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- I remember... The Mediterranean area

- I remember... Robinson Crusoe

- José Bano was born is 1923 on the hills surrounding Cuges les Pins, from Spanish parents.

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- I can remember myself lying on a hessian mattress, full with corn leaves and every time I moved, it made a special sound, in the ears, quite loud.

- This took place is a room bare of any furniture. I was very little, I think that’s one of my oldest childhood memories.

- My father, when he was freed from military service, he knew there was work in France. He was hired in the mines of Gardanne,

- and he worked for 2 years there. And then he went to meet my uncle in Cuges.

- My parents used to work on the hills, we lived in small wooden houses.

- I was always alone with my parents.

- When I was 4, my father, so that I could go to school, decided to come and live in Cuges.

- I found myself together with all the kids who were my age, and I didn’t understand what they told me.

- To be fair, I spoke Spanish with my parents but I didn’t practice French.

- In the end, those kids were a threat.

- I learn French fast.

- The teacher put me at the back of the classroom, and it lasted for 2 years.

- I suffered from it, to be excluded as I was.

- I was granted my basic school-leaving qualification. Then Cuges Mayor organized a small reception, and to me, as I graduated in the second position,

- he gave me a beautiful Robinson Crusoe book.

- Then I worked with my father for years as a lumberjack, and then I was a mechanics.

- In 1939, I was 16, the mayor summoned me to ask me whether I wanted to remain Spanish or whether I wanted to choose France.

- Even though I knew the war had just started, and that I may have gone to the war, I couldn’t but opt for France.

- Enlisted at the age of 19 in the 7th Regiment of Infantry of Africa, demobilized, he then joined the French Forces of the Interior.

- He then worked for the tramways of Marseille.

- A communist activist, he enlisted in union struggle.

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