"I'm an imposter, but not a fraud"

Sitting at the table of a café in Sant Cugat del Vallès, the town outside Barcelona where he lives, Enric Marco Batlle, ex-president of Amical de Mauthausen, an association dedicated to honoring the victims of that notorious concentration camp, and former secretary of the CNT, the confederation of anarcho-syndicalist labor unions, talks about his experiences in Nazi Germany. He is 90 years old, but this small man wearing a pin with the Republican insignia on his lapel expresses himself fluently, without hesitation or lapses in memory. He speaks with the confidence of a well-oiled memory, making effective pauses and emphasizing just the right parts of his story.

"In life-or-death situations like that, one applies one's own survival mechanisms," he says with a voice loaded with emotion.

The problem is that he knows who he is not, but he doesn't know who he is

What made him tread with lies on the sacred ground of European memory?

"Tell me, what's the difference between a concentration camp and a German jail?"

"When they wanted to teach us a lesson, they'd pick one out of every 25 of us and kill him. That day, I saw the SS arrive and I knew that he was coming to get me. He did, and pointed at me with his finger. He didn't say a word, just pointed. I raised my head and gave him the most seductive smile of my life. Then he said: 'Spanisch, an einem anderen Tag' ('The Spaniard, another day'), and kept on walking."

The problem with Enric Marco is that he knows who he is not, but he doesn't know who he is. The reporter listening to his stories already knows that this old man, who doesn't look his age, did not actually go to the death camps, although for many years he has represented those who witnessed the horror of absolute evil, the fight against oblivion and the impossible attempt to bring justice to bear on the past. He knows that the president of the Amical de Mauthausen who, on January 27, 2005, addressed Congress on behalf of the 10,000 Spanish Republicans deported by the Third Reich, was not the inmate number 6,448 from Flossenbürg that he claimed to be.

He also knows that this brilliant speaker - "when we got to the camps on those infected trains, meant for animals, they stripped us naked, their dogs bit us and their spotlights blinded us. They shouted at us in German, 'Links!' 'Rechts!' [Left, right!]; we didn't understand, and not understanding an order could cost you your life" - never set foot in a concentration camp. It's a compelling story. But it is not the truth.

He was in Nazi Germany, true; but he volunteered to go there, as a member of the group of workers that Franco sent to help Hitler's cause. When the historian Benito Bermejo discovered Enric Marco's name on the corresponding list from the Foreign Affairs Ministry, Enric Marco was on his way to Mauthausen to participate, with Prime Minister Zapatero, in the international tribute held on May 7 and 8, on the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation.

"The real inmate 6,448 at Flossenbürg was Enrique Moner Castells, born in Figueras in the year 1900. Enric Marco found that name in the files from the camp and thought that the coincidence between their first names and the first initial of their surnames would allow him to steal his identity. But the archivist Johannes Ibel refused to issue him a certificate indicating that the two men were the same person," says the historian.

More than a scandal, the news that Marco had never been deported shook up Republican circles. How can you tread with lies on the sacred ground of European memory, where supreme suffering and desolation is still fresh, along with the mechanical, industrial degradation of the individual, the exercise of complete ignominy and human barbarity? What made Enric Marco pretend to be one of the deportees?

I ask him, and this man who used to visit 150 schools a year to talk to the students says that he did it to make the denunciation of Nazism more effective and make more of an impression on people.

One thing is for sure: Marco was the best speaker in the association; no one could keep the audience's attention until the very end like he could. No one was left indifferent when he spoke. "I'm Enric Marco and I was born on April 14, the Day of the Republic" he would say, beginning his sabotage of truth, because he was really born two days earlier, on April 12.

"I was the first person to be shocked. We traveled together a lot to give talks, and I never caught him out once. People still ask us about him," says Liberto Villar, the son of deportees.

