If there is no respect, there will be pain

 In spring 1944, Ernest Levy was jailed in Budapest. His offence was minor and he believed he would be at liberty within a few days. Instead, over the next year, this teenage boy was to pass through seven Nazi concentration camps. He worked as slave labour in a factory and a mine, endured a forced march which killed many of his comrades, until finally he was found by British troops who liberated Belsen in April 1945, a living skeleton, ravaged by typhoid and hours from death.

Levy, who became cantor at the Giffnock and Newlands synagogue when he moved to Scotland in the early 1960s , has made it is duty to speak about these events, though they are full of unutterable sadness for him. For the last 40 years he has visited schools and churches to reveal the horrors of Nazism. Tomorrow is Holocaust Memorial Day. It is right, he believes, that he should bear witness one last time.

But no more. He is in hospital in Glasgow – his heart is weak – and Levy will not speak out again. It is “the bitter end”. He has lived long enough.

“People have to be told. If we don’t co-exist, and don’t respect difference, there will be pain,” he says, in his thin reedy voice, sitting beside his hospital bed.

“Homicide does not occur just from one day to another. I saw it coming step-by-step. Sustained hatred culminated in the Holocaust. We have to make an effort to avoid that hatred. We can’t love everybody but we can co-exist. There are fantastic things going on in the world. Unity within diversity. The world has stepped forward a lot.”

Imaging the scenes of Levy’s life is impossible without conjuring up novels and films. In a series of ghastly cinematic frames, his life flashes by as those around him perish. Many times, only his relative youth and physical fitness – he had been a keen footballer – contrived to save him.

Jailed for missing a duty with the local civil defence force, within four days he had been squeezed onto a cattle truck with hundreds of other prisoners and taken away. One of eight children, he would never see half of his family again.

The first station on his descent to hell was Auschwitz, where his few possessions were stripped away and his head shaven. He became a number, not a name. After a week, came a winnowing of the ‘wheat’ from the ‘chaff’. Levy was wheat, detailed to a work camp, some 60km distant. The rest were bound for the gas chambers and “escaped up the chimney” in the words of some of the deranged inmates.

The dark months that followed in Wustegiersdorf in south eastern Poland were desperate enough. Starvation rations, brutal guards, and all manner of filth surrounded the captives. But as the “1000-year Reich” imploded, and the Red Army advanced, the camp was abandoned and its inmates forced to drag themselves hundreds of kilometres to Belsen in Lower Saxony.

This was a “death march”, says Levy, undertaken in bitter winter, by men who had already spent months or years without nourishment or warm clothing. Many died where they fell on the road. Others, who might use the pretence of exhaustion to play dead and then escape, were shot. One night’s act of savagery came by the River Elbe. Here, the prisoners were directed to a warehouse, and its double doors flung open.

“Four hundred malnourished Jewish men and boys were ordered into a space that could not possibly hold them. Eighty at a pinch,” remembers Levy. “We were among the first 20 or 30 inside and facing the doors we watched horror-stricken as the crush increased. It was a little while before close became too close, became difficult, hard to breathe, became painful, became a need to protest, became a need to beg and shout for help.”

The first to die were those crushed into the walls. Others sank to floor and were trampled. A stumble sent Levy down, but he was pulled upright by Joe, his friend. “It was not long before we were moving over the dead and dying. The movement of my feet provoked cries of pain, but the force of the mass compelled my feet to move. I was relatively strong. I survived. The weaker went under, some by my hands and feet. So it was.

“Just after dawn, the doors were flung open to allow the survivors to stagger out gasping and coughing. Some emerged on their knees and collapsed. Others fell to knees in prayer. I would not look back but Joe later described the shed floor covered in broken bodies.”

His first task at Belsen was to clear the railway ramp and the rail trucks alongside of the dead and the dying. “Line them up and box them like matchsticks,” he was ordered by the Camp Commandant, Joseph Kramer. “Are you listening to me? Like matchsticks. You’ll get more in. More space. Do it then.” His final memory of captivity is hauling corpses down to a giant pit of dead bodies, where lime would be added to reduce the mass of skin and bone to a chemical slurry.

Levy has told some of these stories before. But as wise as he is, he can never comprehend their meaning, nor drive their sadness from him.

“It is so difficult to understand a human situation where humanity has disappeared.
I saw it from so close. Once you are swept up in a life of violence and crying, you lose all sensitivity for human suffering. It only takes a year,” he says.

In the ‘New World Order’ of the concentration camps, the brutality of the SS was often delegated to ‘kapos’, convicted criminals, mainly Jewish, who were “given interesting things to do around work camps by the Nazis”, says Levy.

