César Orquín Serra (Valencia, 1914-Mendoza, Argentina, 1988) is a character with an unusual biography. His vital journey contains some of the traits that best characterize the contradictory 20th century, while he travels through some of the most representative scenarios of this period. Now, a documentary entitled "El Kapo", the result of collaboration between the Taller d'Audiviosuals of the University of Valencia and the National University of Cuyo, premiered on April 3 in Mendoza, Argentina, where César Orquín lived for about forty years and where his remains rest, and which will be exhibited on May 7 at the DocsValència Festival, reveals unpublished details of his unusual career.
Born from an extramarital affair between a member of a bourgeois family in Valencia and a domestic servant, César Orquín had the protection of his biological father, who imposed a husband on his mother with whom to keep up appearances and provided financial resources with which to finance their academic and musical training. On his father's side he had other brothers, among them the well-known musicians José and Amparo Iturbi. His formative years were spent in Valencia, where he studied at the Luis Vives Institute and most likely began university studies, although there is no documentary evidence of this. From military service in Africa he escaped to defend the Republic. Perhaps influenced by his personal experience, by then he had already forged his anarchist ideology. From the Spanish war there are unconfirmed indications of participation in various episodes, such as "Els fets de Barcelona" from 1937. What is documented is his belonging to the Lincoln Brigade, made up mostly of American volunteers. Wounded on the Teruel front, he was hospitalized in Benicàssim. After the defeat, he went to France where he was in various camps, such as Argelèrs, Le Barcarès, Agda and Saint-Cyprien. He then joined, like other exiled republicans, in a Company of Foreign Workers to fight against the Germans until he was imprisoned in the Vosges in 1940.
From then on he would be one of the more than 9,000 Spanish Republicans who passed through the Nazi camps, of which less than half survived. At the end of 1940 he was deported to Mauthausen, beginning here one of the most decisive episodes in his biography. Thanks to excellent language skills, he managed to speak seven, he learned German in a short time. His objective was to become an interpreter for the Spanish prisoners before the Germans in order to be essential and thus save his life and that of his compatriots. Half a year later he was named “oberkapo” of a Kommando that would bear his name. He contributed to it his vital and chameleonic, impetuous and despotic character; These are some of the adjectives that Guillem Llin and Carles Senso, the authors of “Cesar Orquín Serra. The anarchist who saved 300 Spaniards in Mauthausen”, the investigation published in 2020 by the Associació Veïnal El Llombo, from Ontinyent, on which the documentary is based. It was about directing an external work Kommado made up of highly productive and efficient men to, in return, obtain improvements in their living conditions and their diet, keys to survival. For this he would have walked a fine line that passed through his compatriots seeing him as one of their own while earning the trust of the Nazis.
Among the survivors there are testimonies, the majority, of those who praised his attitude and others, fundamentally PCE militants, who accused him of mistreating them and of sending the weak and sick to die in Mauthausen. As a result of that hostility, over time a black legend would hang over him that would always haunt him by presenting him as an accomplice of the Nazis.
After his liberation, he remained in Austria for a few years, where he married what would be his companion until the end of his days and the mother of his daughter, whom he had met in Vöcklabruck, the first destination of his Kommando. But the threat of the Stalinist winds would continue to haunt him. That is probably why he left Austria in 1950 to go into exile in Argentina, first in Buenos Aires and then in Mendoza. The truth is that he was never cited in any case against the Nazis. According to some investigations, he even collaborated with the Nazi hunter Simon Wiesenthal whom he knew. In Argentina he dedicated himself to his family, working on the radio as a writer and announcer, as a publicist and as a professor of this discipline, among his main occupations. He also developed an intense civic activity, among others, as director of the Mendoza Philharmonic Association. And another more private as a Freemason. He never returned to Valencia although he always had it in mind, according to his family.
With his death in 1988 in the department of Godoy Cruz, the book of his life was closed, as he said, so that no one would open it again. The historical research carried out by Guillem Llin, who is the basis of "El Kapo", has violated this desire. Although the memory of the Republican deportation, and with it all of us, has come out on top. The story of César Orquín Serra is also our history.