And so, the imposter's story, constructed out of borrowed or made-up anecdotes, was more successful than the real version of the events; a good lie was more effective than the naked truth. The theory proven by Enric Marco is that a tale well told by a fraud is more attractive than the story of the person who actually experienced or witnessed it firsthand.

But Marco is not just any impersonator: between sips of tea, Enric Marco can casually weave together sentences that he has surely learned from others, but are packed full of dramatic power nonetheless.

"At night, in the barracks, the air is thick and cloudy with the humanity of all those people. For a moment, the snoring gives way to a great silence and you can hear an animal howling, but no: it's not an animal, it's a man wailing as if he were a beast." Marco speaks in the present tense and chooses his pauses and stresses carefully, like a master storyteller.

"He was so brilliant that we should have suspected it," says one member of the Amical. "He fooled everyone: us, the authorities, the high school students and teachers."

"We met him at a lunch with survivors and my husband had a bad feeling about him. He always thought that he had never been in a camp in his life," says Lucía, the wife of Francisco Aura Boronat, the only survivor from Mauthausen in Spain.

Now 93 years old, Francisco's health is too delicate for him to be interviewed for this report. "During the meal Marco was being talkative and witty, and he said that the cod balls were worse than the ones at the camp. My husband said that in the camps, there weren't any cod balls like that."

It's a well-known fact that nightmares are a constant in the lives of former deportees, people who have gotten a second shot at life, but who are so marked by the horror, guilt about having survived, suffering and anguish that many times, they couldn't truly enjoy it anymore.

"It left my husband in very poor health for the rest of his life, and he carried it with him until his death. He always had Mauthausen in his brain, night and day," says Feli, the widow of Fernando Lavin. As opposed to the real survivors, who are generally quiet or laconic, afraid that their memories will rekindle such a traumatic experience, Enric Marco is a genius with words who, like any imposter, knows that all lies should have at least a grain of truth to them.

"I'm an imposter, but not a liar or a fraud. All I did was distort my own story. I became the voice and right-hand man of the deportees, because I also suffered imprisonment in Germany. Tell me, what is the difference between jail and a concentration camp? Not only was I a slave to the Nazis, I also resisted them," he declares, looking the journalist straight in the eye in a gesture of defiance.

In the original version of his story, Enric Marco was a young libertarian who, after the Civil War, escaped to France via the Barcelona harbor thanks to a customs officer relative of his who got him onto a fruit boat headed to Marseille. In France, he joined the Résistance, but was arrested by the Falangists, handed over to the Gestapo in Metz and drove to Kiel to work as a mechanic in a war factory. When the Germans found out that he was sabotaging the production line, they sent him to the Flossenbürg, and after the camp was liberated he went back to Spain to join the underground fight against the Franco regime.

This version was destroyed when it was revealed that he volunteered to go to Germany to work, at the recruitment office on Peláez street in Barcelona, and that he signed a contract with the shipbuilding company Deutsche Werke Werft. Now, upon the ruins of this fabricated autobiography, Marco is trying to construct another one to salvage whatever honor he has left.

According to this new account, he was arrested at the submarine base in Kiel for sabotaging the repair of torpedo launchers, tortured for six days by the Gestapo, put in preventative custody and released from prison eight months later.

For this interview with EL PAÍS, Marco has brought a thick folder full of things he has written himself and documents in German, some of them translated, which seem to prove that he actually was charged with "attacking the German state" and locked up in Kiel, although they do not show the outcome of the case.

One section of his new biography opens with the following quote: "If you don't say who you are, someone will say who you're not," something that in his case, could be followed by another sentence: "If you say what you're not, they'll deny what you are."

With the authority obtained from having studied the entire case, Benito Bermejo says that Enric Marco was acquitted, in a ruling that indicated that the defendant wasn't a dangerous element, but just "a very young person who had tried to show off to his colleagues." In support of its sentence, the court cited the testimony of the defendant's direct boss, who excluded him from possible blame for any act of sabotage and said he was a good worker.