“The classical example was Schreiber – a Kapo and a Jew – who could have been an ordinary family man. He was in Auschwitz for years and they taught him how to treat people. He lost all sensitivity. He enjoyed the agony of human suffering. I saw him with my own eyes. Smiling.

“Some young Nazis, enjoyed the agony of suffering. You were lost, you were miles from home. No-one knew where you were, what you were, what was happening. There was no chance of getting out of that hell. And they were counting on that. They had lost their normal humanity.”

At yet, remarkably Levy’s memories are dappled with light. Kindnesses followed his horrendous journey. Arriving in Budapest in 1941, a refugee from Czecholslovakia, he had been separated from his family, when he was taken in by Greta, a prostitute. She fed him, gave him money and directed him to the Jewish quarter, where he was reunited with his mother and father.

Months later, their paths would cross again, and Levy was delighted to find that Greta had married an older man, a retired postman who shared her contempt for the Nazis. The couple would later rescue two Jewish boys and hide them for the remainder of the war. Levy is moved to smile by this memory. “Like us, she came back from the dead. Because she was lost, on the streets, and she came back. With that old postman. It was an unusual story.”

There were Germans who took risks as great and who died to help the Jews. In Wustegiersdorf, Levy was saved by Anton Strummer, the German manager of the engineering workshop, whose generosity and patience towards his 80 strong staff kept them from the inhumanity of the camp outside. Strummer quit his job in a blaze of insubordination, publicly dismissing his successor, a buttoned up Nazi apparatchik, as a fool.

Above all was Helmut, a young German soldier, who was a friendly presence at Wustegiersdorf and on the road to Belsen. By the time the column of prisoners was loaded onto a train for the final stretch of that terrible journey, Levy was suffering from diarrhoea. Throughout the night Helmut repeatedly helped Levy up on to the side of the cattle truck so he could empty his bowels onto the track. “I would not expect my brothers to help like this,” Levy told his good German friend. Now he says: “Like many young men in the Wehrmacht, Helmut was caught in a cleft stick, obliged to ‘heil’ the ‘heils’ but at odds with the doctrine.”

Levy knows little of what happening to these wonderful people. He met Greta once, her hair greying, in 1958. Her postman husband had been shot dead by a Soviet sniper during the Hungarian rising. Anton and Helmut almost certainly perished in 1945 for their virtuous anti-Nazism.

Yet “by a miracle”, Levy first encountered his wife, Kathy, in Belsen. Chased by the brutal kapo, Schreiber, he had fled to an unfamiliar part of the camp, and taken refuge in a brick barracks. “I heard Hungarian, so I shouted my family’s name – ‘Maybe someone is here,’ I thought. There were women. They had their own hair, their own clothing, and something to eat. And she was sitting on a bed, looking down on me. She gave me food.

“All those years later, to remember me was impossible. I had been a skeleton, the living dead. But I had taken a long look at her and after the war, in Glasgow, in Hungarian company, I met her. She told me she was a survivor at Belsen.

“I was invited to her home. In the living room there was a montage of pictures of her growing up. I got a shock. It was her graduation photo. She was 19 and later the same year she was in Belsen. I looked at her in utter disbelief. She had given me a little piece of bread and then I had had to run away.” They married and had two children. Kathy Levy died last year.

A decade ago, a family friend who had a business not far from Belsen, asked Levy if he would like to visit the site of the death camp. “It was an awful dilemma,” he recalled, and neither then nor today can he come to terms with the visit.

“All through the journey I didn’t speak a word. I was ready to say ‘Turn back’. But something pulled me there. When we arrived. I couldn’t go to the ramp [by the railway track]. I couldn’t face it. I went into the memorial hall. And I said my prayers there, because I lost friends.”

Reverend Levy break offs. “I can’t even talk about it.

“I have a bag of earth from Jerusalem. And I brought home a bag of earth from Belsen. When I am buried, I want that earth from Belsen buried with me.”

Jenni Fagan's Edinburgh gothic

By the end of the Luckenbooth, Jenni Fagan’s wildly gothic new novel, readers will need little convincing of the truth of its inscription: Edinburgh is mad god’s dream. 

The book opens with the devil's daughter rowing a coffin into Leith docks, as she makes her way towards Luckenbooth Close, a tenement high on Edinburgh’s Royal Mile.  Here,  the author’s sinuous, supernatural story unwinds down nine decades, through all nine floors of the ancient building, embroiling the lives of nine residents.  

