Last year, my uncle came across an older article in the Diario de Jerez. It had originally been published in 2019 and told the story of five men from Jerez who went into exile after the Spanish Civil War and were later deported to Nazi concentration camps. One of the names sounded familiar to him: Salvador Linares Barrera. He was part of my family.
That meant a family story that had barely been spoken about for decades suddenly led from the Sierra de Cádiz through Jerez and exile in France all the way to Mauthausen and Gusen.
Salvador was born in 1917 and came from the area around El Tempul in the Sierra de Cádiz. He later lived with his older brother on Calle Molineros in Jerez's Barrio de San Miguel. In 1939, he went into exile in France. There he was among the many Spanish Republicans who worked for the French army in the Compagnies de Travailleurs Étrangers. After the German invasion, he was captured in the Loire region and initially taken to the Fallingbostel prisoner-of-war camp.
In November 1940, Salvador was deported to Mauthausen, and in February 1941 to Gusen. On 30 November 1941, Salvador Linares Barrera was murdered there. He was 24 years old.
The camp records listed tuberculosis as the cause of death. Later research considers typhus more likely. But something else matters more: disease, hunger, forced labour and catastrophic living conditions were part of the Nazi concentration camp system. That is why the Stolperstein that commemorates Salvador in Jerez today does not simply say that he died there. It reads: “Asesinado 30.11.1941. Gusen.”
Five men from Jerez
What has stayed with me about Salvador's story is also the fact that he was not an isolated case. The article through which my uncle first came across his name tells the stories of Diego Pérez Núñez, Rafael Domínguez Redondo, Manuel Carrasco Cortijo, Salvador Linares Barrera and Antonio de la Rosa Tozo. Five men from Jerez whose biographies were different, but whose paths after Franco's victory led to France and later into the Nazi concentration camp system.
Diego Pérez Núñez was born in 1919 and lived on Calle Lecheras in the Barrio de San Miguel. He belonged to the Juventudes Libertarias of the CNT and was involved in establishing the Ateneo Libertario in Jerez. After the Civil War began, he left the city. In August 1940, he was deported to Mauthausen and later transferred to Gusen. In December 1941, the Nazis transported him to Hartheim. He was murdered there in the gas chamber. He was 22 years old.
Rafael Domínguez Redondo lived only a few streets away on Calle Zarza. He too belonged to the Juventudes Libertarias of the CNT. He fought in the Civil War, was wounded during the Battle of the Ebro and was eventually evacuated to France. There he was initially held in the Barcarès internment camp and later assigned to a Compagnie de Travailleurs Étrangers deployed on the Maginot Line. After the German invasion, he was captured. Via Fallingbostel, he was taken to Mauthausen and then to Gusen, where he was murdered in 1942.
Manuel Carrasco Cortijo was born in 1915 in the Llanos del Malabrigo between La Barca de la Florida and San José del Valle, and later lived on Calle Cerrofuerte. There is no record of him belonging to a political party or trade union. During the Civil War, he served as a sergeant in the Republican 140th Mixed Brigade. After fleeing to France, he was first interned and later captured by the Germans together with Rafael Domínguez. At the beginning of 1941, both were taken to Mauthausen and a few months later to Gusen. Manuel Carrasco was murdered there on 27 November 1941, three days before Salvador.
Antonio de la Rosa Tozo was considerably older than the others. He was born in 1878. Little is known about his political activities in Spain. In 1943, he was detained in the Le Vernet camp in southern France. At the time, people imprisoned there included those persecuted for activities connected to the Résistance. In the summer of 1944, he was deported to Dachau on the so-called “Ghost Train”. On 28 December 1944, he too became a victim of the Nazi concentration camp system and was murdered in Dachau.
No specific party membership is documented for Salvador himself. What is documented is that he belonged to the Republican exile. Diego Pérez Núñez and Rafael Domínguez Redondo, by contrast, are documented as members of the CNT's libertarian youth organisations, while Manuel Carrasco fought as a sergeant on the Republican side.
Today, five Stolpersteine in Jerez commemorate these men. All of them are located in the Barrio de San Miguel. Salvador's stone is at Calle Molineros 5, in front of the place where he once lived.
What can coexist within a family
For me, this story becomes even more contradictory because of another part of my family history. While Salvador lost his home as a Republican exile and was eventually murdered in Gusen, there were people in the same family who were not persecuted under Franco, but benefited from his regime.
That sits uneasily with the idea that families stand together on one side of history. Civil war and dictatorship ran straight through families. Some people were persecuted, others adapted, others benefited. Some things were told later, others were kept quiet or eventually survived only as isolated names.
Much has also been lost in Salvador's case. In 2026, Memoria Histórica Jerez published the memories of his niece Josefa “Pepa” Villarte Linares, who was born in 1951 in El Tempul near Algar. For a long time, her family knew little more than that Salvador had left one day and that no more news arrived. His sister still hoped that one day he would return. It was only much later that his path through France, Fallingbostel and Mauthausen to Gusen could be reconstructed.
What makes me angry is not only the brutality of his murder. It is also the thought that a young man had to leave his home under a dictatorship while other parts of the same family benefited from those very political conditions. For Salvador, that path ended at the age of 24 in a concentration camp.
Why I am writing about this today
Since learning about Salvador, I have also started to think differently about the political present. Right-wing and authoritarian movements are gaining strength again across Europe. Racist ideas, attacks on minorities and political concepts that divide people into desirable and undesirable groups are once again being discussed more routinely. Positions that only a few years ago were clearly further out on the political fringes have entered parliaments, election campaigns and public debate.
I do not think much is gained by simply equating the present with the 1930s. The historical conditions are different, and comparisons involving fascism and National Socialism quickly become imprecise. But for me, that does not mean political shifts should only be taken seriously once they have already ended in dictatorship and violence.
Perhaps that is the point at which Salvador's story changed for me from a family history into a question about the present. How do you act when the boundaries of what society considers acceptable begin to shift, when contempt for groups of people is once again expressed more openly, and when you yourself are living in the middle of that development?
I cannot know how I would have acted in the 1930s, and I usually find that kind of retrospective certainty pretty cheap. I can only decide how I behave in my own time. And I do not want to look back on these years one day and ask myself why I saw developments that worried and angered me, yet still thought they had nothing to do with me.
That is why I am writing about Salvador not only because I want his name, and the names of the other four men from Jerez, to be remembered. For me, this story is also about what we do with memory while our own present has not yet become history.
Sources and further reading
The biographical information is based primarily on research by the Diario de Jerez into the five deported men from Jerez, as well as the article by Memoria Histórica Jerez about Salvador Linares Barrera and the memories of his niece Pepa Villarte Linares. Further information can be found in the Banc de la Memòria Democràtica and in the overview of Stolpersteine in the Province of Cádiz.
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