Isabel [host]: Cologne, Germany. 1975.

[“It was a time of pain, of death marches, of endless farewells, of brave resistance”]

Isabel: A Spanish singer takes the stage. He’s introduced as Pedro Faura, the singer of anti-Franco resistance.

[“It was a time of guerrilla action, to keep fighting.”]

[Audience shouting]

Isabel: The audience claps, chanting songs most of them don’t understand.

[“And before giving up your rifle you said: ‘we will die fighting.’ Let’s raise our weapons, because this war won’t end like this.”]

Isabel: Only he’ s not exactly Pedro Faura.

Man: Of course, it wasn’t me anymore. (Laughs) It may seem absurd to you, but I wasn’t myself at the time, although I really was myself (laughs).

[“Comrades, like them, let’s defend our land.”

[Applause]

Isabel: And his name isn’t the only false one in this story.

This is an episode about coincidences that cross Europe telling the History, with capital H, of this century. It’s the story of a father and son who lived intersecting lives, but from opposing beliefs. But they didn’t know that, because they never talked about it.

This is a story of silences, and it’s also a story of music.

I’m Isabel Cadenas Cañón. Welcome to De eso no se habla.

[Theme song]

Isabel: I’m going to ask you to put it in flight mode. Because…

Man: You’re right. Hold on…

Isabel: We can stop whenever you want, take a break…

Man: No, no, no, I’m good… Settings.

Isabel: Okay, here we go. So, first I’m going to ask you to introduce yourself.

Bernardo: Well, my name is Bernardo Fuster.

Isabel: I thought it would be fitting to know his real name to tell this story. Although that’s not really his real name, either. Fuster is his second surname.

Bernardo: The first surname is Feuerriegel. It’ s German.

Isabel: F E U E R R I E G E L – Feuerriegel. It’s a difficult surname.

Bernardo: Even the police spell my name wrong.

Isabel: What does it mean?

Bernardo: Fire lock. Fire bar, more than lock, that is… But bars, as in bars that close doors.

Isabel: Those bars that close doors explain quite well Bernardo’s relationship with the original Feuerriegel, his father. And they also have a lot to do with this story. When I ask him to tell me who his father was…

Bernardo: My father… Let’s see. Who was he?

Isabel: Bernardo doesn’t really know what to say to me.

Bernardo: It’s complicated because I know recent things about my father that I didn’t know at first, and they often clash with who I thought my father was, you know?

Isabel: So, for now, and to continue Bernardo’s story, we’re going to stick with who he thought his father was.

Bernardo: I can tell you what I knew, as a child, my father was. My father was a German who had been in the war and then, we don’t know why, ended up in Spain.

Isabel: As to his father’s work, young Bernardo also knew very little.

Bernardo: I had been told he was a music teacher, a music teacher in the German Summer camps during Franco’s time, that is…

Isabel: This wasn’t just anything: during Francoism, and until 1945, these Summer camps for German children in Spain were run directly by the German state through the Hitler Youth. Their aim was to indoctrinate children and young people in Nazi ideology.

Bernardo: Yes, my father was really… He was a Nazi. I knew he was a Nazi because he never denied it, you know?

Isabel: Bernardo grew up in a house on the outskirts of Ayora, in Valencia. It was a big house, with stone walls and lots of light. It would’ve been an ordinary village house if it weren’t for the fact that on the shelves were portraits of his father dressed as a Nazi soldier, swastikas and other things that Bernardo and his brothers found around the house.

Bernardo: A helmet like that, greenish grey, with… A little rough and… Normal, the typical German war helmet. And in a closet there were some uniforms, two uniforms, or one. A uniform and two caps. Which we also played with.

Isabel: But Bernardo doesn’t think his childhood was marked by his father’s ideology.

Bernardo: No, no, not at all.

Isabel: His childhood, he tells me, was marked by something else: music.

Bernardo: In my house there was always music.

Isabel: His father played various instruments and taught him old German songs.

Bernardo: I don’t really know the words, but the music was (humming).

Isabel: And sometimes, when he played the song “Lili Marleen” on the accordion, Bernardo saw him cry.

