amical

Des fusillades déchaînées, des attentats-suicides et des prises d’otage se sont succédé à Paris dans des cafés, des restaurants, une sale de concert et au Stade de France où se déroulait un match de football amical entre la France et l’Allemagne.

The verses of the anthem, steeped in military bravado, may well be brutish but the sentiment — the feeling of a stadium in full throat — was the perfect opening to something the French call, so poignantly, un match amical.

It is only because of the dogged detective work of a Spanish historian that their memory has not been sullied by an impostor, who 10 years ago was president of Spain's main association of Nazi victims, the Amical de Mauthausen.

Then, with the 60th anniversary event at Mauthausen days away, he sent a report to the prime minister's office and the Amical association.

In El Impostor, a book by Javier Cercas in which Marco collaborated, the writer suggests Marco was confronted at Mauthausen with Bermejo's findings by his Amical colleagues and that he admitted being a Third Reich volunteer worker.