How a Renegade Historian Unmasked an Imposter

In 2005, Enric Marco, who had claimed for decades to have spent WWII as one of the thousands of Spanish Republicans deported to Nazi concentration camps, was revealed to be an imposter by an obscure Spanish historian, Benito Bermejo. Here, in an adapted passage from his new work The Impostor, Javier Cercas tells the story of how Bermejo came to know Marco, and gradually, to also doubt his story, and how historical amnesia can result in too easy an acceptance of a heroic tale. Cercas, in examining the story of Marco and Bermejo, also examines the tempting nature of heroic fictions, and underlines the need for research as the path to truth and reconciliation.

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Now we come to the man who, for many people, is the hidden villain of the story, the man who unmasked Enric Marco, our hero’s Nemesis: now we come to Benito Bermejo. From the moment the Marco scandal erupted, people have said all manner of things about him, almost as much as they’ve said about Marco himself. There have been pronouncements from journalists, historians, politicians, trade unionists, writers, businessmen and workers more or less familiar with the industry of memory. Below are some of the things that have been said about him. It has been said that Bermejo exposed Marco because for many people Marco embodied the movement for the recovery of so called historical memory in Spain and that, in destroying Marco, Bermejo was attempting to destroy this movement. It has been said that he acted out of pure malice, or sheer opportunism, or an overwhelming desire to be in the limelight. It has been said that Bermejo, who was born in Salamanca, exposed Marco as an act of revenge for the so-called Salamanca papers, a collection of documents confiscated from the Catalan government by Francoist forces in the last days of the Civil War and stored in an archive in Salamanca, documents that the left-wing Spanish government, after repeated appeals by Catalonia, had agreed to return in spite of fierce opposition from all right-wing parties, some of the left-wing, and by the City Hall and the University of Salamanca. It has been said that Bermejo is not actually a historian but an agent of Mossad, the Israeli secret service, or that he is a historian hired by Mossad or by the Spanish secret services on behalf of Mossad, in short that he is an individual paid by the Israeli government to punish Marco for a remark made in a speech given to the Spanish parliament on January 27, 2005, in the presence of the Israeli ambassador to Spain, as part of an homage to the victims of the Holocaust, a remark he had previously made in all or almost all of his countless talks: that concentration camps had not disappeared, but still existed in various parts of the world, including Palestine.

I’ll stop there. Though I could carry on: many more things have been said about Bermejo, all or almost all as bizarre as those listed above. The reason is that Marco is a consummate storyteller, but he doesn’t have a monopoly; in fact, what Marco did was simply exploit our incurable penchant for fiction, one all the more palpable given the damning evidence that we can hide behind it, and all the more useful given it allows us to shirk unpleasant responsibilities. Because it is extraordinary that no-one stated the obvious, that Bermejo is a serious historian and, as such, a sworn enemy of the industry of memory, just as a serious artist is the sworn enemy of the entertainment industry: on principle, both battle deceitful narcissism; both seek out knowledge—knowledge or self-knowledge, knowledge or acknowledgement of reality; both wage war on kitsch, or—it amounts to the same thing—lies. Bermejo didn’t simply expose Marco’s deception, he also exposed—or so felt many who sought to turn him into the villain—the culpable credulity and the lack of intellectual rigour of those who fell for Marco’s deception.

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While he is a serious historian, Bermejo is also a marginal historian: a man who lives on the sidelines of the academic and university system. He isn’t a professor at a university or institution, and at the time the scandal erupted, he hadn’t even presented his doctoral thesis, an indispensable requirement for anyone wishing to pursue an academic career. In fact, he didn’t pursue any form of career in academia, though he took his degree in history in Salamanca, the city where he had been born into a middle-class family. Perhaps there was something about the Spanish university system, with its intractable hierarchies, its frenzied in-breeding, its cursus honorum, encrusted with rhetorical rigidness and prudish pantomimes, that was anathema to the typically sober and reserved Castilian character of Bermejo, because he certainly never fit in; though to tell the truth, I doubt he tried very hard. Nonetheless, it’s worth wondering why it was someone outside the groves of academe who dared to unmask Marco and give a poke in the eye to the industry of memory which had benefited so much from academia. Bermejo is a maverick: he doesn’t give classes, he doesn’t write for newspapers and, though he has a wife and two young daughters, he has no permanent post and earns his living in an ad hoc fashion. He lives in a modest apartment on calle García de Paredes in the district of Chamberí in Madrid.

Despite the fact that he didn’t pursue an academic career, when he completed his history degree, Bermejo presented a thesis to the University of Salamanca on the subject of propaganda and the control of social communications in the early years of Francoism and, in 1987, thanks to a research grant, he moved to Madrid. It was in part thanks to another grant that he spent two years in Paris, doing research at the Sorbonne. It was in Paris that he first heard about Spanish deportados being imprisoned in the Nazi camps, however, he only became truly interested in the subject in the early 1990s. At this point no academic historian had conducted serious research into the fate of the deportados. At the time, Bermejo had just begun to work with the National University of Distance Learning on a series of documentaries about the Spanish exiles of 1939, and, as part of his exploration, got in touch with a number of deportados.

