The Sheet 15 Postcards Against Forgetting

The Sheet 15 Postcards Against Forgetting
by Antoni J. Escanellas

(October 20, 2022)

The concentration camps of Mallorca told through postcards

SHEET 15 narrates the vicissitudes of a father imprisoned for a year and a half due to envy and suspicion

• Postcards, rings, pendants… handmade objects in the work camps.
• The worst moment in the recent history of Spain told in the first person.
• Zapatero, 41 years old, father of 7 children and guilty of the crime of… thinking.

Rarely is the Civil War presented to us in any other way than as a History lesson, in general terms. Like a movie, like something that happened a long time ago. Always in academic terms to give it rigor… But all that happened to people like us.

SHEET 15. POSTCARDS AGAINST FORGOTTEN (DOLMEN, 2022), by Toni J. Escanellas, gives us the opportunity to experience that episode in the first person. The family of the protagonist, Rogelio Fernández, kept for years the postcards that he wrote from the concentration camps in which he was (the Jaume I ship of Compañía Transmediterránea, the Can Mir wood warehouse, and the S’Aguila and Son camps). Granada, in Llucmajor), which today see the light in the form of a contextualized story.

Rogelio was accused by a colleague who longed for his position as manager of the shoe factory where they both worked. The accusation? Spread alarming leftist news among your circle. Rogelio, belonging to a business union, was placed in the crosshairs of the rebels who, on the same day of the uprising, arrested him. None of this could be proven and 10 months later the case was closed by the courts. Even so, they kept him on a journey through the labor camps for 7 more months. Almost 18 months full of effort, sorrow, longing and lost time. A time that he took advantage of to make with his hands needles, boxes of pins, rings, pipes, pendants and other objects for his relatives, which he sent them by mail and which also appear in the work.

Postcards (minted by the heavy stamp of Military Censorship) that relay the annulment of a person and the advancement of the new political ideals that would be maintained for 40 years in the country. Christmases, birthdays, illnesses, losses, that he had to live through the letters addressed to Rogelio Fernández Puigserver… a name that they tried to erase to turn him into SHEET 15.

A tribute (today, when history only looks at the deceased), to all those who had to continue their lives with their heads down and with a low profile in the face of the new society that loomed over the country. And yet they did not lose, for their loved ones, their smile, like that character of Guido (Roberto Benigni) in LA VITTA É BELLA.