Bernardo: “Lili Marleen” is a song that is the essence of defeat. It’s about a woman who’s waiting, leaning on a streetlamp that now barely gives any light, because Germany is absolutely destroyed. And she’s waiting for someone who isn’t going to come. And that image of the dim streetlamp, the woman… If you’ve lived through a war… Not in my case, but someone who’s lived through it has to cry.

[“Cities stay in the memory, with sad eyes and crimson lips. In the light of a streetlamp the bride is still alive. Lili Marleen waits for you in Berlin”]

Isabel: Bernardo doesn’t remember when he started singing, but he remembers well his first guitar. He even gave it a name, and it was a name that foreshadowed many things: he called it Revolution 3.

Bernardo: They were really upset about that at my house. “The Revolution thing”, they said, “But come on, why do you have to mess up your guitar? Why ruin it by writing that?” And from there on, “Why do you paint flowers on your jeans?”

Isabel: His parents had reason to worry: that boy who had learned to play the guitar with a song by Luis Aguilé…

Bernardo: Terrible song, that said… (Singing) “I know so much about love that I can give advice.”

Isabel: Soon he began to listen to singers who were banned in Franco’s Spain.

Bernardo: Through music I was already moving closer to the stance that was being sung by the singer-songwriters at the time, right? Mainly Paco Ibáñez.

Isabel: And so, a teenager raised by his father to love music transforms, through music, into the opposite of him. In spite of the signs, or perhaps precisely because of them, his parents try to lead him along the right path. And the right path, for his family, seemed to be set by the legacy of José Antonio Primo de Rivera, founder of the Falange (the fascist party). His father, for example, brings him along to political events, like the time in 1969 when he took him to the inauguration of a statue in Valencia.

Bernardo: A statue to José Antonio was inaugurated on José Antonio Avenue. So my father took me to the inauguration. At the end of the act, of the speeches and all that, “Cara al sol” (anthem of the fascist party) was sung and I sang the “Cara al sol” because I said, everybody’s singing it, so I sang it.

Isabel: Or like when his parents enrolled him in the Círculos de José Antonio, seminars that were held to study the work and legacy of the founder of the Falange. Only those seminars didn’t exactly help to take him down the path his parents expected.

Bernardo: Which, well… They miscalculated.

Isabel: In those days, the Círculos de José Antonio were one of the few places where you could talk openly about politics, so many anti-Franco organizations sent activists there to infiltrate and try to recruit the youngest.

Bernardo: Of course, because these kids, who were a little older than us, asked you some questions and put doubt in your mind. They explained it to you and you said, “Fuck, you’re right.” I think within two months I ended up in an anarchist group.

Isabel: But Bernardo didn’t stay in that group. Only two years after singing “Cara al Sol” at the inauguration of the statue of José Antonio, Bernardo had already gone through several groups forbidden by the dictatorship:

Bernardo: Then I went to the Young Communists, of the Communist Party. And I had just joined the pro-FRAP committees.

Isabel: The pro-FRAP committees were the local committees of what later became the Revolutionary Anti-Fascist and Patriotic Front, known as the FRAP. It’s quite difficult to define what the FRAP was.

Bernardo: You’re right. Nowadays it’s very difficult to define.

Isabel: But we’re going to try.

Bernardo: The FRAP was an anti-Franco organization…

Isabel: Which was founded in the 1970’s, bringing together several organizations.

Bernardo: Although it was actually controlled by the Communist-Marxist-Leninist Party.

Isabel: Their actions ranged from the famous “saltos” (surprise actions) and the creation and dissemination of propaganda, to robberies, muggings and even several attacks: they’re accused of having killed up to five policemen and civil guards, of which the FRAP takes credit for three.

Bernardo: Yeah, well, it also entered straight into direct attacks on members of the repressive forces, right?

Isabel: Many of its militants were arrested. Three of them were executed on September 27, 1975, along with two members of ETA, in “the last executions of Francoism.” These executions created such a wave of protest around the world that they are considered a turning point for Francoism to not continue after the death of Franco.

But we’ll talk about that later. Now, let’s go back to 1971: those pro-FRAP committees have just been created and Bernardo has just joined one of them.

