Ángel Mejías Zamorano was born on the morning of March 29, 1892 on Viera street, in the municipality of La Orotava. Son of José Mejías Rosa and Nieva Zamorano Villar, he had seven siblings and a movie life. A political, social, human and war drama that took place between the end of the 19th century and the mid-60s of the 20th century. Ángel was an emigrant and deported, the Gringo and the Canary, a labor leader and an anarcho-syndicalist, prisoner 5,037 of the Nazi camp in Mauthausen and one more member of the Tenberg commando, one released by US troops and a Spanish painter in France, a militant of the CNT in the distance and a exile who died in a Toulouse hospital.
It will soon be 131 years since Mejías was born in La Orotava, from where he left when he was very young to settle with his family in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, on San Juan Bautista street, where his father worked as a merchant. His story was rescued from oblivion, after years of research, by Pedro Medina and Fabián Hernández Romero, author of the blog Deported Canariesmain source of this text.
Ángel’s life turns upside down when he was barely 18 years old. On October 28, 1910, when his father died. She leaves behind a widow and eight children, who must make their way without parental support. his penultimate son emigrates to Argentina on an unknown date, “but everything indicates that he left very young,” says Hernández Romero.
He establishes himself in Buenos Aires and there he enters contact with the labor movement and the militancy policy. He joined the Buenos Aires Workers’ Federation and spent a good part of his youth in years of democracy in Argentina, “which were cut short on September 6, 1930, when José Félix Uriburu led a coup that overthrew the constitutional government of Hipólito Yrigoyen and established a dictatorship and a repressive regime. At 38, Ángel’s life is turned upside down again.
Argentine dictatorship
Hernández Romero details that “with the military dictatorship of Uriburu, martial law was decreed and many anarchist militants were clandestinely executed. Political leaders were imprisoned, censorship was imposed and universities were intervened. The repression also fell on the Creole anarchists and against European militants, using deportations to their countries of origin” as a way to eliminate potential opponents. Ángel was arrested and deported to Europe along with other outside militants.
It is believed that Mejías returned to Tenerife in 1930 and, after so many years in Argentina, he began to be known among his friends under the nickname of Gringo. He worked in the tobacco industry, “most likely as a cigar roller or cigar maker, a highly relevant labor and economic activity in Canary Islands during the first third of the 20th century”, explains Hernández. The militancy also came back with him to his native Tenerife and he soon became a leader of the Union of Tobacco Workers of Both Sexes (Sotas) of Santa Cruz de Tenerife. In September 1935, the tobacco workers in the capital went on strike. On the 28th of that month, there was a stoppage of activity in the tobacco factories, which provoked a police reaction, following orders from the Civil Government, which included the arrest of eight Tenerife tobacco leaders, among which was the Gringo. Along with him, the president of the Sotas union, Eduardo Sanjuán Castro, and other tobacco union leaders were also arrested.
La Gaceta de Tenerife published a piece of news about this strike on September 29, 1935, in which it stated that “by the provincial Labor delegate, and in agreement with the civil Governor, the proposed strike movement has been declared illegal.” And by order of “the first civil authority”, the police “proceeded to the union closure».
Since Sotas was not considered a professional association, it was considered that it did not have the right to perform union representation, for which reason the judge was asked to order its dissolution. To the arrested labor leaders They were fined 2,000 pesetas., a very high amount for the time and which corresponded to a very good monthly salary. In November 1935, Franco received a payroll of 2,429 pesetas from the Payroll of the Army, as chief of the Central General Staff.
That arrest was a first notice and barely ten months later, on July 17, 1936, Franco leaves Santa Cruz de Tenerife for Gran Canaria. On the 18th, the army rose up against the Government of the Republic in various parts of the Peninsula and Franco left Gran Canaria that day on the Dragon Rapide for Morocco to take command of the troops in Africa.
Another coup shakes the life of Ángel who, given his record as a trade unionist, is arrested. According to Hernández, “it is likely that he went through the floating prison, if he was arrested in the first moments, but it is known with certainty that he was imprisoned in Fyffes prison. There is no record that he was subjected to any trial, so he would add to the huge number of government detainees that crowded those halls of Fyffes ».
