Jorge Pérez Troya He was born in Torre de Juan Abad (Ciudad Real) in 1916. At the age of 20 he was involved in the Civil War , fought in the Alcázar de Toledo, in the Alto de los Leones, in Guadarrama and in Jarama (as a sergeant and in charge of an anti-aircraft battery).
After the end of the War, April 1, 1939, he flees to France. The first times are difficult, since France locks them up in camps where the conditions in which they lived were deplorable (hunger, thirst, dysentery, etc); there he makes contact with the communists and becomes one of them. When World War II breaks out and Germany invades France, in 1940, the camps are closed and they are offered three alternatives:enroll in the Foreign Legion, in the Labor Companies, or be returned to Spain. Jorge decides to enroll in the Labor Company (specifically in 211). These companies are used to work in the fields, in the mines, on the roads... Cheap labor.
After the armistice signed by Germany and France in June 1940, France is divided into two:one part occupied by the Germans and the other "free" under the government of Marshal Petain (a puppet government of the Germans). His company is sent to Brest, but he decides that he will not help the Nazis and escapes. He arrives in Bordeaux and there he joins the resistance, after some sabotage actions he is sent to Paris to "fight" within the Urban Guerrilla . In 1942 he already leads one of the guerrilla groups.
After several successful actions, he is ordered to attack the guard post of the German General Staff in Paris. Jorge and his group get ready and for a few days keep an eye on the times of the changing of the guard. They decide to attack the company that was going to take over and, although it was a success, they lost 11 of their comrades.
Jorge hides for a few days but, as the leader of his group, he has to go to a "safe house" where he had the weapons. The concierge of the building suspected the trafficking of that foreigner. Unfortunately, to Jorge's luck, she was the mistress of a policeman and he tipped her off. When Jorge arrived at the flat, he found himself held at gunpoint by two policemen who took him away and beat him up terribly. Almost lifeless, he was abandoned to his fate in a cell with other members of the resistance, among them there were French communists who were able to get medicine from abroad to cure him. After several days between life and death, he is taken to the Fresnes prison. where he stayed for two months with a roll and a salted sardine a day.
Two months later the Germans take him out of there and take him to Romainville Castle where things were much worse. To the physical exhaustion, the psychological one had to be added, since every morning the prisoners were trained and 15 of them were shot. One of the mornings they forced him to take all his things and Jorge thought:
“This is as far as we have come”
But no, he still had to suffer more. They were "packed" on a train whose destination was... Mauthausen (Austria). He would become prisoner No. 25,537. They had to work in weapons factories near the countryside or, like Jorge, in the granite quarries where many died due to the effort. In his words:
«There was a huge quarry and they made us work from dawn to dusk to extract large stones. Hitler needed them for the monuments he wanted to build in the places he was conquering «
«24 hours a day suffocating (gas chambers) women and children «
«None of those who arrived survived and you knew that when they entered certain death awaited them. The walls of the chambers were made of cement, very thick, and you could see the scratches that people made when they were going to die «
Jewish Virtual Library
Jorge Pérez Troya he was one of the survivors of the Nazi death camps, but some 122,000 people in these camps alone were killed. His little revenge took shape when, after liberation, some of the survivors pursued the highest ranking officer of the camp and killed him as he fled. The French government awarded him the Legion d'Honneur for merits during the resistance.
Deportados de Mauthausen (Jorge a la izquierda, bajo la flecha)
A man who fought in a war between brothers, who had to exile himself from his country, who suffered from the distrust and confinement of the French whom he later helped in the resistance against the Nazi occupation and who survived an extermination camp... He would have to be the symbol of RESISTANCE AND HUMAN STRENGTH .
Serve this post as my little tribute to an almost unknown hero (at least for me).
Sources:RNE Documents (Spaniards in the French resistance), Testimony Jorge Pérez Troya (information and photos)