And one of the first actions in Valencia was to knock down the statue of José Antonio, the one in front of which Bernardo had sung “Cara al Sol”. That was also the first action Bernardo participated in. While his counterparts tied the statue to a bus and brought it down, Bernardo took care of the role he had been assigned.

Bernardo: What I had to do was cause a crash with two cars and toss out some pamphlets.

Isabel: The police quickly arrived.

Bernardo: They started shooting into the air and I heard the “pop, pop” of the guns. We all ran off and that was it. The statue was left on the ground.

Isabel: When he returned home, his father was watching the news.

Bernardo: Emilio Romero comes on talking about the event. “Some terrorists, some vandals, have pulled down and…” Giving a totally inflammatory speech, right?

Isabel: And Bernardo said nothing..

Bernardo: I said, “I’ll shut up because I can’t say anything.” And that was a brutal silence on my part. Silence was also a form of going underground. Besides, they taught you that in the organization, that is, not… “Be very careful with what you say everywhere, because you can’t trust anyone, not even your family, so don’t trust anyone”.…

[Beep]

[“Where today lives silence, tomorrow there will be dawn, tomorrow there will be dawn”]

Isabel: In this story, the other side of silence is always music. While all this was happening, Bernardo began writing his own songs, and the same year they tore down the statue of José Antonio, he and several friends invited Paco Ibáñez to sing in their village, Ayora. They put an ox cart as a stage, borrowed sound equipment from the church and Paco Ibáñez, who had just arrived from Paris, sang.

Bernardo: I was there, and I saw how people came in and stood there with their mouths open. And of course, that was exciting.

Isabel: After the concert, his friends and Paco Ibáñez went to Bernardo’s house to keep playing. That day his parents weren’t home and Bernardo had taken the opportunity to hide all the remains of swastikas and all the pictures of his father dressed as a soldier.

Bernardo: I did put that away because I thought, well, going into a house and finding a picture of a soldier in a Nazi uniform is intense.

Isabel: As Bernardo was the host, it was his turn to sing.

Bernardo: It was scary, singing in front of Paco Ibáñez. Fuck, he was God to me (laughs).

Isabel: He sang “De madrugada,” (At Dawn) one of the songs he had written, a tribute to the militants who had to go underground.

Bernardo: It said “At dawn, when the sky is red and the path of my life is already marked, I’ll take all the love you’ve given me and will go wake up the sleeper.” That was the beginning. Yes, yes.

Isabel: That day, as he listened to Paco Ibáñez sing, as he himself sang in front of Paco Ibáñez, Bernardo decided that he wanted to be a professional singer.

Bernardo: “Come on, where do I sign? I want to be this.”

Isabel: But it wasn’t that easy. That first action with the statue of José Antonio had been followed by many others: mainly, setting up printing presses in clandestine apartments, making propaganda against the regime and distributing it. He was already so deeply involved with the FRAP that the police were looking for him in various places.

Bernardo: In Valencia, in Madrid and in Zaragoza, also, in Asturias, everywhere.

Isabel: So Bernardo had to start living in hiding. And he thought the safest place for that was his grandmother’s house in Madrid.

Bernardo: It was a house that belonged to a totally Francoist family. It was empty because my grandmother had gone to live in a village.

Isabel: Without explaining much to his parents, he got the key and hid there. That house was on General Martinez Campos Street. It was a wealthy neighborhood and his grandmother, a well-heeled lady. Nobody could imagine that that well-mannered grandson from Valencia would keep, in the basement of the building, suitcases full of FRAP propaganda. The doorman of the building, a retired civil guard, helped him carry those suitcases up and down. Bernardo told him they were second-hand books that he was going to sell in the Rastro. And the doorman never suspected him.

Bernardo: No, he never really knew anything about it. I mean, I was a young gentleman.

Isabel: But being hidden meant that Bernardo couldn’t be a singer, or at least couldn’t sing in public because they were looking for him. For the first time in his life, music and politics, which for him had always gone hand in hand, were in opposition to each other.

Bernardo: I had accepted that the struggle was above being a singer. I said, “If the Republic comes, I’ll sing in public. Until then, no.”