Along the way we experience murder, love and Edwardian sex in the city and meet, among others, a Second World War spy and a 1970s gang leader, both women,  a celebrity author and a miner who is terrified of the light. The last and most recent resident, the homeless Dot, breaks into the derelict tenement for shelter.

"Weird” it may seem to some reviewers, but for Fagan, her third novel is  “a love letter to Edinburgh”.  If love is truth,  she says, “it’s the business of writers” to reveal the hidden truths of people’s lives, the terrifying challenges and choices they face  because they are trapped by forces they cannot control. 

Take Dot.  Fagan  admits an empathy with her waif-like character  who in 1999 squeezes through builders’ hoardings to find a place to live after her benefits have been stopped. 

“Dot’s  on the fringes of everything in lots of ways, a quiet person who is not obviously a hero,”  Fagan says. The question her character poses, she adds, is  “Why are some women still unable to have any sense of security?”

That question comes straight from the heart. Fagan, 43,  has always been reluctant to talk in public about her past, but the bones of her life story are shocking. 

She was placed in care as soon as she was born, and afterwards had more than 30 placements with strangers around Edinburgh before she was 16.  She was so often fostered out, by the time she was five her name had been changed four times.  

“It’s a  lifelong legacy, you know, and its impact will always be there,” she says. “My original name is nothing like my name now. I eventually got hold of my social work files  and there's about 17 different variations, because they would spell them wrong.” 

As a  child she remembers “being told the story about myself all the time”, as she was moved from place to place.  “You're listening to people saying ‘This is Jenni and she is …blah, blah, blah.  You had a little story book that would travel with you (to explain who you were).”

Even now it feels strange, she says over a Zoom call. “I knew almost nothing about  where I came from until I was a lot older. When I was growing up I never saw a photo of a person who looked like me. You'll know somebody who laughs like you -  for me, there are not even any little markers like that.”

Poetry and reading saved her.  Fagan started writing aged seven. “I was completely voiceless in the system,” she says. “What was so powerful for me about writing a poem was I could see my voice. I could go away, come back three days later, open the book again and it was still there. I started writing and never stopped.”

When she read the Hobbit, she discovered “a huge story, a game changer,” she says. “I used to go to a library van. I read all the books it stocked.  I  could see there were other worlds and that  the world I was living in was not the only one.”

Though obviously  bright, she quit Beeslack High School, Penicuik at 15, without qualifications.  She lived in homeless accommodation as a young adult and for a while she sang in punk and grunge bands, gradually inching towards higher education.  

“It took me a long time to even consider sitting in a classroom,” she says. “One of my biggest achievements was  just to sit there, not even to study.”   She became an undergraduate at 30,  studying at Greenwich University and completed a PhD on Kafka recently at Edinburgh University.  

Her understanding of life is woven through Luckenbooth. She would not, for example, scoff at the notion of the supernatural.  Her narrative weaves between the real and the spirit world, and in one terrifyingly vivid scene, the ghosts of women slain in a heinous murder are conjured up at a seance. 

These days, people only laugh at the idea of a sixth sense because of their own fears, Fagan believes, and because they have become conditioned by their regimented lives.  

“We've been trained to kill our instincts,” she says. “We're at a point in the world,  a point of crisis, where we need to do the opposite now. 

“When, say,  someone instinctively knows a parent needs them, and decides to pick up a phone, I think that’s a brilliant thing.  My entire life I’ve been in touch with that ability to survive.  I have a very deep respect for it.”

Above all, steeped in feeling for the city, Fagan, who lives near Leith with her young son and partner, brings Edinburgh vividly alive.  Her heroines drink in the rowdy howffs on Leith Walk, or rendezvous in the old Palais dance hall in Fountainbridge. The gargoyles of St Giles Cathedral stare down on her characters and the beautiful Meadows park conceals the graves of plague victims. 

In better times, Fagan could even lead readers to the real site of her imagined Luckenbooth Close, in a cleared space on the North side of the High Street, near, appropriately enough, the Devil’s Advocate bar.  

In these more difficult days she has fought off  a bout of Covid-19, fearing in her darkness moments that she might die.  Her response was to spend the last few months writing her memoirs to ensure, whenever she finally publishes, her own truth is out there.  

“There's no one other person in my story,  it is a weird thing,” she says. “People say, ‘Who was the one person who saved you?’  I say, ‘It was me, and it took a long time.”

• A shorter version of this article appeared in The Times, Scotland edition on Jan 9 2020

Don't insult me with 'unionist'

Interesting times, uncomfortable times.  That’s how the writer Denise MIna recalls the Scottish independence referendum.

