Blood of Spain

by Ronald Fraser

  It was folly, he thought, to remain in this crowded port. It was a trap. They must escape while they could. Rumours that the Italians were closing in were growing, JULIAN was fortunate to have escaped so far. Arrested by the Casado forces on the Madrid front, released by a tank battalion which by chance was passing through, he reached Valencia only to find that the secret police were already looking for him. His party organized a hide-out in a farmhouse; from there he and some others were dispatched the day before to Gandía where, they were told, a ship was waiting.

  One of his men, a mechanic, was trying to make a fishing boat seaworthy; the engines of the many boats in the Alicante docks had all been put out of action before they arrived. Hurriedly, they made a selection of tank corps men who would leave. The boat was plainly visible to the people crowded in the docks; it was going to be a tricky operation to get it out to sea. Unsure of whether the engine would work, the mechanic tried it. It broke into life. At the sound of the engine’s steady beat, refugees threw themselves headlong on to the boat which immediately capsized and sank. Though no one was drowned, there was no way of salvaging it.

  They would have to return to his original idea: fill their haversacks with whatever they could lay their hands on and set off with short-arms for the mountains. Some of the men had managed to get to the port with their tanks, but these were useless now. If they couldn’t remain in the mountains, they’d have to try to make for the Pyrenees and France.

  They set off; it was already too late. They no sooner got out on the road than they were surrounded and taken prisoner by Italian troops who had begun to arrive.

  Throughout Thursday, the Italian forces took up positions without entering the port. Word had it that their commander, General Gambara, was prepared to convert the docks into a neutral zone. The refugees feared that the Basque surrender to the Italians at Santoña was about to be repeated. By Friday, Gambara was telling the refugees’ representatives that it was in everyone’s interest that they should be able to leave that day. But the captains of the French cruiser and two merchant ships preparing to put in to Alicante demanded that the refugees first surrender all arms. After much discussion, arms were piled, thrown into the sea or hidden. Three ships had been seen patrolling off the coast; they disappeared, re-appeared, began making for the port. Hearts rose. It was only as the leading warship closed in that the refugees saw it was not a French but a Spanish nationalist minelayer. It broke out a large red and gold Spanish flag. From its deck, laden with soldiers, came the sounds of a nationalist anthem. Soon the order, given by the Spanish military commander, was being passed from mouth to mouth by the refugees: ‘Within half an hour we have to be out of the port.’

  Three days of hope and despair came to an end. A burst of machine-gun fire broke over the refugees’ heads from the Santa Barbara rock rising steeply behind the port. Refugees threw arms, valuables, suitcases over the quay-side; the water turned red, then yellow as cases of saffron, worth a fortune, began to sink. Between ranks of Spanish soldiers, the refugees started to leave the port; there were so many that not all could be got out before nightfall. Saturnino CAROD and other leading anarcho-syndicalist militants from Aragon remained. Two of them proposed that they should commit suicide. Another, Antonio Ejarque, army corps commissar, looked pensive, CAROD replied that it was no solution.

  —‘I will not deny my enemies the pleasure of shooting me. If I am to die, it will be at their hands. As long as I’m alive, I’ll do everything in my power to escape. Our duty is to continue fighting’ …

  None the less, he believed, it was a good thing they hadn’t won the war. The struggle between the conflicting forces on the republican side would have been so savage that all would have perished in the end. Even taking into account the privations and sufferings that were certain to be inflicted on the defeated – sufferings which, in the event, were even worse than he could imagine – defeat was preferable to the inevitable internecine conflict that victory would have unleashed. He recalled the communist sweep through Aragon, the attempted communist blackmail to make him accept party membership in return for arms for his men. For too long he had had his eye on the rear for the stab in the back.

  His two companions, Mariano Viñuales and Máximo Franco, were not persuaded by his arguments. As the hour approached for the last of the refugees to leave the port, they shot themselves.