Isabel: So Bernardo decided to sing in a different way: he recorded a tape with no name and passed it on to his friends, underhand, as was done then with tapes that were forbidden by the regime. It circulated so much that one day a friend approached him and offered him a tape to support a strike. It cost five pesetas.

Bernardo: I said “okay, okay” and bought it from him. I put it on at home and flipped out, because it was my tape. And I said, “Fuck, it’s really gotten around, it’s already been distributed.” And that also reaffirmed me as a singer. “Well, I’m going to be a singer, the singer that nobody’s going to know, but at least people are going to hear it,” right?

Isabel: His tape reached the FRAP’s leaders. One day they arranged to see him in Madrid to tell him they’d listened to it, they liked it, and they wanted to make him a proposal.

Bernardo: “Do you want to be a singer abroad, in Europe, to sing at rallies and so on? Because it’s very useful for us.”

Isabel: That proposal brought together, once again, politics and music.

Bernardo: The two things came together. I mean, I could still be active in the anti-Franco resistance and I could sing in public.

Isabel: Although, of course, singing in public meant no longer being Bernardo.

Bernardo: They told me, “Well, give yourself a name because you can’t call yourself this anymore.” That’s when I said, “Well, Pedro Faura.”

Isabel: Pedro Faura was a name that, this time, he would be known by in many places. Bernardo was 23 years old. He doesn’t remember how he told his parents, but he knows it wasn’t in person. Since he had joined the FRAP, he barely spoke to them.

Bernardo: My parents knew I was wanted by the police in half of Spain. They knew because, obviously, at some point they went to my house to ask. And so I think I didn’t have to say much.

Isabel: And so, overnight, he took the few things he had and left. Like those militants he had dedicated the song “De madrugada” to a few years earlier, Bernardo changed his name and country and went underground.

Bernardo: If I think about it, I made a song for myself two years before.

[Comrade who goes underground. Another name, another house, other people, but always the same struggle. Here are your streets, your friends, comrades, your long years of struggle, they stay here with us. But you know very well that only by fighting will we not be defeated. We will win!

“At dawn, when the sky is still red and the path of my life is already marked”]

Bernardo: Yes, that’s what they called me, yes (laughs). The FRAP singer.

[“I’ll take all the love you’ve given me and will go wake up the sleeper”]

Bernardo: I became a singer… I was going to say professional, no, I became a subversive singer and participated in practically, not all but many, of the rallies and events that were held throughout Europe against the dictatorship.

[“Raise your fist, comrades, I want to unleash it now. The time has come to give the people what’s theirs. Raise your fist, comrades, raise your fist, I’m on my way”]

Bernardo: First a German singer sang and people clapped a lot for him. Then they would introduce you, “Well, now Pedro Faura from the Spanish resistance is going to sing,” and the theater went wild.

[“The fascists who judge us today will be judged tomorrow”]

Bernardo: It was non-stop. I mean, they gave me the list, “tomorrow you go to Milan, the day after tomorrow you have Berlin, then you have another town in Germany, and then you have Denmark, and then…” I mean, I have the agenda from that year at home and I don’t… I look at it and say “this isn’t true, I mean, it can’t be, how am I going to go from Stockholm to Frankfurt?” Well, I went from Stockholm to Frankfurt.

Bernardo: In that era, especially after the executions, the support in Europe for the resistance was brutal. And at that time, because of what the FRAP meant, because of the three people who were shot, well, the support was brutal in Europe, right?

[“Laborers: Spain, hill by hill, is a land of the poor and the working class. Do not let the rich eat it, laborers!”]

Bernardo: I was convinced that what we were doing was going to end the dictatorship.

[“Thirty years of fascism, death, terror and prison. We will break the chains with our revolution, comrade!”]

Bernardo: The armed struggle, well, yes, it had been being said all along, right? I didn’t know at the time how much it meant, what happened next, you know? That is, the line of directly attacking the forces of repression as if they were occupying forces. It created a strong internal discussion, because it was a totally reckless line, without any popular support, without any logic… Well, without any support.

[“We are the workers who, armed with a rifle, will free Spain from oppression and suffering”]

Bernardo: I know the reason I left was because I didn’t agree with this line. I left in ’76. I have the exact date written down here in a notebook… It has to be in this part. July 25th. July 25, 1976, which was a Sunday. I put it here. It says “Goodbye FRAP.” (laughs).

