SPAIN: Homecoming

• Share

Sentimental, fiesta-loving Barcelonians declared a holiday and thronged by the thousands to the waterfront one afternoon last week to welcome home a shipload of all but forgotten men: the last survivors of the ill-fated and ill-famed Blue Division that Franco sent off in 1941 to fight in Hitler's Wehrmacht on the Russian front. Captured by the Russians, the Spanish legionnaires had spent some ten years in Soviet forced-labor camps, were released and sent home as another installment in the Communist peace offensive.

As the small Liberian steamer Semiramis, chartered by the Red Cross, slipped into her berth in Barcelona's harbor, hundreds of hysterical relatives and friends leaped or shinnied aboard to embrace the returning soldiers, 248 in all.

Broadcasters took their microphones aboard to let all Spain eavesdrop on the reunion scenes. In the bustle and excitement, Photographer Carlos Perez de Rozas slumped to the ground, dead of a heart attack.

Glad to be back in Spain, the returnees were gladder still to be out of Russia. They painted a chilling picture of their years as prisoners, but insisted that the lot of the Russian peasant is but little better than that of the labor-camp inmate. Said Telesforo Moreno: "Communism? Communism is cabbage soup, hard work and every man for himself."

While the Spanish press made little mention of the fact, not all the Semiramis' passengers were Blue Division P.W.s. With them were four bitter young men with pinched faces and premature wrinkles who had been sent to Russia by the Republican government in the 19305 during the civil war.* Still missing and unaccounted for by the Soviet government: 5,247 others who went away at the same time, have never been heard from since.