ABSTRACT
The Spaniards, like other national groups, were housed together, in Blocks 9, 11, 12, and 13, but they soon came into contact with other national groups, and they discovered what all discovered: international solidarity faced all kinds of obstacles, because the national groups in general were unable to free themselves from national prejudice and animosity. 1 The Czechs did not forget Munich, and were bitter against the French; they would have been equally bitter against the British, except that there were not yet any Britons in Mauthausen to be bitter against, and besides, that bitterness was assuaged by the fact that Britain was showing no sign of surrendering. The Poles remembered the Phony War, and shared the feelings of the Czechs. The Germans and the Austrians blamed the French for allowing diemselves to be defeated. The Russians, when they began to arrive in late 1941, shared most of these sentiments. As for the Spaniards, with their experience of France limited to the concentration camps and indentured service, the bitterness was profound. The ignominy of the French collapse, and the reality of Vichy, made francophobia the one camp passion in which almost all the prisoners could indulge. Razola and Constante write that in the eyes of many national groups the French symbolized 'non-intervention in Spain, the abandonment of Poland, the repudiation of treaty obligations, and the spirit of col laboration.' 2 The resentment was directed not just at France in the abstract but at the French individually. The Frenchman Jean Laffitte attests to this: 'Generally speaking, everybody hated France. We found nothing around us but indifference, contempt, and hatred. In the opinion of most of the Spaniards, we were a bunch of bastards.' 3