Isabel: When he returns to Spain, Bernardo goes to visit his parents in his village, in Ayora. He hasn’t set foot in the family home in years and is a little nervous. He doesn’t know if his parents will ask him about his life abroad, about his concerts against the regime. Just in case, he prepares himself to talk about it.

Bernardo: Then, of course, I was preparing myself, “well, when they bring it up, I’ll talk about it”.

Isabel: But the days go by and the questions don’t come.

Bernardo: I was amazed. I said, but won’t they ask me anything? And no, it’s as if nothing had happened. No, they never asked me. It wasn’t talked about.

Isabel: I asked Bernardo why he thinks they never said anything to him, but he didn’t know quite what to answer.

Bernardo: It’s something I hadn’t thought about much, you know? I mean, why doesn’t anything come up, this confrontation? I hadn’t thought about it.

Isabel: It was as if at that time Bernardo didn’t have time to think about his parents’ silences. He had enough with his own.

Bernardo: Of course, yes, there’s a very strong identity crisis after 1976, for years. I wondered: , who am I? What do I do? How do I recompose all that ideology I had? In fact, it took me a long time to tell people that I was Pedro Faura.

Isabel: Bernardo didn’t know what to do with those years of activism and, above all, he didn’t know what to do with Pedro Faura. But he did know that he wanted to keep singing. In 1979, three years after his return, he forms the band Suburbano with his friend Luis Mendo and he writes songs like this one…

[“One cold morning Carlos III arrived, with a distinguished air he took off his hat, very slowly he got off his horse and with a deep voice he said to his servant: ‘There it is, the Puerta de Alcalá’. There it is, there it is watching time go by”]

Isabel: Or this one…

[“That’s why there are commanders, prophets in the pay of temple and knife who sell eternal values and die because, no matter what, the Earth moves.”]

Isabel: Or this one.

[“Makinavaja, Makipoeta, the last remaining crook, the last prophet. Makinavaja, Makipoeta, the last remaining crook, the last prophet”]

Isabel: At the same time, Bernardo started to work as a musician with other groups: he plays with Vainica Doble, with Joaquín Sabina, with Luis Eduardo Aute. Some of his colleagues know that he was a member of FRAP, that organization that chose armed struggle, and they joke about it. But none of them know that he had been Pedro Faura, “the FRAP singer.” This is Susana Martins, his partner for the past 27 years:

Susana: I begin to have a relationship with Bernardo at work, because we were both musicians with Luis Eduardo Aute. And the only thing I knew about Bernardo was that he had been “a terrorist”. That’s what his fellow band members said. They said, “No, be careful, this one has been a terrorist. Ha, ha, ha.” Period. He never talked about this. When we started to have another kind of relationship, it was a subject we didn’t talk about. It wasn’t talked about.

Isabel: It would take many years for Bernardo to break that silence. It was in 2006, when a friend organized an exhibition about singer-songwriters and asked his permission to exhibit one of his albums as Pedro Faura. Thirty years had needed to go by since his return to Spain, and he needed to receive public recognition to start talking about that part of his past.

But facing the past never comes alone.

In those years, Bernardo began to go more often to his childhood home, where no one lived anymore. His father had died in 1995 and his mother in 2009. The few times he went to visit them while they were alive, Bernardo says that he used to swim in the village pool, eat paella, and at the table they’d talk about the weather, or about music, or about the village gossip, those topics that families talk about when they don’t want to talk about something. When the house became empty, Bernardo began to go there on weekends or on vacation. And there, exploring closets, opening drawers and trunks, he came across that helmet he played with as a child, with the portraits of that military father adorned with swastikas… And he also found things he had never seen before.

Bernardo: Well, one day I find a huge photo album, I mean, it was a meter wide and half a meter high, you know? With photos pasted in it, everything really well organized. And the cover, which was still… It was also made of leather, embossed leather, and it had a swastika on it.

Isabel: Bernardo showed me the pictures in that album.

Bernardo: There are all kinds of photos.

Isabel: They were pictures of events in different German schools in Spain.

