It's a cliché to say that fact is stranger than fiction, but once in a while it's totally true. It happened with the escape of two anti-Franco students, Manuel Lamana (1922-1996) and Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz (1926), from the Valley of the Fallen, where they were serving their sentence in 1948. A filmmaker, Fernando Colomo, took advantage of this priceless material to shoot the movie The Barbarian Years (1998).
Son of the historian and Republican politician Claudio Sánchez-Albornoz, Nicolás returned to Spain in the 1940s, while his father was in exile. He then resumed his studies and began to associate with the FUE (Federación Universitaria Escolar), a clandestine union that, in the midst of a great shortage of means, carried out the propaganda against the regime that it could. The organization experienced a certain boost after the end of World War II. At that time, there was still hope that the fall of European fascism would drag down the Franco dictatorship.
In 1947, the police arrested a group of these militants. They also went after Sánchez-Albornoz, but he was not in Madrid, but in Barcelona, where he was finally arrested. For the justice of the regime, the FUE was nothing more than a disguise for the communist party. This vision did not respond to the objective reality of the facts, but to a conspiracy vision that was very much in vogue at the time.
In Cárceles y exiles (Anagrama, 2012), Nicolás tells that the dictatorship police could not understand that young people from good families were involved in acts of political opposition. The agents found the dissidence of the workers normal, but they were incapable of understanding that people of bourgeois origin were against Franco: "Having to persecute young men -and on top of that, obviously upset them".
As usual at the time, the trial to which the students were subjected lacked the most basic guarantees. The defense lawyer had a minimal intervention and limited himself to saying that the defendants had no subversive intention. This argument, if it had been taken into consideration, would have led to a reduction of the sentence, never to a plea of not guilty.
The prosecutor requested three years for Lamana. For Sánchez-Albornoz, the same. Curiously, the first ended up sentenced to four and the second to six. From a legal point of view, it is peculiar, to put it mildly, that the penalty is higher than the one demanded by the accusing party. The two young men ended up in the Valley of the Fallen, a pharaonic funerary monument with which the regime intended to propagandize its triumph in the Civil War.
Sánchez-Albornoz, in his memoirs, admits that his experience was "relatively benign." He was lucky to be employed in an office, so he did not suffer the same hardships as other inmates, forced to work for private companies, deprived of sufficient food and adequate hygienic conditions.
But despite this privileged situation, both he and Lamana, equally busy with bureaucratic work, agreed not to wait for the sentence to be served. They were going to elope one way or another. They were not the only ones trying to escape: Fernando Olmeda, in El Valle de los Caídos (Peninsula, 2009), has documented many other escape attempts.
The two companions prepared the escape in detail. For example, they had to take passport-size photographs and adopt false names that were easy to remember. They also had outside help. On August 8, 1948, at the agreed time, a car was waiting for them next to the El Escorial monastery, where they had managed to reach after crossing some pine forests without much trouble.
In the car were two young foreign women, the writer Barbara Probst Solomon and Barbara Mailer, sister of Norman Mailer, the famous novelist. From El Escorial they traveled to Medinaceli, Barcelona and Vic. The fugitives then crossed the Pyrenees on foot until they reached the French town of Valcebollère.
The success of the escape made a fool of the regime's jailers, who toughened the conditions for the prisoners as a result of the episode. The interrogations then multiplied, although without any results.
It was even said, due to the apparent ease of evasion, that the authorities of the regime had tolerated it. The truth is an unsubstantiated theory: just look at the reprisals suffered by other members of the FUE.
Lamana ended up exiled in Argentina, where he worked as a university professor. Sánchez-Albornoz also left for this country, where he met his father, whom he had not seen for years. He dedicated himself to his own profession, history, in which he shone with his studies on Latin America. He had the opportunity to see Colomo's film about his feat, which he found to be respectful, in general, of the facts, although it took the inevitable cinematographic license.