  *

  The refugee-prisoners wound along the road to San Juan. Nationalist soldiers stole what they could from them. A rubbish cart, with a fat, dirty woman sitting on top, came past the column in the opposite direction. Andrés MARQUEZ, Madrid left republican youth leader and brigade commissar, who on the day of the uprising so long ago had watched the crowd threatening bus-loads of insurgent military officers being taken to Madrid prisons, saw the cart approach. As it drew level, the woman, her rolls of fat quivering, shouted at them: ‘Assassins! Reds!’

  Things hadn’t changed, he thought. The hour of the lumpen-proletariat had come with the victory of reaction. The garbage woman could well have been among those who had greeted the return of Ferdinand VII, the last absolute king, a hundred years earlier, with the shout: ‘Long live our chains!’

  The men were segregated and herded into a large almond orchard, a short distance from Alicante. Within a few hours, the young fruit that was just setting, the leaves of the trees, were being picked and eaten; soon the tender shoots and even the bark were being stripped for food. Then the prisoners were ordered to lay barbed wire around the orchard’s perimeter. As they imprisoned themselves, General Franco was penning a communiqué several hundred miles to the north. Suffering from ’flu – the first time in the war that he had been even slightly ill – he crossed out several words, changed another and, satisfied at last, signed what he had written:

  Having captured and disarmed the red army, Nationalist troops today took their last objectives. The war is finished.

  Burgos, April 1, 1939.

  VAE VICTIS!

  The war was over. In crowded prisons and concentration camps, the sufferings of the vanquished were just beginning.

  From the almond orchard, the prisoners captured in Alicante were shifted to the concentration camp in Albatera. Designed to hold a few hundred, the camp was packed with nearly 10,000 prisoners. Hygiene and shelter were primitive to the point of non-existence, food and water scarce. Falangists, police, civilians, even priests came from different parts of Spain to look for men they wanted; many whom they took away at the beginning never reached their home towns or villages. Some prisoners succeeded in escaping; others were executed in front of the camp inmates for trying. On one occasion, a temporary second lieutenant inspecting the sentry posts turned a machine-gun on the inmates and opened fire.

  Narciso JULIAN, communist armoured brigade commander, and three companions dug a hole under their tent in the camp where they hid when visiting groups came looking for men they wanted. After four months, a companion, who had been beaten up, revealed his presence in the camp, and JULIAN surrendered to a man who had come for him. By then, however, unauthorized assassinations of prisoners had ended, JULIAN was taken to Porlier prison in Madrid and court-martialled with sixteen others in a trial that lasted a total of eleven minutes. (Courts martial considered the accused guilty unless otherwise proven.) Sentenced to death, he spent one year and seventeen days awaiting execution.

  Every evening the prison inmates were lined up. The prison officer would sometimes be smoking a cigar as he read out the next day’s execution list.

  —Often he would read out only the first name, Pedro, and pause for several minutes. Everyone with that Christian name went through agony until he read out the first surname. It might be a common one, several people might share it. Agony again. Until finally, he read out the second surname …

  Most of the men went to their deaths courageously. On the pretence that he was a relative, JULIAN was often able to spend time with friends on their last night before execution. One night, as he entered the conde
mned men’s room, he was amazed to find the prison warders standing against the wall, their faces as white as sheets, and the prisoners roaring with laughter at a parody of a Franquista court martial they were acting out.

  —One of them, his cap pulled down over his eyes, was playing the part of the military prosecutor. He was demanding the death sentence because the defendant had a cat called Franco. As I listened, I thought: ‘Which of these men are going to their deaths in a few hours? It looks more like the warders.’ When the time came for their execution, they went out heads held high, shouting ‘¡Viva la República!’ …

  JULIAN’S sentence was commuted to thirty years’ imprisonment. He served seven of them and was released. Six years later, in 1952, he was arrested for communist activities, court-martialled twice and sentenced to twenty years, of which he served eighteen.

  Keeping faith with his word, Saturnino CAROD escaped after a short time in Albatera camp. After many nights walking over the mountains, he was able to contact his wife who helped get him to the French border. In France, he was again confined in a concentration camp. On his release, he returned clandestinely to Spain to re-organize the CNT, was arrested, court-martialled twice and sentenced to death. The sentence was commuted to thirty years, of which he served eighteen, being released finally in 1960.

