when testifying against him during a war crimes trial after the Nazi defeat is the closest revenge comes to justice.
Another scene she describes includes priests reading aloud the names of those whose execution by the fascists is canceled. With Franco in charge, the priests’ allegiance to the Catholic Church was synonymous with their fealty to the fascist regime Franco leads. Targa’s description of one such episode describes the priest and his assistants taking a certain delight in the psychological torture the drama they are conducting produces. Unlike some of the other detainees who considered themselves religious, Targa is an atheist and has no use for the priests or their charade.
After the Gestapo and its Vichy allies transfer her and hundreds of other women to the German camp in Ravensbruck, they see for themselves the end game the Nazis have planned. In short, it is clear that the women will be worked to death. This becomes even clearer upon her removal to Buchenwald, where those considered too weak to work are led almost immediately to their deaths after arrival in the camp. While detained at Buchenwald, Targa is sent to work at an armaments factory where many if not most of the workers are prisoners. Only certain supervisors are Germans whose work is paid and their home is not a detention camp. It is during this period that her experiences with a couple of those Germans bring her to realize that not all Germans are Nazis. Indeed, she shares a story about one supervisor who, after watching her sabotage a machine she was operating, convinced the manager that her sabotage was an accident. Later, the German supervisor calls her “comrade” and in the brief conversation that follows, discloses that he was a member of the Rote Front, one of many underground communist organizations during the Weimar Republic.
A prison, however, is a prison. There is no such thing as a good one and the ones Mercedes Núñez Targa ended up in were among the worst in history. This book reminds the reader of this in its descriptions of the conditions, the guards, and the food. Likewise, Bearing Witness reminds us of where fascist movements and the governments they take over can all too easily end up in their pursuit of total power and control. Prisons, detention centers, camps—however one decides to label these places of human cruelty—are the ultimate symbol of the control such regimes desire. They are also all too often the sinister reality of those regimes. Targa’s collection of memories is a poetic and personal testimony to this truth.
