No one doubts that World War II was the greatest horror that humanity had to face, which, on the other hand, has a history of shadows that show that while we are capable of the best, we are also capable of committing atrocities. Years go by and all that remains behind is the risk of forgetting what should never have happened, and it is already known that he who forgets his history is doomed to repeat it.

Paloma Sanchez-Garnica in front of the Reichstag in Berlin | Photo: Carlos Ruiz Bq

That’s why memory is so important, to remember. This can be done by walking through a city that has experienced something as terrible as Berlin, where at every step there are monuments that are witnesses of that suffering. It can be done by studying, and it can be done by reading. And here it helps us Paloma Sanchez-Garnica with his book Last Days in Berlin..

The writer presented herself at the 2021 Planet Award, where she became a finalist with this novel, whose protagonist, Yuri Santacruz, will guide us through the greatest horrors of the 20th century. Born in Tsarist Russia, the Bolshevik Revolution devastates everything he knew and ends up exiled with some of his relatives to Spain, their father’s country, the country they arrived in when they overlooked the barbarism that awaited him many years later. with the Civil War. and the Franco regime. Unfortunately, his mother and brother Kolya remained in Russia, whom he swore that he would someday see again. This brought him to Berlin, where he got a job at the Spanish embassy and he thought that from Germany he could get to Russia to return his family.

What Yuri Santacruz finds is a Berlin no longer like that crazy 2020 which, despite post-World War I hardships, inflation and the economic crisis, was the scene of avant-garde movements and discoveries that seemed unthinkable in others European capitals. Berlin in 1933 witnessed the rise of Nazism, the “accession” of Hitler, whom nothing and no one dared to get ahead of.. Hell reigned on earth thanks to the support of some, the indifference of others, the fear of some and the opposition of many others, who soon discovered that Nazism brooked no resistance.

Berlin walk, history walk

It would be interesting to resort to Moscow with Paloma Sánchez-Garnica, which is also the setting of the novel. Perhaps at another time one could walk with the author through the Russian capital feeling like Yuri Santacruz, but certainly not in 2022, when Putin invaded Ukraine and started a war in Europe, a terrible conflict that erupted when the world thought that weapons – the last thing is that problems can be solved in a different way. And again a person or some people decided the dehumanization that Paloma Sánchez-Garnica brings out so well in her novel.

Paloma Sanchez-Garnica among journalists during a walk in Berlin

It couldn’t be Moscow, but it was Berlin, the city that lives long and does not forget, a city that has memories on every corner and is the result of a story that highlights the German Empire, two world wars, the occupation, the cold war and the wall and, of course, reunification. And there the guide, Andres, an Argentine who settled in Germany, who perfectly understood what Paloma Sanchez-Garnica showed in “Last Days in Berlin”, accompanied us on an excursion that passed through the Reichstag, the Memorial to Political Opponents, the Tiergarten and the USSR Monument, the Memorial victims of homosexuality memorial to the victims of the holocaust and other places named in the novel.

The walk took us to the Jewish Quarter of Berlin, where we were kindly visited by Paloma Sanchez-Garnika, passing through the synagogue and enjoying the atmosphere of the Heckmann Höfe. And there, in one of those courtyards, we again plunged into romance during conversation you can see in this video in which the writer expressed that it all started when she started reading to “understand what went wrong, what happened. To understand how a German society like ours was carried away by a savior like Hitler to an evil and why they followed him or were silent or looked the other way and allowed this man to take power in 1933″.

Finalist of the Planeta Prize 2021 on tour in Berlin | Photo: Carlos Ruiz Bq

Sanchez-Garnica admits that reading is the basis of writing, perhaps for this reason, Doctor Zhivago, the character he approached for his protagonist Yuri Santacruz., a man of great values, with integrity and principles that were greater than the fear he could have of reprisals for opposing the Nazis. But, as I pointed out earlier, Last Days in Berlin features not only Nazi Germany, but also Russia, especially Stalinist Russia.

And finally, he couldn’t stop two totalitarianisms from taking over the novel: “When I was trying to understand the rise of Nazism so that humanity could reach the horrors of World War II, another reading came to me and I thought, ‘I have to tell. I was thinking about , whether to leave this story in Russia or, as I thought, place it in Nazi Germany, and reading Hannah Arendt, I realized that Nazism and Stalinism are medals with both sides. Stalinism was cruel from beginning to end, but in the 1930s there were purges, and in this Stalinist Moscow, it seemed to me that this was a good way to count that two-sided coin, which is totalitarianism and which ultimately determined the lives of millions of people who caused a lot of suffering that tormented millions of people. I wanted to equate the two ideologies a bit.”

