From La Loma to the French Resistance: a researcher recovers the memory of Albox natives who faced Nazism
Miguel Ángel Alonso recovers the story of Mateo Alfonso, from La Loma, and will speak in Albox on 16 October about ten people from Albox who passed through Nazi camps.
Automatic translation: this article was translated with artificial intelligence from the original in Spanish. Read the original
He was born in 1916 in the La Loma neighbourhood, into a family of potters, and ended up standing up to Hitler’s troops in the mountains of Grenoble. The story of Mateo Alfonso has come back to light thanks to the researcher Miguel Ángel Alonso, who has been on his trail for more than ten years, as he told La Voz de Almería.
In 1930, in the midst of an economic crisis, the family sold the pottery workshop and settled in Domène, on the outskirts of Grenoble. The emigrants from Almería adapted so well that, in Alonso’s words, “on one side of Grenoble was the village and on the other side was La Loma”.
After the German invasion of 1940, Mateo, a man of libertarian ideas, joined the clandestine resistance and went on to lead a combat commando unit. According to Alonso’s research, the former anarchist minister Federica Montseny wrote that this man from Albox was a pioneer of armed harassment against the Germans.
When his group was cornered in Domène, he slipped behind the German line at night, killed two soldiers and blew up the blockhouse in which they were gathered, which saved his comrades. He then took refuge in the Alps and joined the maquis. After the liberation, in 1944, disappointed with the recognition he had received, he enlisted in the Foreign Legion and fought in Indochina.
Ten Albox natives in the Nazi camps
That memory will have its own event in Albox. On Friday 16 October, at 19:30, Miguel Ángel Alonso Mellado will give a talk in the exhibition hall of the Municipal Archive (Sala de Exposiciones del Archivo Municipal) about the people of Albox who suffered in the Nazi concentration camps, as announced by the residents’ forum Somos Albojenses.
He will put names to ten people from Albox, among them two brothers from La Loma; four never returned. He will trace their path from the Retirada (the Retreat) of 1939: enlistment in the French army and the Foreign Legion, capture as prisoners of war and deportation to camps such as Mauthausen or Dachau. Among others, he will tell the story of José Alfonso Soto, from Locaiba, who passed through the Stalag at Sagan, in present-day Poland.
Alonso Mellado, a native of the outlying district of Almanzora (Cantoria) and a member of Somos Albojenses since 2009, has spent years recovering the history of the district: he founded the magazine ‘El Arriero de Albox’ and is the author of ‘Los exploradores de Albox. Una odisea scout en Almería’.
Recovering these names also means remembering the emigration and exile that marked so many families in the Valley. And putting a face to local people such as Mateo Alfonso, whose recognition, as La Voz points out, is still pending, above all in his own town.