Bernardo: A children’s choir who have surely sung a lot of songs onstage. In the background you can see a swastika with an eagle and a lot of flags surrounding the choir.

Isabel: Flags…

Bernardo: Nazi flags, clearly, with swastikas. Yes, yes.

Isabel: But also of other acts where you see Nazi soldiers parading through Madrid…

Bernardo: For example, this one is very interesting because at the bullfights sometimes the German forces marched like one more part. You can see it here, in Las Ventas.

Isabel: Or Himmler himself on his visit to Spain in 1940.

Bernardo: This is Himmler.

Isabel: There they were, before his eyes, the long-denied ties between Francoism and Nazism.

Bernardo: Parading through Madrid…

Isabel: Discovering this album, Bernardo is surprised. He doesn’t think it’s normal for a simple music teacher to have photos of so many events, of so many parades, of so many people from the highest Nazi ranks.

Bernardo: Well, this… He wasn’t a teacher. Or rather, maybe he was a teacher, but a bit more than a teacher, right?

Isabel: And there, in the last pages of that album, was the confirmation of his suspicions.

Bernardo: I found an invitation. “The Hitler Youth invites you to the concert to be given by the Youth Orchestra of whatever… Signed, the head of the Youth group in Spain, Bernhard Feuerriegel,” and I said “holy shit.” My father was the head of the Hitler Youth in Spain.

Isabel: Bernardo understood that his father had not been just an ordinary soldier who had fought in World War II, nor a simple music teacher who taught classes at the German School, but rather that he had an important position within the Nazi establishment in Spain: between 1944 and 1945, right at the end of the war, he was responsible for the indoctrination of all German children in Spain. And there were many: since World War II began, the German population in Spain had tripled.

There are things that only begin to make sense when you discover a piece of the past you didn’t know about. A secret, a silence, tears welling up when listening to a song… But there are also pieces of the past that, when revealed, create, above all, new questions.

Bernardo: How does the album end? With a newspaper clipping that says: “People the Allies want returned by the Spanish government because they belong to the National Socialist Party.” Then I see the list and my father is on it.

Isabel: Hitler surrendered on May 5, 1945. After the end of World War II, the Allies feared Spain would become a Nazi refuge. They had every reason to believe it: seeing defeat ever closer, Hitler sent thousands of party members to Spain to carry out all kinds of missions. Spain was the neutral country where the largest amount of Nazis took refuge. That’s why the Allies made several lists in which they asked the Spanish government to expel from the country those Germans suspected of belonging to or collaborating with Nazism.

Bernhard Feuerriegel appears on the third of these lists.

According to the newspaper clipping from ABC, he should have embarked in Bilbao on September 1, 1946 and left Spain forever.

But we know that didn’t happen. The last director of the Hitler Youth in Spain stayed in the country, got married, and had Bernardo and his brothers.

How did he do it? Bernardo started to investigate. And he discovered two things. On the one hand, he began to understand a part of our country’s history that today is still hidden: the relationship between Francoism and Nazism. At the same time, he realized there were a number of coincidences linking his life and his father’s life.

Bernardo: Well, look, the first coincidence is that when the war ends, he is wanted by the Allies and during… on his side. And on my side, during Franco’s regime, I’m wanted by the Political-Social Brigade, by the police.

Isabel: Bernardo discovered that his father had managed to stay in Spain thanks to a network of Nazi concealment. The network was run by Clara Stauffer Loewe, a Spanish woman, daughter of Germans, who was also head of the Sección Femenina [the women’s branch of the fascist party]. Her network helped more than 800 Nazis stay in Spain. And for this, Clara Stauffer did whatever was necessary: she hid them in the homes of Spanish families close to the regime, provided them with work contracts in friendly companies, obtained false documents…

Bernardo: The second coincidence is that he has to change his name, I have to change my name.

Isabel: Bernardo found the false document the network had given his father: they had invented a new life for him so that he could go unnoticed.

Bernardo: Yes.

Isabel: In that new life his name was Bernardo Fernández.

Bernardo: Yes, Bernardo Fernández, yes.

Isabel: Can you read this whole document to me, please?

