Saturnino Navazo was captain of the Spanish team in Mauthausen concentration camp. How did someone from Spain end up in a German concentration camp in Austria? To answer that question, we have to go back in time to 1936 in Spain. In July of that year, a group of generals staged a coup against the democratically-elected Spanish government. The coup developed into a civil war between defenders of the Spanish Republic and fascist supporters of General Franco. Slowly, Franco’s fascist troops conquered the entire country. In the end, only one small corridor in the northeast remained, from whence many Republicans fled the approaching army. Millions of people escaped persecution at the hands of the fascist victors by crossing the Pyrenees to France, but the French government did not welcome the Spanish refugees with open arms. Many of them were sent to detention camps. When Nazi Germany occupied France in 1940, over ten thousand Spanish antifascists were deported to German concentration camps. One of them was Saturnino Navazo. He arrived at Mauthausen on 17 January 1941. Like his compatriots, he was given the blue triangle for immigrants with a white S for Spain. As antifascists, they were subject to harsh treatment at the start of their imprisonment. Many of them died from forced labour in the stone quarry. But over time, the situation improved for the Spanish prisoners. More and more Jews and Soviet prisoners of war were deported to the concentration camp in Upper Austria. Navazo was able to get work duty in the prisoners’ kitchen and was even allowed to play football on work-free Sundays. He’d already played in the Spanish second division before the start of the Spanish Civil War. Thanks to his skill at football, he became captain of the Spanish team in Mauthausen. In January 1945, prisoners from Auschwitz arrived in Mauthausen. Among them was a Jewish boy named Siegfried Meir, whose parents had been murdered in Auschwitz. The ten-year-old from Frankfurt am Main put up quite a fight when his hair was to be shorn. Most likely due to his blond hair and German name, the SS guards allowed him to live, and transferred responsibility for the boy to Navazo. With Saturnino Navazo’s support, Siegfried survived. After the allies liberated the camp, the boy claimed that he was Navazo’s son, taking on the official name of Luis Navazo. The two lived first in Revel, near Toulouse, France, where Saturnino again played football. He did not return to Spain when the Franco dictatorship came to an end in 1975, and died in France in 1986. Siegfried Meir moved to the country of Navazo’s birth, living in Ibiza until his death in 2020.