She voted No, went on Radio 4 to explain her position and was rewarded by endless vitriol on social media from Yes-supporting keyboard warriors.  She hated the abuse, she hated the flag-waving in the streets and she still hates how the terms of the debate, even the terminology, are laid down by the Yes side, five years later.   

“What the f*ck is a ‘unionist’ anyway?” Mina demands. “I grew up in Paris, I grew up in Norway, I’m an internationalist.

“‘Unionist’ is just an insult, a straw man argument, gathering everyone who disagrees with you into one bundle, and discrediting them by association with the Orange lodge, that’s what that’s about.” 

Mina, it’s obvious, is spiky all the way south of her wild haircut.  Best known as a crime writer, she’s in Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum theatre, where she has been watching her adaptation of Mrs Puntilla and Her Man Matti, by Berthold Brecht,  a playwright whose politics chime with hers. 

The production switches the action from rural Finland of the 1940s to a present-day Highland estate, but  - and this is the nub of the issue - it is not a bit about twee nationalism.

Instead the helpless local staff and immigrant hirelings are at the mercy of the pitiless inconsistency of Mrs Puntilla, a fabulously wealthy drunk played by Elaine C Smith.   The chauffeur, Matti, is the Everyman figure who explains what it’s all about: the age old tyranny of capital over labour.   

That’s why ‘unionist’ is such an insult, says Mina. “Brecht was an international socialist. He saw the central division as haves and have-nots.”

This outlook is ingrained in her.  Mina, born in East Kilbride, owes her peripatetic childhood to her father, an engineer, whose work took his family around Europe.  Her teenage years were in Bromley, south London (“Do you know it? It’s a suburban shit-hole”) and she arrived in Glasgow, studying criminology in her early 20s.

She broke away from a PhD to write Garnethill (1998), set in her newly-adopted home city.  It laid a pattern for the rest of her crime-writing career, by winning a prize and foregrounding a put-upon, flawed heroine, an abuse survivor with a history of psychiatric illness.    

About a dozen books later, The Less Dead comes out in August. It began as a true crime investigation of a series of murders in Glasgow and is rooted in her interest in  “deserving” and “undeserving” victims, a distinction made, she maintains, by the public at large, rather than by the police or the media.

The setting is the 1990s, recalled by the author as  a “crazy time” in Glasgow when a spike in heroin addiction coincided with a surge in the number of women on the city streets. Emma Caldwell, 27, became the best known victim in a spate of killings  of sex workers. 

Mina explains: “Emma Caldwell was covered in a particular way because her family were lovely, and gave interviews.  She herself was very sympathetic, she was a ‘good’ victim.  

“The women before that - and I remember following those murders at the time - were not sympathetic, they were not seen as lovely and many grew up in foster care or children’s homes.  They didn’t have anyone to stand up for them.”

The more she researched, the more troubling her true-crime project became. “I realised I couldn’t really talk about these women, a lot were really kids, without repeating the offence and making it a gory book about the awful things that happened to people.” So, she says, she wrapped it up in fiction. 

She remains fascinated by the central moral conundrum: why do the public, and even many feminists, have so little compassion for sex workers and other “invisible” people?

“One of the tropes of crime fiction when I was starting out was if you had a sex worker murder, you had to have five and they had to be killed in interesting ways,” she says. “If the victim was, say, a minister’s daughter, one was enough.  The assumption was the audience didn’t care (about sex workers).

“At the same time, particularly with those Glasgow murders, what was so interesting was the fact the feminist movement did not feel ownership over those women. They were like an aberration.   

“Even using the term ‘sex worker’ is controversial, because you are suggesting it is legitimate work.  It’s so controversial, most people just stay out of it. It’s like trans rights - you hear people say, ‘I don’t know what I’m allowed to say about that.’ 

“That kind of fighting about words is a way of stopping people caring.  In the meantime there are other human beings dying in the street, or behind closed doors.  Those women who died will just be forgotten because people say, ‘It’s prurient to talk about them.’  Well, I’m glad crime writing is prurient.”

Ian Rankin, the author of the best-selling Inspector Rebus series, often argues for crime-writing to be accepted as serious literary fiction. Mina disagrees.  

“I like low art forms. I like the notion of someone picking up my book because it’s fun.  The fact it isn’t taken seriously means you don’t have the social status but you do have a real engagement with your readers.  

“In Glasgow, people have come up and said, ‘Read your last book, hen. It was shite.’ I love it.  I bet Salman Rushie doesn’t get that.”