Bernardo: Well, yes, it’s a document, a card issued by the Falange in Madrid in 1941, when he was in Poland. His name is Bernardo Fernández, born in Tarragona, single, profession mechanical expert, and he lives at 64 José Antonio Avenue in Madrid. Issued in Madrid, 1941, signed, Miguel Primo de Rivera.

Isabel: The next coincidence is that, 30 years apart, father and son hid in the same house in Madrid. Clara Stauffer’s network hid Bernhard in the house of a lady close to the regime. There, Bernhard met that lady’s daughter and they fell in love. A few years later they married and had Bernardo and his brothers. So the lady who had hidden Bernhard became Bernardo’s grandmother, and her house is that house where Bernardo took refuge when the police were looking for him.

Bernardo: It was on Martinez Campos Street. Now 25, previously 21, I think. I was also in hiding in that house. These are things you say, fuck, what’s going on here? I mean, it’s a little bit Twilight Zone (laughs).

Isabel: Bernhard Feuerriegel lived for four years with a fake name. Bernardo doesn’t really know how the process went, but the Allies returned his passport after considering he hadn’t committed blood crimes.

Bernardo: My father was given, once and for all, the German passport again with his real name, and… He began to live as a normal citizen and traveled to Germany and traveled everywhere.

Isabel: Of the 1,600 Germans named by the Allies, Spain only deported 265. In our country there were many Bernhard Feuerriegels: Nazis who lived quiet lives, without having to give explanations, without being persecuted. According to what Bernardo has discovered, the only time his father seemed to be in danger was during those four years he lived under a fake name. While he was hiding in a farmhouse in the Enguera mountains in Valencia, very close to Ayora, another one of those coincidences that impress Bernardo and seem to weave this story together happened.

Bernardo: Ah well, wait, I don’t know if I’ve told you about the maquis (anti-Franco Spanish guerrillas). When he’s hiding there’s a group of maquis who try to kidnap him. In my case, many years later, I get to know people from that guerrilla group, who were in those mountains…

Isabel: And he was so impressed that he wrote a song for them that became very well known.

Bernardo: If you write “maquis song, Pedro Faura,” a ton of websites come up.

Isabel: Twenty years after writing this song, when his father died, Bernardo found out that the guerrilla group he had made the song for was the same guerrilla group that had tried to kill his father.

[“And they went up into the mountains, leaving Ayora at their feet, as far as the mountains of Enguera, fighting as far as Teruel. Fallen comrade, bring your courage and the rifle, for the blood you shed can never die”]

Bernardo: Of course, then you think, if that group had taken my father, they would’ve killed him and I wouldn’t have been born. It may seem like a novel, but it’s real.

[“Nobody leave your weapons, because this is not how a war ends. Let’s go up to the mountains, let’s defend our land!”]

Isabel: That song is the song Pedro Faura sang at the beginning of this episode, in Cologne, Germany, in 1975.

[Crowd shouting]

Isabel: That song was also a perfect way to end this episode: a story about the parallel lives of a father and son that ends as it began, closing a circle.

But this is not a story of parallel lives. The coincidences of Bernardo’s life and his father’s do not indicate lives that repeat, but rather opposite lives. Bernardo was persecuted by a dictatorship. His father was protected by that dictatorship, because he had participated in another one.

As I edited this episode and listened to Bernardo’s hesitations and doubts about his father, I tried to understand why he had never confronted him about his past. So I went to visit him to ask him.

Isabel: I’m having a hard time finishing this story… Because I don’t understand why you never asked your father anything. Have you thought about this?

Bernardo: Yes, why didn’t I ask him? I did… I thought about it. But what I also don’t know is why I didn’t ask him anything in particular. You see, it’s as if there had been a kind of pact of silence, of two silences. That is, I don’t tell you anything about what I did and you don’t tell me anything. And that’s how we can hold on and not have a confrontation that would’ve happened, obviously, and also been definitive, right?

Isabel: But you don’t really need someone to be alive to confront them. I asked him if he would do it now, after all he had discovered about his past.

Bernardo: Well… Yes, I could ask him, but I don’t think his participation was that important. I’m not saying this to excuse him, huh? But I think he was someone, let’s say, totally from the middle or even the lower rank, who at a certain moment, when Germany was already losing the war, was sent here to a place where everything was already lost.

