:quality(85)//cloudfront-us-east-1.images.arcpublishing.com/infobae/5NM2SKWORZGYFNMZXHE5AAGWCE.jpg "“Maddi and the borders”: a Spanish Catholic smuggler who ended up in German concentration camps 1")
For the Spanish writer, Edurne Portela (1974) confinement represents a revealing moment for his work. After moving to the outskirts of Madrid, in a small town located in the Sierra de Gredos (Iberian Peninsula), received the historical file on Maria Josefa Sansberrobetter known as Maddi, a woman who was a resistance banner and deported to concentration camps whose existence she was responsible for condensing into “Maddi and the borders”.
Material amazed by portela to be a brave woman born in 1895 in the Basque town of Oiartzun, where he was trained as a contradictory figure: Catholic and divorced, who became an agent of the resistance and ran a hotel on the border of the Pyrenees between France there Spain; a character that obsessed the writer for months.
The novel took shape from these historical documents received by portela in 2021, which revealed a brave woman who served as smuggler there limitas people were called who helped a person persecuted for political reasons to cross the border.
“It makes me fearful and modest, because the Maddi that is going to be read is the one I created. But it’s better than lying dead in the archives. It’s like breathing life into it that I know is fictional, but based on what could have been. Historical truth was very important, maintaining a solid foundation with documentation, but then following the logic of fiction,” Edurne Portela said in an interview with The Spanish newspaper.
The author mentions a Material (pronounced Mayi) who defied the limits of her destiny, determined to rise above her humble origins; a determined woman who, in the flower of her marriage, decides to divorce Nico and put himself in charge of a hotel near Mount Larrún, a tourist spot for the French to have a train that climbed to the top.
Maddi and the Borders also has a disdainful character that seduces Louis, the village barber, who does not believe in God, but believes in man. Quite the opposite of her, who remains a devout Catholic. portela He describes her as a virile woman, unattractive, with a strong character, who did not want to tie her destiny to a man.
As a hotel manager and taking advantage of his geographical location, he begins to negotiate and traffic in food, socks and other types of goods, but he refuses to pass on condoms. All under the arguments of his unshakable Catholic morality. sansberro every Sunday she religiously attended masses, but there is an account of when she was refused communion because she was divorced.
“Maddi, the protagonist was an extraordinary and courageous woman who crossed many boundaries, she cannot be presented as a feminist activist. She was not aware of the political significance of what she was doing, but rather did what she believed to be good and honest,” Edurne Portela said. Go.
Portela also deals with the time during which Material he had to serve Nazi militants in his hotel shortly after the occupation of the area. All the while, she was an agent of the resistance. After the German occupation, the statistics of Spanish women sent to concentration camps are among them, they are deported to Dachau, Ravensbruckand finally, in 1944, he died at Sachsenhausen.
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