Damiana, like so many of her generation, preferred silence. The stories of who did what to whom, she says, were cosas del pueblo – village matters. ‘It was all about envies and old hatreds. What was the war for? For nothing.’
Damiana’s version of the Civil War, and especially what it was for, is accepted by many of those Spaniards who simply found themselves caught up in history. This is no more so than those with men called up by one or other side, forced to fight and die purely on the basis of whether the area where they lived had fallen under Republican or Nationalist control.
But the Spanish Civil War, was never about ‘nothing’. British historian Hugh Thomas, who wrote the definitive history of the conflict at a time when Spaniards were only allowed to hear the winners’ account, declared it to be, at least in its opening days, ‘the culmination of a hundred years of class war’. That, however, was just one of the many battles fought out on Spanish soil, and with Spanish blood, between 1936 and 1939.
The Spanish Civil War was many things. A Spain that had stumbled its way through political chaos for more than a century, and where the division between the ‘two Spains’ of right and left had reached epic and bloody proportions, would fall under the yoke of the former.
The Civil War was the end of the Second Republic. This had been a well-intentioned, if messy and poorly directed, affair. At its best, the Republic was an attempt to free Spain from the backwardness and moral straitjacket imposed on it by landowners, the Church and a monarchy that had been forced to flee in 1931.
The Republic was born with massive hopes and ambitions, some of which, especially in the field of education, bore early fruit. Had it worked, it might have transformed Spain. In the end, unfortunately, it was no exception in an ongoing history of political tragedy. It had been under assault from all sides, from within and without. Attempted revolutions, military insurrections, strikes, political assassinations, street violence and secessionist moves in Catalonia had left it worn and torn. Franco’s latter-day apologists, proponents of a theory that the Generalísimo saved Spain from a workers’ revolution, claim that it was already on its deathbed.
The Civil War was also a curtain-raiser for a much greater, global war of ideologies. For this was an early round in the great clash between the fascist ideals being promoted by Hitler and Mussolini and the communism of Stalin’s Russia. Hitler’s Luftwaffe tested out the carpet-bombing of civilian populations, with infamous consequences, in Guernica. Mussolini also provided abundant troops and supplies. Stalin backed the International Brigades, and eventually ended up with much of Spain’s gold. It was also a piece of calculated fence-sitting by Britain, France and the other European democracies. These turned their back on the elected Republican government and remained neutral, partly out of fear that communism might be the eventual winner, but mainly to avoid a punch-up with Hitler and Mussolini. Appeasement had an early outing in Spain.
But the Civil War was, first and foremost, the most important event in twentieth-century Spanish history. It could be argued, in fact, that it was the most important thing to happen for several centuries. A country that had slowly, over several hundred years, lost a once vast empire, finally turned against itself. This loss of empire had reached its final point in 1898 with what became known as el Desastre, the Disaster. In that year Spain lost Puerto Rico, the Philippines and, in a humiliating naval defeat by the United States, the Caribbean jewel of Cuba. Admiral George Dewey sank the Pacific fleet in the Philippines in May. The Atlantic fleet was ‘picked off like pigeons in a shoot’ near Cuba two months later. Spain’s empire was thus reduced to a few poor possessions in Africa. The events of that year provoked a long bout of national soul-searching and self-flagellation led by a group of intellectuals – including Miguel de Unamuno and the novelist Pío Baroja – known as ‘the generation of 98’.
The Civil War was also a bloodbath that pitted brother against brother and neighbour against neighbour. By the time the guns had stopped smoking and Franco had signed his final parte de guerra on 1 April 1939, some half a million Spaniards were dead. There are no exact figures, but it is thought that some 200,000 were executed by the two sides. There were also thousands of dead Italians and Germans, who fought for Franco, and other foreigners who had volunteered for the International Brigades. One in thirty Spanish men were dead. Some 400,000 went into exile.
