Deportado 4443

Antonio Hernández Marín spent four and a half years locked up behind the Nazi barbed wire at Mauthausen. More than five thousand five hundred Spaniards were only able to leave Hitler's death camps through the chimneys of the sinister crematoriums, turned into smoke and ashes. The history of all of them was buried by the Franco regime and later forgotten by our democracy. To recover the Memory of these men and women, between January and May 2015 Antonio Hernández Marín was resurrected on Twitter as @deportado4443; a spokesperson for all his colleagues who narrated minute by minute, tweet by tweet, what was happening in the Mauthausen concentration camp. That virtual hole in time captivated about fifty thousand Internet users who followed his story with emotion. Shortly after he finished telling his story, Ioannes Ensis contacted me to propose to illustrate the tweets that he had been reading during those three and a half months. His goal was to help prevent the sad adventures of these heroes and heroines from falling into oblivion. The end result is this work. A work done from the most absolute historical rigor, without any margin for invention. Everything shown on these pages is based on the testimony of the few survivors and on existing documentary evidence. The fruit are magnificent illustrations, full of emotion and feeling, that reflect all the horror that our deportees suffered at the hands of sadistic members of the SS.