“What would you be willing to do to survive?”: Julio Godínez saves the story of a Mexican in the Nazi extermination camp in Buchenwald

“I dial the phone, a secretary answers me and I say: ‘Can you please contact Florián Salazar-Martín?’ They put me on the phone, Florián answered me and said ‘Who’s talking?’

“Julio Godínez, I am a Mexican journalist”

‘What do you want?’

‘I want to know if you are the son of José Luis Salazar Martín’ he remains silent then says to me ‘Yes, it’s me.

Julio Godínez is a Mexican journalist who lives his daily life between Belgium and his native country. “The Mexican of Buchenwald”, a book by its author that tells the story of two nationals who spent a season inside a Concentration camp on German soil, it is the result of four years of research begun after the opening of the archives of Bad Arolsen, containing the names of thousands of people who passed through the genocidal machines designed by German Nazism.

There, Godínez and several of his fellow journalists found the unusual stories of various Mexican men and women who lived through the terrors of the Holocaust from within. However, a few names particularly caught Julio’s attention. He relates in particular the case of José Luis Salazar Martín, who identified himself in the concentration camp as a native of “El Paso, Mexico”. The detail that troubled Godínez was that by the time José Luis arrived in Buchenwald, the region of El Paso had already been seized from Mexico by the US armed forces for almost 100 years.

“For me all these disconnections jumped out at me and I said ‘here’s something to say'”. What was the point of someone giving misleading information about such a tiny detail as the fact that El Paso was owned by Mexico rather than the United States? This question, along with the novelty of finding names of Mexicans on the lists of German concentration camps, was the first impetus that led to four years of investigation into José Luis’ past.

Despite the difficulties of investigating events that took place decades ago, Godínez found an environment eager to share information. “The people who work on archives, history, are people who are always ready to help. These are people who are very excited. Every time I told them this story, people were amazed. They told me “How could there be Mexicans in concentration camps? What were they doing here? “.

Answering these same questions was an activity that started out as a hobby. However, after four years, this entertainment took the form of a novel. Godínez went from journalist to writer, obeying the call that gave him the same story he wanted to tell: “We [las y los periodistas] we use writing as a work tool, but in reality, a lot of times we don’t feel like writers. We have this desire, but we don’t want it. “

Although historiographical research, archiving and investigating among decades-old documents was one of the tasks that occupied Julio the longest, he says. a climax when the past collided with the present:

Following the surnames of José Luis Salazar Martín and the accumulation of documents he left in his name after going through the dictatorship of Francisco Franco in Spain, the resistance in France and the concentration camp in Germany, Godínez found one of the descendants of the Mexican from Buchenwald.

Like that too realized the true origin of José Luis, who was actually born in the province of Malaga, Spain. In a desperate attempt to escape the war against Mexico (as many other Spanish men and women did years before, fleeing the dictatorship of Francisco Franco) decided to lie about his place of origin. Thus, he became another Mexican inside the Buchenwald camp, coming from the fictional “El Paso, Mexico”.

Godínez specifies that, although the title is in the singular, his novel is the parallel story of two people who lived through the horrors of Nazi Germany. The other character in his book is an authentic Mexican: Juan Rodrigo Del Fierro. The author managed to discover that her family consisted of an American mother of good ancestry, while her father was from the community of Nazas, in the state of Durango. However, he was never able to trace the family to Europe, so the explanation of how he ended up in a concentration camp with José Luis remains a mystery.

José Luis was one of those characters who they witnessed the horrors of the concentration camps and survived. In fact, he has already tried to mend his terror. Was it the key that allowed Godínez to find one of his descendants, since on his return to France after the concentration camps, José Luis complained to the French for having expelled him. In the documents attesting to your complaints, he himself writes the names of his children.

So one day Julio decides to pick up the phone and dial the number he found during an Internet search: “‘Can you contact Florián Salazar-Martín?’ They put me on the phone, Florián answered me and said ‘Who’s talking?’ […] Two weeks later we were both sitting in the port of Marseille [Francia], talk face to face, and that’s where the whole story revolves around me ”.

To understand the mystery of José Luis Salazar and the confusion behind his place of origin, Julio Godínez only needed a question from Florián, the son of one of the main characters in his novel: What would you be willing to do to survive? […] Well, that’s what my father did ”.

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