The war dragged on for three years. Franco could probably have won it in a lot less time. But he preferred to avoid an early battle in Madrid and, anyway, he was not just after military victory. He wanted more than that. His fellow generals appointed him ‘Head of Government of the Spanish State’ in September 1936, thinking they were creating a wartime dictatorship. In fact, in the words of one historian, ‘They had created a Hobbesian sovereign endowed with greater powers than Napoleon, a sovereign who was to shed few of those powers over forty years.’
It was not, at the very start, Franco’s rebellion. The head of the military revolt was the conservative general José Sanjurjo. He was an inveterate conspirator who died in an aeroplane accident on the third day of the war – apparently provoked by the weight of the ceremonial uniforms he was carrying with him. Franco was, at the time, based in the far-off Canary Islands. He started off by taking control of the army in Morocco, moving it across the Strait of Gibraltar and organising a campaign that quickly won much of south-west Spain. A third general, Emilio Mola, did similar work in north-west Spain, while most of the rest of the country remained faithful to the Republic.
Once Franco took control, however, the war had two specific aims apart from military victory. For Franco the war was a cruzada, a fundamentalist Roman Catholic crusade against a conspiracy of Marxists (and their ‘Jewish spirit’), freemasons and separatists. The crusade’s purpose was not just to defeat the enemy but, in good measure, to eradicate it. It was, in that respect, a repeat of what Franco considered one of the most glorious moments of Spanish history – the Christian Reconquista of Spain from the Moors. The Reconquista had pitted Spain’s Christians against its Muslims over several centuries. It led, eventually, to the forced conversion or expulsion not just of the latter, but also, in 1492, of the Spanish Jews.
Franco’s victories rarely brought instant peace. They brought, instead, what would later be called ‘the politics of revenge’. In its earliest stages this meant retribution, vengeance and more bloodshed in a deliberate and thorough cleansing of all possible opposition. This was made all the more justified, in the minds of those who carried it out, by the fact that some rojos had been enthusiastic church-burners, priest-killers and creators of anonymous mass graves themselves. Their victims included thirteen bishops, 4,184 priests, 2,365 friars and 283 monks. Up to 60,000 people were killed by the left, a number probably doubled by Franco’s followers. The difference was not just in scale. ‘Neither the Republican authorities, nor the political parties of the left sanctioned reprisals,’ one historian points out. ‘The savage repression perpetrated on the Nationalist side, on the other hand, was an official, systematic and calculated strategy.’
‘Everyone who is openly or secretly a supporter of the Popular Front should be shot … We have to sow terror. We must eliminate without scruples all those who do not think like ourselves,’ General Mola had declared. ‘If I found my father amongst my opponents, I would have him shot.’
Franco preferred a slow, thorough war to a lightning victory. There was work to be done not just at the front, but behind one’s own lines – weeding out and eliminating the enemy. ‘There can be no ceasefire or agreement … I will save Spain from Marxism at any price,’ he would tell the American journalist Jay Allen when asked whether he would shoot half of Spain.
That work was, in great measure, carried out by the Falange, a political party which, despite its meagre showing in elections five months before the war, became the only approved party. It quickly attracted the right in all its forms, as well as chancers, opportunists, the vengeful and thugs.
The other aim of the war
eventually became to consolidate Franco’s own position. Although he initially appeared to be a wary and unwilling plotter, he soon revealed a natural dictatorial bent. A small man with no sense of physical fear and certainly no belief that he might be wrong, he also made sure that, by the time war was over, there was only one person in charge – ‘Franco, Caudillo de dios y de la patria’ (‘Franco, Caudillo of God and of the nation’). As the title shows, he served God as much as his country.
One reason that Spaniards, especially older Spaniards, do not like to talk about the Civil War is that they still disagree so radically on it. Scratch the surface and most, even those on the modern right who profess dislike of Franco, will find themselves blaming the bloodletting on one side or the other. Better silence, anyway, than an argument that might see the blood of one’s grandparents being swapped across the table.