The first he’d heard of our hero was in late 2000, or perhaps early 2001. Margarida Sala, curator of the Museu d’Històrie de Catalunya and member of Amical, mentioned him. She told Bermejo that one of the members of Amical (Editor’s Note: Amical is an organization for surviving Spanish political prisoners who had been deported to Nazi concentration camps), a man named Enric Marco, was a survivor of a Nazi camp and, more than a survivor, he was a historian. Bermejo was very interested by this news: firstly, because, although he’d spent more than a decade gathering information about the deportados, speaking to them, delving into their lives, no-one had ever mentioned Marco’s name; secondly because, although he knew a number of French deportados who were both camp survivors and historians, he knew of no-one in Spain who fulfilled both criteria. Later, searching his memory, or going through his papers, Bermejo realised he’d been mistaken: obviously, he was very familiar with Pons Prades’ book about the deportados, now it occurred to him that the Marco he’d read about there, and perhaps in some other books, was the same man Sala had been talking about.

Shortly afterwards, the two men met. Marco’s youthful appearance must have confused Bermejo, given everything he had read and heard, because he asked whether Marco was the son of the camp survivor; no, Marco replied, it was he who had been a prisoner in Flossenbürg. That was the extent of their conversation. The crowds and the commotion that followed the event made it impossible for them to carry on, or Marco made the most of the confusion to cut things short. Nevertheless, the brief exchange piqued Bermejo’s curiosity. He knew that there had been very few Spaniards in Flossenbürg concentration camp, and until now all his attempts to locate one had proved futile (though he had managed to track down and interview a French survivor from the camp). Needless to say, this made Marco even more valuable to Bermejo as a witness.

The second encounter between the two men wasn’t accidental, and the historian arrived well prepared. It took place in Mauthausen during the celebrations commemorating the liberation of the camp, which took place every year on the weekend following May 5. Bermejo was still intrigued by Marco, though his suspicions hadn’t yet been aroused, despite the fact that the three accounts of Marco’s life he’d read—in The Kommandant’s Pigs, in the magazine Tiempo de Historia, and in A Memoir of Hell which had just been published—did not match up: Bermejo was well aware that it was typical for various accounts by a single survivor to contain discrepancies and attributed those he noted in Marco’s accounts to errors made by the interviewers, Marco’s failing memory, or a combination of both. That day at Mauthausen, Bermejo twice spoke to Marco about his experience in the Nazi camps. The first time was in the camp itself, 200 metres above the Danube, before the ceremony took place. Bermejo asked Marco about his dual status as camp survivor and historian; Marco offered a nebulous response, he was evasive.

The second time they spoke was over a lunch organised by the descendants of the hundred or so Spaniards who had elected to stay on in Austria after the camp was liberated, and who met every year on the same date. There were some thirty or forty diners, most of them Austrian, but Bermejo engineered things so that he could sit opposite Marco.

What happened over lunch proved very disconcerting for Bermejo. As he had planned—it may have been something he always did when he first met with a camp survivor—he asked Marco to talk about the time he had spent in Flossenbürg; Marco cut him off before he had even voiced his request: told him he didn’t feel talking about the matter would lead anywhere, told him not to bother with such things, told him there were much more important subjects. Bermejo was thunderstruck. He had often encountered camp survivors who didn’t want to discuss their experiences, because they were still traumatised, because they wanted to forget, or because they found it painful to remember; Marco, however, was completely different: for years now he had been giving talks, granting interviews, talking endlessly about his experiences in Flossenbürg. How was it possible that Marco was prepared to talk about the subject to anyone but him?

It would take Bermejo some time to clear up the matter. That afternoon in Mauthausen, he didn’t ask Marco anything else about his past, but our man’s behaviour had sowed the seeds of suspicion.

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In the months that followed, his suspicions continued to multiply.

The third and last meeting between Bermejo and Marco took place in May 2004, again in Mauthausen, on the day commemorating the liberation of the camp, or to be more precise, on the eve of the commemoration, and not in Mauthausen itself, but in Ebensee, an Aussenkommando or subcamp or satellite camp eighty kilometres south of Mauthausen. By now, Bermejo had spent several years compiling information about Marco, comparing various sources and working out that Marco’s account of his time in the camp made no sense, that it was riddled with contradictions and impossibilities; he didn’t yet have definitive proof with which to categorically refute the story, but he was completely convinced, or almost completely convinced, that the president of the Amical was not who he claimed to be.