Prisoner Redemption
In August 1938, the Gringo was part of the exchange of a hundred prisoners made from Fyffes with the Republican side. The exchanged group arrives in Barcelona in September. Ángel Mejías was 46 years old at that time, “so it is unlikely that he was sent to the war front.” In 1939 the Civil War ended and Ángel went to France, where he “possibly entered a refugee camp in the southeast.” In a world immersed in World War II, tranquility and freedom once again lasted very little for the Gringo: the Nazis invaded France in June 1940. The exact date of his arrest is unknown, but “if there is evidence that in 1941 is already imprisoned in the Stalag IX-A prisoner of war camp in Ziegenhain, in Germany. That camp housed prisoners, the majority of whom were Poles, Italians, Soviets and French, among whom was François Mitterrand, who would later become president of France.
«Few Spaniards arrived there and Ángel is the only canary known to have passed through Stalag IX-A», explains Fabián Hernández. From there he was transferred to the feared Mauthausen concentration camp, in Austria, on April 27, 1941. He was part of a contingent of 28 Spaniards. He was 49 years old and the oldest deportee in the group. In Mauthausen he was assigned the number 5037.
He mauthausen memorial recalls on its website that since the opening of the camp in August 1938 and its liberation, it housed some 190,000 prisoners. There, more than 90,000 people died beaten, shot, killed by injection, frozen, gassed (about 10,200), sick, malnourished or exhausted due to “their exploitation as labor, without any scruple and accompanied by ill-treatment, as well as such as insufficient food rations, inadequate clothing and a complete lack of medical care”.
On January 25, 1943, south of the Austrian city of Linz, the Ternberg prisoner command was created, which owes its name to the small town where it was located. The objective of this detachment of workers was to build a hydroelectric dam on the Enns River, to supply power to the Nazi factories. Mejías worked for a time with that command before joining Mauthausen again and, later, Gusen.
Despite the extremely difficult living conditions, mistreatment and arbitrary executions, Ángel Mejías managed to survive the Nazi horror and attended, on May 5, 1945, the liberation of Mauthausen by United States troops. At the age of 53, the Gringo regained his freedom after almost four years in Nazi camps. Of the 28 deported together with Mejías from Stalag IX-A in 1941, “14 were assassinated, 11 managed to survive, and their situation is unknown for 3 of them.” The Gringo goes to France, a country where he remains until his death. He never returned to Spain. He settled in Toulouse, where there was an important Spanish republican exile community, and there he was known as Ángel, el Canario. He earned his living as a painter and did not abandon his militancy either, since he collaborated with the Spanish Federation of Deportees and Political Interns.
He died on January 20, 1965 at the age of 72, at the Purpan Hospital in Toulouse. In March of that year, in number 169 of the newspaper Espoir, the Bulletin of the VI Regional Union of the CNT of France, published in his host city, an obituary was published, in which one can read: «Returned to France at end of the war, with broken health, stoically endured the calamities of that long post-war period, in frank moral and physical restoration. Lately he had achieved a relative stability that would allow him to leave work with some peace of mind. It was the just reward for his long life of vicissitudes. But the aftermath of the Nazi blow would not take long to turn so much joy into a vain illusion. Suddenly, swift as lightning, there was the terrible shock. A fulminant paralysis would keep him in a semi-comatose state for more than a month, followed by all the consequent complications, one of which would destroy the last redoubt of his energy. May this serve as a communication to so many of your friends on this and the other shore of the Atlantic Ocean».
The work of Fabián Hernández Romero
Fabián Hernández Romero, a primary care doctor from Tenerife, has spent more than a decade dedicating a good part of his time to rescuing the memory of the victims of Francoism and Nazism on his blog Deportados Canarios. Most of the stories of the Canarians who passed through the Nazi concentration camps would have been forgotten if it were not for the priceless and selfless work of Hernández Romero, who with his tenacity, involvement and serious and rigorous work has managed to rescue all the details of life stories such as those of Ángel Mejías Zamorano. To achieve this, he has had to carry out extensive research in the historical press and archives of Spain, Germany and France. Pedro Medina Sanabria is another guarantor of historical memory that, together with the Ateneu Llibertari Estel Negre or the Anarchist Federation, have also shared the unrepeatable history of the Gringo.