It is a sign of just how much Spain has changed that one of the volunteers involved in digging up graves should be José Antonio Landera – a young member of the same Civil Guard police force that did much of Franco’s dirty work. He told me that his schooling had left him with only vague notions of what had happened in the 1930s. ‘The Civil War was only talked about superficially. There was no mention of the civilian deaths in virtually every village, of the mass graves or of the disappeared,’ he said.
Many books have been written on Spain’s Civil War. Few Spaniards, however, have yet managed to write impartially about it. Rafael Borràs Betriu, an emblematic editor who is Spain’s most prolific publisher of twentieth-century history books, says the time is not yet ripe for agreement. ‘Winners and losers have mostly offered their personal and subjective vision because … the Civil War remains alive in the social cloth of family tradition and in the historical memory of Spaniards. Quite a few years will have to go by before what is currently a minority trend can impose itself in the writing of history: seeing the part of the truth which corresponds to the adversary, freed of all connotations of “enemy”.’
Film-makers and novelists have, generally, suffered the same partiality. British director Ken Loach cast his eye on the subject with Land and Freedom in 1995. ‘What shame Spanish cinema must feel. It has to be a foreigner who recovers for us one of the most transcendental pieces of our history,’ wrote one critic.
A recent exception to that rule is the novelist Javier Cercas, whose 2001 Soldados de Salamina – which fictionalises the story of how a Republican soldier helps a Falangist leader escape execution in the dying days of the war – was a surprise publishing success (even to the author). The novel seemed to tap a desire for reconciliation – or understanding – at least amongst the minority of Spaniards who read books. A notable recent attempt to bridge the divide was, appropriately, called A History of the Civil War that Nobody Will Like.
The digging up of graves like that in Poyales del Hoyo has had a galvanising effect on what some Spaniards have come to call their own ‘desmemoria histórica’. This expression was coined to describe an almost deliberate lack of historical memory. Amongst other things, it has set Franco’s apologists scribbling. The most popular of these is Pío Moa.
Moa has changed radically since the days when he was a member of the First of October Antifascist Resistance Group (GRAPO) – a left-wing terrorist group that still occasionally rears its ugly head in Spain. He has had a publishing hit with The Myths of the Civil War in which, having moved from one extreme to another, he launches a vicious assault on many historians. Amongst his conclusions are that Winston Churchill and Franklin D. Roosevelt were both crueller than Franco, that the Republican loyalists were relatively more bloodthirsty than Franco’s rightist rebels when it came to executing opponents and that the generals’ rebellion was directed against a revolution brewing within the Republic. His rewards included a top place on the best-sellers list and long interviews on state television when it was controlled by the People’s Party.
None of that changes the fact, of course, that Franco had time to hunt down and execute most of those responsible for killing his own supporters. A retroactive law was passed in 1939 which allowed for those deemed politically responsible for political ‘crimes’ previous to that date to be arrested. The last person to be executed for Civil War crimes was the communist Julián Grimau in 1963.
The killings by rojos – especially by anarchists – formed an essential part of the Franco regime’s internal propaganda for decades. Hundreds of the priests and nuns they killed have gone down the beatification conveyor-belt at the Vatican in recent years. Pope John Paul II beatified 233 of them in one record-breaking go in 2001. The left’s victims were eventually accorded burial in cemeteries, hailed as martyrs and saw their names added to the ‘Caídos por Dios y la Patria’ plaques put up in every town and village in Spain. Thousands of the victims of Franco’s repression were, however, left in roadside graves or even stuffed down wells (one well in Caudé, in the eastern province of Teruel, is said to be the last resting place of up to 1,000 people).
The full history of the losers – by which I mean the losers’ stories rather than the left’s version of what happened – is only just being broadcast. The army, which carried out its own executions after summary trials, kept many of its archives on those executed closed until the 1990s. Some files on those executed are still unavailable, piled up in cardboard boxes at the back of military warehouses. Others are simply thought to have disappeared.