Mrs Puntilla  and her Man Matti, Edinburgh Royal Lyceum, until March 21; Glasgow Citizens Theatre from March 25, 2020

A version of this article first appeared in The Times Scotland edition, March 7, 2020

Barcelona notebook: the Catalan referendum

I spent four days in Barcelona during the Catalan referedum.  Not every thing I wrote was published in the paper, or even submitted for publication.  I've emptied some of my notebook here. 

Thursday 28, September 

A copy of Pablo Picasso’s Guernica carried at the head of a demonstration today in Barcelona brought home the vast gulf between the supporters of Catalan independence and the Spanish government.

The pro-independence students who assembled the banner, say it perfectly reflects the heavy-handed actions of Mariano Rajoy’s government, before Sunday’s referendum.

About ten million ballot papers have been seized, 14 Catalan officials arrested, and thousands of Spanish police are quartered in Barcelona, ready, apparently, to be deployed on polling day to halt the vote.

Miguel Sarquella, 20, who helped make the Guernica banner, was carrying the portion featuring a man screaming in his death throes, beneath a rampaging bull.

“We feel the current government is repeating the actions of repression, which we had before democracy was established here,” said Mr Sarquella, an architecture student. “We think this kind of democracy is fake.”

Picasso’s image depicts the bombing of a town in the Basque country and the slaughter of about 300 people by Franco’s Fascists, supported by Nazi aircraft.  Was that really a fair comparison with contemporary Catalonia?

It was, insisted Mr Sarquella.  “We don’t feel free to speak for ourselves,” he said. “We don’t feel free at all.   Why have they moved thousands of policemen here?”

Julia Ramon, 20, stressed the independence movement was pacifist.   Ms Ramon said. “This is a student march, but all ages support us.  Many of them had to live under Franco 40 years ago.”

Emma Clark was one of 25 drama students, who staged a show about freedom in front of the  Guernica banner, once the march reached Placa de la Univeristat

“It’s the best backdrop for our play, because they won’t even let us vote,” said Ms Clark, brought up in Catalonia by her Croydon-born father and Czech mother.

The 20-year-old was uncertain what would happen over the next few days, and it was difficult to figure out how the constitutional crisis would be resolved, she said.    The Spanish government insists the referendum is unconstitutional; not a single country in the EU has offered support to the Catalan independence movement.

“We have to do the best we can here, and let’s see what happens,” Ms Clark said.

The demonstration of perhaps 10,000 university and school students was cheerful and loud, the police presence muted, save for the local Mossos officers,  who helped to marshal the crowd.

Where it differed strongly from the mood ahead of the Scottish independence referendum was its unmistakeable sound of protest. The uncompromising attitude of the Spanish government has stoked resentment; the response of Westminster to the Yes movement in Scotland seems both sophisticated and benign by comparison.

“That’s because British democracy is much more mature,” Mr Saquella said. “It has solid government. Our democracy is much more recent. It just changed from one repressive government, when Franco was in power,  to one which is patched up, just to look good to the world.” 

Was his passion for independence making him exaggerate the failings of Mr Rajoy’s government?

“I’m not actually passionate for independence,” Mr Sarquella said. “I still have my doubts, but I am passionate for freedom of expression.  I still don’t know if I will vote yes or no, but I do want to vote. We need to be able to vote.”

Friday 29, September 

Tonight, rallying under a flag made by Rory Steel’s mother, 17 Scots joined tens of thousands of demonstrators in Barcelona, supporting the rights of Catalans to vote in the region's independence referendum.

Mr Steel, 23, the vice convenor of SNP Youth  first became aware of the Catalan independence movement three years ago when  he saw its flag alongside a candlelit display  in Glasgow’s George Square, in support of Scotland’s “Yes” movement.

Solidarity it seems is reciprocal, and SNP Youth, he said, has built strong links with  left-leaning campaigners in Catalonia  who are voting “Si”.  

The actions of the Spanish government over the last few weeks have appalled Mr Steel . He  condemned the “jack-boots “of the Spanish police in making arrests and seizing ballot papers, and noted lingering connections between the People’s Party of Mariano Rajoy, the prime minister,  and the  former  Fascist regime of General Franco.

Jordan Linton, 22, his friend, highlighted the stark contrast between the approach taken by the Spanish government and their Conservative counterparts at Westminster, who signed the Edinburgh Agreement with the SNP in 2012.

 “Two governments, in Scotland and the UK, with diametrically opposed views in terms of the outcome, were able to come together to agree a referendum which was  legally binding, which gave people the chance to have their say,” said Mr Linton, a North Lanarkshire councillor.