  Tomás MORA, socialist chief commissar of the Estremadura army, remained nine months under sentence of death, having been found guilty by a summary court martial of having been a ‘general in the red army’. In 1944 his life sentence was reduced to twenty years’ imprisonment and he was conditionally released under an amnesty which reprieved prisoners with terms of up to twenty years’ imprisonment.

  Sócrates GOMEZ’S father, last socialist civil governor of Madrid, who was in the camp, was executed; his son was court-martialled and sentenced to twenty years. Antonio Pérez, father, Casado defence councillor, was another victim of Franco’s firing squads. His son, who had not made for Alicante but for Madrid, reached the capital and went into hiding for two months. Convinced that the republic had suffered only a temporary set-back – ‘the country was still basically republican’ – and that the fascist victory could last only a year or two at the most, he located former JSU comrades and began clandestine work. Within three months, the group was broken up, most of its members arrested – one of whom died under torture – and Antonio PEREZ was forced to flee Madrid for the provinces. (Later he was to be imprisoned for clandestine communist activities.)

  It was not only the leaders who suffered. José MERA, Madrid schoolteacher, who answered his union’s call to defend the capital in 1936 and later became a communist, was court-martialled in Alicante for ‘aiding the rebellion’ – the usual charge. The prosecutor demanded a twelve-year sentence; his defence, whom he had never seen before – which was also customary in these summary courts martial – asked for a reduction to six. The court handed out a twenty-year prison sentence.

  —At least I was lucky. I didn’t have an extra charge made against me as did a right-wing republican history professor I knew, who was accused, on top of the usual charges, of ‘intellectuality’ …

  MERA had been forewarned by his experience with an extreme right-wing doctor and his wife whom he had helped protect during the war. In return, they had offered him every protection if it was ever in their power to help. Now that the moment had come, the couple refused him; as a consoling thought, the doctor said: ‘Don’t worry, they can’t shoot your wife until your son is a year old.’

  *

  In Madrid, some communist militants who had been arrested during the Casado coup were left in prison to be found there by the enemy. On the day the nationalists occupied the capital, Miguel NUÑEZ, eighteen-year-old communist education militiaman and commissar, managed to persuade the socialist lieutenant, a bricklayer whom he knew, to release him and fifteen others. Like Pérez, he was convinced that the fascist victory would be shortlived, and he set about reorganizing his party. He contacted a JSU comrade, and together they were walking down a Madrid street when they came across a group of right-wingers talking about their hardships during the war. Stopping to listen, his friend, Vicente Goya, suddenly was unable to contain himself.

  —‘But that’s nothing,’ he burst out. Everybody turned to him. ‘What happened to you, then, joven?’ one of the men inquired. ‘To keep me from the reds and certain death, my father hung me up for three years on a clothes-hanger with an overcoat over me.’ The people looked at him, not knowing whether it was serious or a joke. ‘Come on, chico, let’s get out of here before they kill us,’ I said …

  Within three weeks, NUÑEZ was arrested. He was sentenced to thirty years’ imprisonment, later reduced to twelve, of which he served four. His friend Goya, who was even younger than he, was sentenced to death. On his return from his court martial, he threw himself out of the police car and, although handcuffed, managed to escape. He made for his grandfather’s house in Segovia, reaching it still manacled. The old man, who had spent all the war in the nationalist zone, threw him out to cries of ‘Bandit, red –’ Goya made for his roadmender uncle’s hut in the mountains; it was an excellent place to hide. His uncle also threw him out. Too exhausted to continue, the youth lay in the road until he was found by the guardia civil. Taken back to prison, he was executed not long after …

  Régulo MARTINEZ, left republican leader in the capital, who returned from France to Madrid forty-eight hours before the city fell, was sentenced to death for being a ‘traitor to religion’, the ‘creator of the Popular Tribunals’ and a republican. The Vicar General of the Navy, whom MARTINEZ had saved after his arrest by anarchists in Madrid, moved heaven and earth to save him. ‘Now I see that there was a great deal more goodness and generosity on your side than there is on this,’ he commented. ‘These people are cold, they lack generosity of spirit –’ His pleas, however, were successful; MARTINEZ’S sentence was commuted to thirty years and he served five, later being imprisoned again for anti-Franco activities.