For some time, Bermejo had been asking questions about Marco, especially of those who’d had a direct relationship with him. Whether he spoke to former deportados the response was always the same, or almost always the same: “I wouldn’t stick my neck out for him,” they said. “He’s a shady character,” they said. “There’s something fishy about him,” they said. “He’s not trustworthy,” they said. And even: “Maybe he’s an infiltrator.” He also thought it suspicious that Marco, whose official story claimed that he left Spain clandestinely and was imprisoned in Marseille before being deported to Flossenbürg, had never had any contact whatever with the French organisation the Amicale de Flossenbürg, where no-one knew anything about him. Nor did anyone at the Spanish Federation of Deportados and Political Prisoners (which also had a branch in France), something that seemed more than suspicious to Bermejo, who thought it almost impossible that a Spanish anarchist who had survived the Nazi camps would have no contact with the organisation.

Naturally, Bermejo had requested information from the Flossenbürg Memorial archives about Marco and been informed that there was no mention of a prisoner named Marco in the camp registers; moreover he still couldn’t get his head around the patent contrast, not so much between the abundance and the epic, sentimental tone of Marco’s stories compared to those of other camp survivors, but between Marco’s loquacity in public and his categorical refusal to speak in private.

But what he found most suspicious and which, together with the foregoing, led him to the conclusion that Marco had invented his story, or a large part of his story, was: the more he studied Marco’s various accounts and discovered points that were contradictory or even nonsensical, the more he realised these couldn’t simply be attributed to Marco’s poor memory or to errors made by journalists or writers who had set the stories down, and therefore Marco must be wilfully altering his life story. He began to glimpse the truth. He began to speculate that perhaps Marco had been in Germany in the Forties, not as a deportado, but as a volunteer worker, because his account of his route to Germany via France sounded very similar to that of Spanish volunteer workers—on at least two occasions, for example, Marco had mentioned Metz, the city from which such workers were reallocated—and because he knew that Marco was a metalworker and that one of the first volunteer convoys to leave Barcelona had been made up of metalworkers, most of whom ended up working in northern Germany, where Marco admitted he’d spent time in prison. Lastly, in early May 2004, when Bermejo was writing an article with Sandra Checa proving that the supposed Mauthausen deportado Antonio Pastor was actually an impostor, he had the conviction—though not the proof—that Marco, too, was an impostor.

It was at this point that he had his last encounter with Marco. It took place, as I said, at Ebensee, one of the subcamps of Mauthausen, set in a mountainous region where, late in the war, the Germans excavated a network of underground tunnels where they could set up armaments factories safe from Allied bombings. That day there was to be a small commemoration service at Ebensee prior to the main ceremony at Mauthausen camp the following day. Bermejo and Marco met in one of the tunnels beneath the subcamp. They talked. Marco was surrounded by a group of teenagers; he explained to Bermejo that they were students who had travelled from Barcelona thanks to the Amical and that he was acting as their guide. Then he talked to Bermejo about the activities of Amical, which were increasingly numerous and varied, and mentioned that the following year, the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen, they hoped to bring an important person, perhaps a member or a representative of the government, to attend the commemoration.

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The proof that Bermejo was lacking finally appeared early the following year. In fact it’s possible to be more precise, because the historian noted the discovery in his diary: January 21. In less than a week, the Spanish parliament would for the first time commemorate International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and, also for the first time, welcome a representative of the Spanish survivors of the camps, a ceremony at which Marco was to give a speech; in just over three months, commemorations for the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Mauthausen would take place, and for the first time the Spanish prime minister would be in attendance and for the first time a speech would be given by a Spanish deportado, who, until the last minute, was to be Marco.

Bermejo didn’t stumble on the evidence by accident. At some point it had occurred to him that he might find information about Marco in the archives of the Ministry for Foreign Affairs, which he had consulted on previous occasions, and when he visited the archive, he discovered that his hunch had been right. There were only three pages, but they were enough to prove beyond all doubt that at least one fundamental part of Marco’s story, in its many variants, was false; he had not left Spain clandestinely, he had not been arrested in France and sent to Germany, he was not a deportado. The document did not prove that Marco wasn’t a survivor of Flossenbürg—there was still the possibility that, while in Germany, Marco had been arrested by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp, as had happened to other volunteer workers—but it did prove that Marco had lied. There were only three pages, but they were enough to destroy Marco.

Bermejo’s euphoria at his discovery must have been short-lived, because his next thought was “What now?” Despite what many later claimed, Bermejo felt no animus towards Marco, nor did he relish the idea of being a wet blanket, of poking people in the eye, certainly not an old man. What now? Bermejo asked himself. His provisional response was to call a number of trusted individuals and tell them what he’d found out about Marco. None of these people knew what to advise, and at least one of them said: do anything except do nothing.

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Adapted from THE IMPOSTOR, by Javier Cercas. Used by permission of the publisher, Knopf Books. Copyright © 2014 by Javier Cercas. Translation © 2018 by Frank Wynne.