“A lot of the literature here, surprisingly since they are on the cusp of the referendum, has simply been about the right to vote, it’s not about taking sides. The word ‘Votar’ is everywhere.  It has underpinned my whole time here.”

Christina Cannon, 19, another member of SNP Youth is already a Glasgow City councillor. She agreed with Mr Linton. “The principle of democracy has become the theme of our visit,” she said.

Over the last few days, there has been condemnation of the Spanish government heavy-handed approach  from across Scotland  and that was a matter of pride for these activists. 

 "Christina McKelvie (the SNP MSP) wrote to Donald Tusk,  of  the EU Council, a cross-party group of MSPs wrote to Rajoy,”  Mr Linton said. “That is leadership  - it would have been good to see that more around the world.”

Mr Steel agreed: “The Scottish government has already stood up more for the rights of Catalonia than the other major players in Europe.  Not a lot has been said by other nation states.”

Were they frightened  by the possibility of violence in the next 48 hours?  Worried would be a better word, said Mr Steel, “worried that the police should be sent out to stop a democratic process.”

Saturday 30, September 

Opponents of the Catalan referendum believe they are silent majority, but when 3,000 gathered in Placa D’Urquinaona  yesterday evening, they quickly found their voice.

These demonstrators were older and angrier  than those who had been on the streets proclaiming “Si” just 24 hours earlier.  They felt they had been ill-served by Catalonia’s political leadership  for years.  “SOS Intimidats pel Nacionalisme”,  read the poster taped to a shop window – "intimidated by nationalism".

This demonstrators had been too afraid to speak out in the past, believed  Roberto Pardo and Laura, his wife, both lawyers from Barcelona. 

 “Today is the day,” Mr Pardo said, a Spanish flag draped over his back. “We have been silent for too long – it is time to do something."

No-one here would  vote, he added.  His wife agreed. “Why would we?” Mrs Pardo wondered.  “This is an illegal situation.”

An office worker, who said his name was Jose, was not going to vote.  “We support the constitution, we support the law,” Jose said.  “Catalonia has been part of Spain for 2,000 years and we want to continue.  This is not some kind of colonial situation – we have been united since the foundation of the Spanish state.”

Over the last 30 years, the government in Madrid had given away too much to Catalan politicians.  “They needed support for this or that policy, so they made too many concessions,” Jose said.

“They have allowed Catalan separatists to indoctrinate people.  In TV, in the media, in schools, all we hear is Madrid is wrong.”

Around Jose, the cries went Up.  “Catalunya es Espagna”, and then as more people arrived, the procession moved off down Via Laietan, and the marchers burst into song: Y Viva Espagna.

Rafael Lopez, 58, an office manager, had come all the way from Madrid with some friends to join the procession.  The referendum he said was “illegal, immoral and unjust.”  It oppressed the people who had gathered here. 

Nothing would happen next week said Mr Lopez, whatever the result, because the vote had no validity.  

But there would be a reckoning, predicted Mr Pardo, the lawyer.

“Afterwards,” he said,  “some of the government in Catalonia will go to prison.  It must be so, because this is sedition.  They have declared war on the Spanish government and the people.  The law in Spain says you have a trial, you pay the penalty, and you go to prison.”

Notebook: Inside Pau Casals School, Gracia Saturday night

The school was occupied on Friday and Saturday night.  Scores of kids were playing games, when we turned up in the early evening.  The school gym had been requisitioned for people to sleep in; others slept in pop-up tents in the playground. 

Only the adults stayed in the school overnight, but when we were there, because the kids were still around, we were asked not to take photographs. 

Jordi Mir, 53, an administrator. 

The police, the Mossos, came round earlier in the day and told us we had to be out by six in the morning.  The only people we will open the door to at that time will be the people  who bring  the (voting) urns and the ballot papers.  We won't let the police in.  

If the cops beat their way in there is no particular plan.  The idea is that people will sit in front of the door.  They are going to have to play a game with us: it will be like picking onions.  We will be sitting  there in rows.  The police will have to pluck us out one by one.  We will invite them to play.  The idea is the cops will eventually give up.

Ramon Massana, 52, marine biologist

It’s been organised because of social media.  The fathers from the school came here about two days ago, and the proposal was made to occupy the school.  I have two kids here. 

Most people will vote ‘Si’.  The people who would vote ‘No’ will not vote.  They will say, ‘This is not fair.’ If they really want  to stay in Spain, they should come and vote, but instead they prefer to say, ‘This is not legal.’