  On his release after seven years in prison, nine months of which he spent under sentence of death, Francisco SANPEDRO, Popular Army staff officer, took the opportunity of asking the prison chaplain, whom he had got to know while working in the prison offices, a question.

  —‘You know that I killed no one, robbed no one, committed no crime. Can you tell me, therefore, why I have spent seven years in gaol?’

  ‘That’s very simple, I’m glad you asked me that question,’ replied the priest. ‘I can answer it. You were on the point of being shot, but you weren’t; the same could very well have happened to me had things turned out the other way round. Your side lost, and the rest – whether you robbed or killed – matters not a jot. Many who have committed murders are still alive, and many who didn’t have been shot. You’ve been in prison seven years because you lost the war’ …

  A civil war, he might have added. For the objective was not only to castigate the defeated but to crush for all time working-class militancy and the threat of socialist revolution, so that Spanish capitalism could prosper. The worst of the repression continued until 1943.23

  Many of those who managed to escape from nationalist vengeance to French concentration camps after the fall of Catalonia were to experience the oppression of Nazism. Timoteo RUIZ, the lad who started the war with a lance, was released from a French camp when he volunteered for work in the French coal mines. Caught by the Germans during the invasion of France and thrown into a concentration camp, he was later taken to work on German fortifications at Brest. Aided by communist party members outside, he and three others managed to escape to Bordeaux. There the only job they could find was working for the Germans in the submarine pens. A fight with the Nazi foreman led them to escape to the French maquis, where they remained fighting the Germans until the end of the war. After an abortive guerrilla invasion of Spain, he became a member of an armed group that was sent by the Spanish communist party to Valencia, clandestinely crossing half of Spain from the French frontier on
foot. Once in Valencia, he was summoned by his party to Madrid to participate in the clandestine struggle there. Arrested, he was sentenced to twenty-five years’ imprisonment, of which he served just over eleven. Arrested a second time, he served a further seven years.

  Josep CERCOS, libertarian youth metalworker, who started the war with a pistol in the streets of Barcelona, was released from a French concentration camp to work in a labour battalion in northern France. He retreated with British and French forces to Dunkirk and, with some Italian international brigaders, set off in a rowing boat after most of the British had been evacuated. Picked up by a British ship as they drifted helplessly in the Channel, they were taken to Dover, then to a prison in London where the warders, believing them to be German prisoners, greeted them as ‘bosch’. CERCOS wanted to go to America; the prison governor simply smiled. After a few days, a French captain informed them they would have to return to France because they were working for the French. Paris had not yet fallen. They reached Cherbourg in a Belgian ship. No sooner had they arrived than British troops began embarking; the retreat was in full tide. Left foodless and leaderless, they got on board a Lithuanian collier which took them round the coast to St Nazaire. From there, they joined the flood of refugees pouring south. Finally, CERCOS reached Perpignan and his original concentration camp. After six months, the Germans forced him into a labour brigade which was sent to fortify St Nazaire. Six months later, he escaped and reached Chartres, where false documents were procured, and he went to work as a Frenchman in various factories for the Germans while operating with the French resistance.

  *

  The victors’ fate was kinder, naturally. But not always as kind as might have been supposed. Alberto PASTOR, falangist farmer from Tamariz de Campos, Valladolid, ended the war as a lieutenant, and volunteered for the Blue Division, Franco’s contribution to the Nazi cause, which fought the Russians on the eastern front. After the world war, he returned to his life as a farmer, occupying an occasional post in the farmers’ vertical union but refusing the bureaucratic benefices and perquisites with which the new regime favoured its petty-bourgeois rural supporters. (Between 1940 and 1950, the bureaucracy doubled in numbers; its one and a half million members were then nearly three times as numerous as in 1930.)