Paloma Sanchez-Garnica at the monument to the Soviet Union in Tirgaten, Berlin | Photo: Carlos Ruiz Bq

Thus, Paloma Sanchez-Garnica identifies Nazism and Stalinism, while not forgetting that “continues to patronize Bolshevism and communism. Tell someone he’s a Nazi, insult him. To say that you are a Stalinist, a communist, a Leninist… you have more condescension.” And, of course, Putin came out, “a mixture of tsarism and that great patriotic Russia that wants the world to be afraid of it again. Everything is faked, the tsar is a little, but also with the control that he drank from the KGB, he was brought up in it and uses the mechanisms used by cruel special services.” This connection between the present and the past also brings us back to Roman, because “Russians believe that it was they who, in the Great Patriotic War, put an end to Nazism, and remained with Stalinism and revived the feeling that Putin feels. He wants Russia to be feared again and wants to expand the territories he considers part of Russia.”.

Putin spoke of the denazification of Ukraine, “denazification,” “an attractive word because it means that the enemy must be defeated.” Enemy, another very common word for dictatorships in general and totalitarianism in particular: “Nazism and Stalinism had a lot in common. Communism is the dictatorship of the proletariat, Nazism is racial superiority.. Both represent a single party with a single mindset and admiration for the leader. Fear, terror as an element of population control and incitement to hatred and the creation of external and internal enemies, ”says the author, pointing to Jews, communists and opponents in general as enemies that Nazism is looking for, while in Stalinism they were counter-revolutionaries and aristocrats, and also, of course, any adversary.”

Author of the book “Last Days in Berlin” in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp | Photo: Carlos Ruiz Bq

Those who were called enemies suffered and even paid for it with their lives, and sometimes with their families: “In these systems, not only dissidents are persecuted, but also their loved ones.. This is what hurts the most. When they go against your family, I swallow my valuables, turn my head and follow the herd. This is the problem of totalitarianism, fear, control.” Jews, political opponents, and the Nazi persecuted group that was last recognized as such suffered: homosexuals. Gays were persecuted, marked with a pink triangle, arrested, interned in concentration camps and killed. In his memory On May 27, 2008, a memorial was unveiled at one end of the Tiergarten. located opposite the Holocaust Memorial.

Books against manipulation

Paloma Sánchez-Garnica did not forget the homosexuals in “Last Days in Berlin” and she does not forget that even today we must be on the alert “not to allow the arrival of forces that will again restrict our freedom. Either you agree with what I install or you do not, and this is fraught with serious consequences. What can we do to avoid becoming a manipulated society? Book reading. Reading makes us a free society, with criteria, with an opinion that is difficult to manipulate.who can resist the force that wants to crush this rule of law that we live in. Reading teaches us to sift. Goebbels’ principles are in the order of things, they are not a thing of the past. This is the basis of manipulation, propaganda. Everyone uses it, not just politicians. If we can sift through the information that comes to us, if we are a society that does not allow itself to be programmed by those flashes that appear and repeat and which we perceive as the truth, they will not be able to manipulate us, we will be able to respond, ”adds the writer about the danger that has not gone into the past. Burning of books at Bebelplatz in which thousands of books burned on May 10, 1933. Among the works burned were the works of Heinrich Heine, who accurately wrote in 1817, more than a century before the advent of Nazism: “Where books are burned, people are also burned.”

Paloma Sanchez-Garnica with his book on Friedrichstrasse | Photo: Carlos Ruiz Bq

“Totalitarianisms do not assert themselves, they appear little by little, and when you can no longer react and they have power, they sprout and dissent cannot act, because they risk their lives, prison. Fear is set and the law is bent, principles are bent and you can no longer act. This is what happened in German society, they believed that Hitler could be the solution and in two months he had absolute power. We need to be on the lookout for our rights and know that they can take them away from us.. All the freedom that we have is such a valuable asset that we must be constantly on the alert, and we can only fight as a free society, in a society that does not allow us to be manipulated, ”concluded the brave author of Last Days in Berlin. .