I saw a banner on the anti-referendum march.  It said: ‘We are oppressed by nationalists’.  What do you think of that?

It is a joke, a joke.  They are very emotional.  We are not oppressing them.

You want independence?

Yes, yes.  I have always wanted that.  Many years ago it didn’t seem possible.  Now it does, and I feel very happy.

To the outsider, life in Barcelona seems to be going on as a normal – it seems such a prosperous, comfortable city – but this argument is so heated and angry …?

Look back in history, go back 300 years ago – we had our country.  And the civil war – many things have happened – it was a very heated moment.   

But in the present (crisis) things started 10 years ago. The starting point was our parliament proposing  a route for Catalonia, a new future.  The proposal went to Madrid: it was changed quite a bit, but then accepted in the parliament.  It came back to the Catalan Parliament and passed.  But the Madrid started rolling back on this again, they started changing our law.  People realised that we had been positive, but (Madrid) always made the law.

Things have happened very quickly recently, but this is not something that came from nothing.

Do you feel Spanish at all?

No. In this movement though there are so many people for whom identity is not important.  It is about dignity, about respect.  

Some people shouted today that they are Catalan and Spanish …

You think they feel Spanish and Catalan?

That’s what they said.

It is what they say now, because they are forced to say so.  But it is not true.  Ten years ago, these people would not have said they were Catalan at all. They would say they were Spanish.  Now they say they are Catalan and Spanish, we have to live together.  It is a strategy.  Again, it is like a joke.

Ton Barniles, 46, General Manager of the Catalan Alpine Club

If they produce violence in us, they win.  It’s what happened in the Basque country.   We will use non-violence and humour.  Like the placards of Tweety Pie  (Piolin)

I won’t find trouble here, from what you are saying?

Oh I don’t know.  I wouldn’t be naïve.  But on the citizen’s part there will be no violence.  I think now the Spanish government is quite afraid of this, because they saw the reaction after the recent arrests.   They thought they could smash this.

There has been an increase in support, simply because of their violence.  And more people want to vote now.   For example, the Mayor of Barcelona, she is not for a free Catalonia, but after the police intervened, she said ‘Enough.’   She will do a “white vote”  (she will go to vote – but abstain).

Monica, 47, a journalist/publisher, who didn’t want to give her surname

I need the right to vote.  I am not going to say whether I will note yes or no, I am not some kind of independence nut, but I am here to defend the right to vote.   I’ve always thought there should be a referendum, to settle this issue.

I need Catalans to express what they think, whether it is yes or no.  The Spanish government crossed a red line with its behaviour in the last week.

But I don’t like the Catalan government.  They cheated to create this referendum.  They changed the law to make the referendum happen, it wasn't good. They haven’t been clean, but equally the attempts by the Spanish government to outlaw the referendum are ridiculous.

Many Scots who voted “No” in the Scottish independence  referendum because they said they felt Scottish and British. Do you  feel Catalan and Spanish?  

I like to live in this grey area. I feel  Catalan, it is the motherland. I used to feel Spanish but not anymore.   For me it is a very sad situation.  I wish I could have both.  But I am more Catalan for sure, because you always feel attached to the motherland.

Laura, a reporter for a Spanish-owned TV station, did not want to give her name

It is hard to work for the Spanish media when my heart is here.   From the Madrid point-of-view, what the press has been saying has not been fair at all, it doesn’t reflect what people feel and what is happening here.

Some of the journalists from our station made an anonymous protest, and I was part of that.  For example of on the day of the terrorist attack, there was a big protest, but my channel simply didn’t show that, it didn’t show all the people who turned up.  Forget about what you do or don’t believe in, it just wasn’t a true portrayal of what happened.

The Spanish media is poor – you can’t believe what you see and read.   People get their new from international media.

Imagine.  My work is my money, but my heart is Catalonia.

 

We should just be open about what is happening in Catalonia, a referendum with campaigns for Yes and No  - this is what should have happened.  That’s why I am here, now.  So that people can vote.

Sunday morning write-up

When polling finally opened in Pau Casals school, Monserrat Llajuirri, 83, was one of the first to vote. 

"For so long, I lived under Franco,” she said, recalling the Fascist leader, who died in 1975.  “Now I can die with the satisfaction of helping my children and grandchildren to freedom.  I voted Yes for the liberty of my country and to stop repression.”

Outside the school, Carrer de la Providencia, a narrow street in a crowded residential area, had been filling up with people over the four hours before the referendum was due to begin.  They had come to vote and to defend this polling station.

