L’Humanité, of course, why anything but humanity, I went to see the house where he was born in Barcelona, a quiet neighborhood on the side of a hill, with trees, a building from the beginning of the century number 19 on Calle Margarit, his tailor father owned a shop in the corner of his building, today there’s a bar, I drank a glass to the health of the young Spanish socialist who enlisted in the Republican army at the end of 1938, when the collapse was certain, when the Battle of the Ebro was lost and when Franco, Millán-Astray, Yaguë, and the others were hurtling towards Barcelona the invincible, propelling 500,000 soldiers and civilians onto the roads to exile, they crossed the border in Cerbère, in Le Perthus, in Bourg-Madame, many would end up going back to Spain or would choose exile in Mexico: Francesc “Franz” or “Paco” didn’t have that luck, he left Barcelona once and for all with his companions in arms, the Republic is defeated, Paco doesn’t lose his smile, he’s seventeen, he has hope, humor, joy, a passion for photography, and a little camera given to him by the son of a Soviet diplomat, a 1930 Leitz, thanks to which he published his first reports in the journal Juliol, when the Front was still holding up and the revolution was on the march, Francesc Boix will be the reporter of Mauthausen, I picture him in a striped uniform, in the terrible cold of Austria, for four winters, four long winters of suffering sickness and death that he fills by hiding photos, organizing the resistance, until the liberation — the Spanish liberated the camp themselves and hung a banner to welcome the Americans, Mauthausen and Gusen were overflowing with corpses, but so few compared to the 150,000 or 200,000 deaths in the camp complex, among them the massacred of the granite quarry, the gassed of Hartheim, those dead from hypothermia, immersed in freezing water for hours, the victims of medical experiments, the electrocuted, the hanged, the shot, the sick, the starving, the ones worn out by work, the ones asphyxiated in the gas vans, the ones beaten to death, according to the long list of the Nazi modus operandi, I was eighteen I didn’t know about Francesc Boix’s fate when I played at war in the Rivesaltes camp, I don’t remember dreaming of the deportations there, that of the Spaniards or that of the foreign Jews who passed through there, on their way to death, or that of the Harkis that France put there in 1963 some of whom stayed there for over seven years before permanent housing was found for them — in those rotting barracks that were falling to pieces one after the other, no plaque, no monument, no memorial, Francesc Boix the photographer of the Erkennungsdienst of Mauthausen, the very young man from Margarit Street in Barcelona, the witness at the Nuremberg trial, what was he thinking about, after he testified, back at the Grand Hotel, he saw Speer, Göring, or Kaltenbrunner in the accused box, he commented on the photos stolen from the SS, taken by the strange artist officer Paul Ricken, creator, besides the official camp photos, of almost a hundred self-portraits, full-face, in profile, in uniform, wearing civilian clothes, armed, on horseback — maybe it’s him Boix is thinking about, that January 27, 1946, lying on his bed in Room 408 of the Grand Hotel in Nuremberg, he’s thinking about one of Ricken’s photos, one of the most disturbing, where the Nazi snapped himself lying in the grass, arms alongside his body, in a suit, with a nice tie and shoes, in the same pose as the poor guys shot by the guards when, according to the Germans, they were trying to escape: Ricken has offered himself as an imitation of violent death, he arranged himself as the corpse he had photographed the day before, what could be the reason, Boix has copies with him, he looks at them, lying on his bed, he is preparing the second part of his testimony, what will the lawyer for the defense ask him? bah, wait and see, he thinks of Marie-Claude Vaillant-Couturier, so beautiful, he took her portrait for page one of Regards, they met in the wings, did they talk about Spain, who knows, Vaillant-Couturier wrote an article on the International Brigades, she too testifies about the camps, they say she went through the monumental entrance to Birkenau singing the Marseillaise, she is truly magnificent, I wonder if Boix was in love with her, if he desired her, his head was probably elsewhere, did he still remember his barracks in Rivesaltes, maybe the same one I slept in, almost fifty years later, I too in uniform, almost as young as he but destined for another fate: the idea of the documents in the briefcase came maybe from Boix the photographer from Barcelona, in any case the 296 images by Paul Ricken are carefully filed, digitized, in my suitcase, not the Mauthausen ones, but the ones from Graz, a sub-camp to which Ricken was transferred at the end of 1944, the report on the death march of the evacuation towards Ebensee, hundreds of dying people finished off with a bullet the minute they dropped from exhaustion, the photos of Ricken the austere are clean and artistic, he took his time, never a shaky blurred badly composed snapshot, just the opposite, a morbid body of work, self-conscious and precise, maybe he was trying to pierce a secret, Ricken the mad SS artist was condemned to life in prison at the Dachau trial in 1946, the 296 photos remained secret—296 close-ups, almost always framed the same way, where you see the killer’s face the instant he shoots, sometimes tense, sometimes relaxed, usually impassive, and the effect of the shot, at the same instant, a black cloud rising from the head of a man stretched out, a collection of executions documenting the massacre, how was Ricken able to convince the SS to let itself be photographed, I have no idea, Paul Ricken was a strange man, professor of art history member of the National Socialist Party from the very beginning, Boix and his Spanish comrades describe him as a pretty nice guy, not a brute, he never denounced his detainee “employees,” never manifested any violence, he was just a wee bit deranged, I think he was documenting his own moral collapse in his hundreds of self-portraits, he saw himself falling along with the world around him, falling into the bottomless night and it’s that night he photographed for a week during the death march, it’s a journey, an itinerary, like my own from the Rivesaltes camp all the way to the train to Rome, the disappearance of a man into a fascination with violence, his own disappearance and others — Francis Servain Mirković disintegrated in the same way Paul Ricken did, maybe I too wanted to document the journey, disappear and be reborn with the features of Yvan Deroy, if that’s possible, the train is moving forward, soon Bologna, then Florence and finally Rome, I suddenly have the strange sensation that something is going to happen in this car, something tragic like during the march of Paul Ricken the Nazi artist in eyeglasses, my neighbor is sleeping, his head back his mouth open the crossword-couple is conversing in low voices nothing new beneath the railroad sun temperature constant speed more or less constant so far as you can judge it on the black screen of the window where, from time to time, a sinister hamlet comes to life, we went to Rivesaltes by truck, old canvas-covered trucks that squealed whined rocked on their ancient shock absorbers, the drivers were also conscripts trained on-the-job in a barracks yard, their notions of driving couldn’t have been more military or abrupt, stand on the brakes on the descents, we were jostled like sacks on every turn, I felt these same sensations in other trucks in Slavonia or Bosnia except usually it was Vlaho driving, just as badly but with a smile, more than once the guy almost tossed us into the Neretva with our weapons and gear, stubborn as a mule it was as impossible to make him let go of the wheel as to teach him to use the engine for braking, for him shifting down would have meant demeaning himself, a kind of cowardliness, and even today, disabled, he descends Dalmatian hills at full tilt in a vehicle specially modified for his handicap, Vlaho the reckless Catholic wine-growing driver it’s been a long time since I saw him last, I confess that’s entirely my fault, too many memories, the shadow of Andrija, of our violent acts as conscripts, we’d talk about war, that’s for sure, I wonder if Francesc Boix liked to see his companions in deportation again, he probably didn’t want to be reminded of certain times, of the little daily base things of the concentration-camp world, you don’t survive for four years in Mauthausen without some low actions, without entering the grey zone of the privileged, of the