The Spanish Fraud
On the podcast: Javier Cercas’s new book on the man who impersonated a Holocaust survivor.
The legacy of Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco and the Spanish Civil War remains a deeply painful piece of Spain’s past. Enric Marco wanted to be a hero of that history. He was a fighter against the fascist dictatorship who had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during the war. He told his story again and again, as a spokesman for an organization of former Spanish Holocaust survivors. The problem was, his story was a fiction. In his new book, The Impostor, Spanish writer Javier Cercas unravels the many lies of Enric Marco.
The legacy of Spanish fascist dictator Francisco Franco and the Spanish Civil War remains a deeply painful piece of Spain’s past. Enric Marco wanted to be a hero of that history. He was a fighter against the fascist dictatorship who had been imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp during the war. He told his story again and again, as a spokesman for an organization of former Spanish Holocaust survivors. The problem was, his story was a fiction. In his new book, The Impostor, Spanish writer Javier Cercas unravels the many lies of Enric Marco.
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