At 7am, two officers from the Mossos, the local police, advised the crowd of about 1,000 they were breaking the law, but said they would do take no more action.  There were cheers and applause, as the officers pushed through the crowd and walked away towards a café at the end of the street.  

But soon, by the packed entrance to the school, people were sharing mobile phone footage of attacks by Spanish police, wearing hard hats and riot gear.  “This is a school on the other side of the city,” said one woman fearfully. “My cousin is there.” 
 She showed a picture of two police in riot gear hauling a woman away.

“We have been warned about secret police,” said Lena Oliverez, 22.  “They come in pairs and in plain clothes.  They will come and seize the ballot boxes.”  These officers might be armed with tasers, she warned.

It took longer than expected to open the poll.  The destruction of ballot papers and the confiscation of ballot boxes forced the organisers  to improvise.  Huge cheers went up when plastic boxes  were held aloft for the crowd to see through the plate glass entrance.  Ballot papers were freshly published on office printers. 

Yet another problem arrived when an app went down linking the polling station to the electoral roll.  Miguel Collomae, an economist, came to the doorway to explain the difficulty had been anticipated – the Spanish government had closed down other internet channels.  “We have contingency plans,” he assured those eager to vote. “Be patient. You will vote.”

They were patient and they were rewarded.  Maria Dolores, 81, was second to cast her vote, when polling opened. 

“I am ridiculously happy, she said, her eyes filling with tears. “We don’t have anything, they are squashing us all.  We are peaceful people, not animals.  They cannot deny us our freedom.”

Notebook: Lena Oliverez, 22

Lena returned from Argentina a month ago, after completing an interior design degree.  She stayed in the school overnight and was one of about 20 people who came out to mingle with the huge crowd outside.  She was weeping as she embraced her friends and family, and sometimes was overcome by tears during the interview.

It was coincidence that I finished my studies and was able to come back, just in time for the vote.

It was a very special for me last night.  It is just a year since my grandmother died. She was 91.  She was very emotionally involved with this: it is important to me to vote for the people who are no longer with us.

Why is it important that Catalonia is independent?

Two things. It is important for my family to come to Barcelona because they had so many problems when Franco was alive.   My grandparents, and parents came from Granada: Barcelona gave them everything.  It is so hard to explain.

Catalonia and Barcelona has a deep meaning for them?

Yes.  All those things that happened in those days: we don’t want to be part of it.

Did you think like that, even before the brutality of the last couple of weeks?

Yes.  

But isn’t it time to move on from the Franco era?

What we see in Spain, is Franco is very present. Posters, organisations, defending Franco.  This hasn’t disappeared.  A lot of things that are happening now, happened when Franco was in power.

Sunday afternoon write-up

At 5pm, Marcel Graell, 21, a politics student, addressed a crowd of an least 1,000 in the quadrangle outside Barcelona’s Industrial School.

By then, 500 people had been seriously injured in police attacks on crowds across Catalonia, and footage of the brutality widely shared on the internet.

In a passionate speech, delivered through a megaphone, he urged the crowd to “calm, peaceful, determined”.   The crucial thing was not to provoke the police.  “We have videos of them being violent and us being peaceful,” he said.

 “These are the images, the attitudes we want the world to see.  Then our president can carry on his strategy of taking our message to the world.”

Mr Graell   emergence as a charismatic local leader was the direct result of the heavy-handedness of the Spanish government.  Two weeks ago, he told me, he was undecided about how to vote in the referendum.

“I don’t hate Spain,” he said. “I don’t hate Spanish people.  I have been all over Spain.  A nanny who helped bring me up is from Aragon – I love her as a second mother. 

“Over the past two weeks, our institutions, our Catalan government has been taken by the Spanish institutions.  It meant I voted yes without hesitation.”

Mr Graell was among a group of 50 people who occupied the Industrial School on Friday night, when fears grew that Spanish police would attempt to shut it, ahead of referendum day.

"I seriously doubt the police have the  means to dissuade us.  We will sit on the floor, hands wrapped together. 

"If they do use violence to enter the college, they will have won the battle to defend the college but we would have won the moral battle, because we would have been peaceful."

The pic at the top was taken at about 8pm, when Mr Graell declared the ballot closed, thanked the people who had turned out to protect the polling station, and thanked the international press.  The barricade was at the back of  the industrial, opposite a hamburger joint. 

There was no violence at either the Pau Cassel School, or the Industrial School.  The brutal actions by Spanish police appeared to die off about lunchtime.  About that time, we tailed a convoy of police vans through the city, expecting them to stop at a polling station, and deploy their truncheons.  Instead they parked up in a layby, as if they had been stood down.