Isabel: As we kept talking, I thought of the generation of Germans the same age as Bernardo, that generation that confronted their parents for having been complicit, by their actions or their silence, in the Holocaust. And of how the “I didn’t get blood on my hands,” the “I didn’t know anything,” were no longer valid as an excuse. I thought of an entire generation that asked their parents where they were and what they did, and in what way they were complicit. And I told this to Bernardo.

Bernardo: The complicity was present in most Germans, of course. Obviously, in people who were from the party much more because they had more information, right? Than the people on the street. But… I don’t know exactly. I haven’t asked myself that question very deeply. Maybe I’ll ask it now (laughs).

Isabel: As I returned home, I thought that Bernardo and I don’t live in Germany. There they even have a word for that process in which society asked itself about the responsibility that each person, each collective, each institution had in Nazism. And I thought that here, in our country, we had never done that process. Here we had rather the opposite: that agreed upon silence between Bernardo and his father was not just something between Bernardo and his father, but something much more collective. It was the silence that made Bernardo hide the songs of Pedro Faura. And maybe it was the same silence that made Bernardo not want to do this podcast and I had to convince him. That silence which, we were told, it was much easier to live with.

When I got home, Bernardo had sent me this message.

Bernardo: Hi Isabel. Look, I’ve been thinking for a while about some of the issues that have come up while we spoke. I had a series of doubts and I thought, this has to be for a reason. And in the end, look, I’ve come to a conclusion. In Spain there was a silence, a silence for which a series of things could no longer be asked about. It was much better to turn the page. So… This brought up, for me, well, that all my time as Pedro Faura became something that hadn’t existed, right? It wasn’t… The usual thing wasn’t to ask. The normal thing was to ignore it. And that’s why I’m re-recording some of these songs now. It’s really a way of recovering that silence that had disastrous consequences because we were denied a part of History. And that’s what I’ve come to, I don’t know if this reflection is of any use to you. Thank you.

Isabel: I’m Isabel Cadenas Cañón and we don’t talk about that… Or else we do.

The production, the script and the editing of this episode have been done by me. Laura Casielles is our text editor, and Vanessa Rousselot, our script editor. Our editing assistant is Paula Morais, who assists us in almost everything else too. The sound design is by me and Marcos Salso, and our sound studio is Isolé División Sonora. Laura Casielles is in charge of communication. The illustration of this episode is by Carmen Cáceres and our theme is by Alva Noto and Ryuichi Sakamoto. And the rest of the songs in this episode are, of course, by Bernardo Fuster, either as Suburbano or Pedro Faura.

Thanks to Emilio Silva for putting us in touch with Bernardo and to Manuel Maroto for his help in the research of this story. Thanks to all the people who have listened to this episode and helped us to make it better: we have added your names in the acknowledgements section of our website.

If you want to know more about Bernardo’s story, in the extra materials section of our website we have included photos, videos, songs and more.

If you have a story of silences, talk to us. On our website, www.deesonosehabla.com, you can subscribe to our newsletter, listen to the rest of the episodes or send us a voice or text message, or an email. We are also on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook and you know how much we love to talk. If you liked this episode, recommend it to your friends and subscribe to our channels. You can even leave us a rating.

De eso no se habla is produced in the proud neighborhood of Lavapiés, in Madrid, thanks to the support of PRX – Public Radio Exchange – and the Google Podcasts Creator Program.

We’ll be back in two weeks.

Thanks for listening.

[Guitar chords]

Bernardo (singing): “Break the silence and throw your song to the wind, there are no chains to silence the voice of your feelings. If you do not sing, companion, you see death cornering you. A song that is not for everyone, is neither song nor hope”.

Bernardo: I don’t remember the third verse.

Isabel: What a song that is, huh? For this story.

Bernardo: Yes, the truth is, look, that’s the first song we did as Suburbano. You can say, and why that one? Well, we started the group and we didn’t have any songs and I said, “Well, I can make one”. And I did that song which is the first song that Suburbano recorded, “Rompe a golpes el silencio” (Break the Silence). I still hadn’t broken it at that time.

Isabel: Wow, Bernardo, are you really telling me this?

Bernardo: Yes, yes.