There are still thousands of bodies in unmarked graves. The highest estimates talk of 30,000 unidentified corpses. Around 300 have now been recovered. Since the three women from Poyales del Hoyo were exhumed, two other graves have been identified along the same seven-mile (eleven-kilometre) stretch of road. They are said to contain twenty corpses of men from both Poyales del Hoyo and Candeleda. The rediscovery of the graves caused the author and journalist Isaías Lafuente to pose the following question: ‘Can a democratic country allow thousands of citizens murdered like animals by a dictatorial regime to remain buried in its roadside ditches? Can it tolerate this while the man who allowed and encouraged the mass killings rests under the altar of a Christian basilica? The answer is so obvious that is almost an offence to have to ask the question.’
Why had it taken so long to broach the subject, to dig up the dead, to ask the question? Fear is often given as the main reason. Franco’s presence made it impossible to talk freely, let alone dig up graves, for almost forty years. That fear lived on into the first years of democracy. It was encouraged by coup rumours and the 1981 storming of parliament by Civil Guard Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero.
Spain’s whole democratic transition was, at least publicly, postulated on the stated belief on all sides that, as the returning Communist leader Santiago Carrillo put it, nothing was ‘worth a new Civil War between Spaniards’. Even Felipe González, the Socialist prime minister who governed for nearly fourteen years from 1982, heeded the advice given to him by a former general to leave the subject of the Civil War well alone in order not to provoke the ire of the army. Nothing official was done to mark the fiftieth anniversary of the war’s start in 1986.
In the graves of Pilar, Virtudes and Valeriana – and in hundreds more like them – there is proof of a silence that has been both collective and willing. One of Europe’s most verbose and argumentative peoples has simply chosen to look away from a vital part of its history whose ghastly, ghostly presence is to be found under a few feet of soil.
Not even the family of poet and playwright Federico García Lorca, whose execution by the Franco Nationalists of Granada was explained by Ian Gibson in his 1974 classic The Death of Lorca, had tried to recover his body. Gibson’s work, specially remarkable for the date in which it was published, was one of the first attempts to counter the Franco-imposed ‘desmemoria’ of the time. Lorca’s family, despite the popular pressure, still refuses to go any further.
The families of three men thought to have been buried alongside the poet do not, however, agree. Two anarchist banderilleros (secondary figures of the b
ullfight, whose job is to rush out and sticks darts in the bull’s back) and a one-legged Republican schoolteacher are said to be in the grave. ‘If one side [of the Civil War] can bury their dead with dignity then it is time the other side was able to as well,’ the grandson of one of those bullfighters, Francisco Galadí, told me on a visit to Granada. ‘The family of García Lorca has to be respected. But my father did not want his father to be left abandoned. Our family were treated as apestados – pestilential – for years. My father never got a good job, and we had to go to schools run by priests and fachas. I lived under Franco’s repression for forty years. After seventy years, now it is time,’ he explained.
The grave of the three women was one of the first to be dug up as Spaniards slowly began to look back down at the ground. These early exhumations were interesting, amongst other things, because they showed that Spain actually had a stock of people already experienced in such things. They were forensic scientists, anthropologists and archaeologists who had already worked on similar, if fresher, graves in the former Yugoslavia or Latin America.
One of the early volunteers was Julio Vidal, an archaeologist from the University of León. He was the first to describe these graves as secretos a voces. They still, he says, provoke ‘a heavy and fearful silence’ accompanied by a certain shame. The graves, Vidal says, represent ‘the shameful part of our [democratic] transition which, while it keeps its eyes closed, will not allow this page of history to be turned.’
Spain’s local magistrates, fearful of a flood of cases, refused to get involved in digging up graves. There were, they said, no crimes for them to investigate. There was no official money for the task of digging them up, either. Aznar’s government, which had spent its time studiously trying to show that it had nothing to do with Franco-style rightism, was challenged to act. Emilio Silva took a case to the UN Committee for the Disappeared, more used to arguing over the mass graves of Kosovo or Guatemala than those on western European soil.
Ghosts of Spain Page 5