"Enric Marco was in prison in Germany for six months. He returned to Spain in 1943 with a work permit, and stayed. In the Foreign Affairs Ministry's records, it shows that one of Marco's relatives inquired about his situation and that the Franco administration said that he was in jail in Germany, serving a six-month sentence for bad behavior," says the historian.

One thing that Enric Marco hasn't quite cleared up is why a young anarchist would flee Franco's Spain to work as a volunteer in Nazi Germany. "I felt suffocated by postwar Spain, with all the symbols of the Franco dictatorship and the Church," he says. Another unanswered question is how, where and with whom he fought, underground, against the Franco dictatorship for 33 years, from the time he returned from Germany until he started to appear in CNT circles. "I was undocumented, taking each day as it comes. Yes, I worked as a mechanic in a workshop in the Barcelona Cortes. I got arrested several times." According to inquiries made by this newspaper, Enrique Marco Batlle worked as a mechanic for many years in what is now the Vinyals auto repair shop at 46 Travessera de les Corts street, in Barcelona.

"He worked here back when it was called Talleres Coll-Blanch and then Talleres Cataluña. He was the husband, well, the companion, of the woman who owned the place at the time, María Belver Espinar, now deceased. He always said that he had been in a concentration camp, and as far as I know, he wasn't arrested, at least not from 1969 to 1979 while I was working there," says Antoni, a former employee.

Their former neighbors at 57 Oriente street, in Barcelona, remember María Belver and Enric Marco perfectly, as a nice, courteous couple who broke up after many years of living together, after Enric - in his fifties by that time - had met a history student, the mother of his two daughters.

The owner of the Bar Juan, on the corner of Travessera de les Corts, also has a positive memory of the mechanic who used to work on his street. "I've known him since 1976; he's a good person who bent over backwards for others. He didn't talk about politics here, but we know that he had been in the CNT. Once, 15 years ago or so, a German television station came to videotape him in the bar."

Enric Marco's lies go a long way back then, though he didn't approach the Amical de Mauthausen until the late 1990s, and the CNT didn't hear from him until the political transition to democracy. The union leaders Juan Gómez Casas and Luis Andrés Edo had already noticed that there was "nothing solid" in Enrique Marco's biography, but nothing stopped him from becoming the secretary of the CNT, the president of Amical and the recipient of the Cross of St. George, which the Catalan regional government gave him in recognition of his work in charge of the Federation of Fathers and Mothers of Students in Catalonia.

"Who is Enric Marco, really?" I ask him. "My childhood was straight out of a Dickens tale. I came into the world in the mental institution of Sant Boi de Llobregat, in what used to be called the insane asylum, because my mother was a patient there. I didn't get to enjoy her cuddles; she didn't even nurse me. They would take me to see her once a month."

"I hardly remember my father. He slept with an illiterate, alcoholic woman, who in the mornings would send me off to fetch a quart of firewater and make me read novels to her. That's how I discovered Cervantes, Dumas, Zola... I didn't understand much of what I read, but I had good diction and that's why they put me up on the podium to read to the rest of the class."

Where does his imposture end and the truth begin? "Under all the pretense, there's a real, live man," he says. "I may be an imposter, but I didn't lie about the fundamental things. I don't need to see a shrink. What crime have I committed to ask forgiveness for?"

One thing is for sure: Enric Marco Batlle, a megalomaniac with a huge ego in a small body, has spent much of his life making up imaginary scenes where he forged his heroic, made-up double persona of victim and resistor. He was determined to play the role of the Republican leader, and he delivered a brilliant performance. Because after so many years of living between reality and fiction, Enric Marco is an actor addicted to the stage.

As personal therapy, it might be good for him to go back to lecturing students about the dangers of Nazism. Of course, he'd have to start off by saying: "My name is Enric Marco and I was about to be born on April 14, the Day of the Republic. I've been an imposter, because I didn't fight with the Résistance and I never went to Flossenbürg or any other concentration camp, but I can tell you what the deportees went through..."