Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  The president looked at me. ‘Get up on this table,’ he said. Hesitantly I climbed up. ‘Silence,’ shouted the president. The noise, the people milling about, the confusion that had met me when we first came in, immediately stilled. The president began addressing them as though he were holding a political meeting. ‘This man didn’t take up arms against the people. We believe he should be given a chance to live. A chance to purify his life, rid himself of his mistaken religious beliefs.’ The crowd shouted agreement, turning immediately to other matters. Ignored, I got down from the table and went out, ‘free’ …

  Only a relative freedom, however; a Popular Tribunal wanted him for trial on charges of rebellion. He went into hiding. The only thing that made life bearable to him was Socorro Blanco – White Aid – which started as a spontaneous movement among those who felt their lives endangered.21 In the house where he was hiding, people helped each other in a truly Christian manner.

  —There was no question of individual possessions; everything was shared. It was a marvellous example of human solidarity. Everything was heightened by the imminence of death. You became far more sensible to religion, living in a constant state of God’s grace. A sort of primitive Christianity at the time of the persecutions. Sin – the sin of ordinary day-to-day life – became irrelevant, if that’s the right word. Throughout the war, I never touched a woman; I’m sure there were many believers like me …

  Survival in Barcelona looked increasingly less assured as the war continued without a decisive nationalist victory; the only course, he thought, was to escape. For 1,000 pesetas a head – half down, the balance payable on reaching safety – smugglers would guide a party of a dozen across the border to France. Each had to make his own way to the rendezvous. From there they set out on foot in the dark. They were already some way towards their destination when they heard the sounds of a patrol: the carabineros with dogs. The smuggler-guide insisted they turn back. There was nothing for it but to return to Barcelona; hiding was preferable to capture. He went to see the Basque government’s representative, Irujo, brother of the minister in the central government, MESTRES’S mother was Basque, and he was able to get a Basque identity card on the strength of it. Irujo gave him an introduction to the manager of an export company in Valencia who needed an assistant to write French and English business letters. Survival in Valencia, where he was not known, would be easier than in Barcelona. He went.

  —I bought two English correspondence primers published by Pitmans and Macmillans. French was no problem, but English certainly was. In the mornings I took down the correspondence in Spanish; in the afternoons I sweated over the translations. But, at least, I seemed out of danger …

  Unexpectedly, the government took over the company. Still wanted by a Barcelona tribunal, he found himself overnight a government civil servant in Valencia. Moreover, he was promoted to head of the export department. He did the job to the best of his ability, believing in being meticulous in all things, and because he was determined to survive. One shock followed on another: the government decided to move to Barcelona. He would have to go too. It was impossible; he risked death if he went. He decided to talk the matter over openly with his boss, a former socialist deputy for whom he had done a favour in the past.

  —He looked at me amazed. ‘I don’t know how to help you. The only thing I can suggest is that you stay here and look for another job’ …

  Before long he found work in the state import-export company, dealing with the Russians, all of whom worked under Spanish names. There he saw his first adding machine. The woman added up a long column of figures on it and when she had finished, added them all up again – in her head. He wondered why; it seemed to him that if she were to make two operations of it, it would have been more logical to proceed the other way round.

  In 1938, his call-up papers came. He had been a reserve officer in the pre-war army, and was posted, as a lieutenant, to his regimental depot. His attempt to remain a survivor by setting up an NCOs’ school at the depot – ‘the republican army suffered enormously from a lack of NCOs and sub-lieutenants’ – was soon brought to nought by his honesty. Serving as an orderly officer, he discovered that milk due to a batch of recruits had been adulterated. He protested, and it transpired that the milk had been taken by the brigade commissar. The next day he was posted to the front and the commissar disappeared from the brigade.

  The chance of survival appeared reduced beyond appeal: his posting was not to an ordinary front line unit but to the newly formed Special I Brigade. The battle of the Ebro had turned against the republic. Refusing, as always, to permit a metre of nationalist territory to remain in enemy hands, Franco had launched a frontal counter-offensive on the bridgeheads across the Ebro. In mid-November, the republicans were forced to withdraw to the east bank, each side having suffered heavy casualties. A republican diversion was considered necessary. In December, Special I Brigade, composed of four battalions of specially selected men, was to land from the sea behind enemy lines at Motril, in Granada, and march on Málaga.

  —We embarked in Almería one night after explosions had been set off to frighten the civilian population into their cellars and air raid shelters so no one would see us. We waited, packed in the old boats until 2 a.m. Then suddenly there was a shout. The operation had been called off. We heard that the naval commander in charge of the operation – which was to be supported by combined attacks on the Andalusian fronts – maintained that the landing was too dangerous and he would not support it … 22

  Posted to the Granada front, MESTRES had still to survive a republican attack. The wife of the mayor in whose house he was billeted consoled him that everyone who stayed there had always returned alive. It was a small village, and her husband, a peasant, appeared to be a communist.

  —‘You see,’ she cried when she saw me return, ‘what did I tell you?’ And then she added: ‘Lieutenant, the señoritos won’t return, will they?’

  It was his last action; he had achieved his aim …

  Episodes 15

  Death-watch

  —The room looked as though it were a visiting place for prisoners to receive their families on Sundays or something like that. It had high windows, some benches and chairs. There was a statue of Liberty that looked like the one in New York, but perhaps it was the figure of justice carrying scales in her outstretched arms. There were some armed warders in the room. As we came into the prison there were shouts from the guards: ‘¡Centinela, alerta!’ ‘¡Alerta está!’ I remember all this as vividly as though it were now, although I thought for a long time that I didn’t remember, that it was stories my mother and aunt told me. But it isn’t so. I’ve proved my memories correct since then, though I was only five at the time.

  We were going to spend his last night on earth with my father. In the morning he was to be shot.

  He was a member of the Catholic youth workers’ organization JOAC in Valencia. At the start of the war, he was thrown out of his job in the townhall for belonging to a right-wing organization. He managed to get a job in a garage first, and later as a draughtsman in a surveyor’s office. My whole family, with one exception, was right-wing.

  My father was arrested in January 1938, accused of having attended a clandestine meeting at which a proposal was alleged to have been made to call on the youth of military age not to answer their call-up papers. I’ve never been able to find out if it was true, or whether the meeting was an attempt on the part of townhall employees who had been thrown out to get some compensation or re-instatement. At most, I believe, there may have been an attempt to establish contact with Socorro Blanco. A court martial found him guilty and sentenced him to death. No one expected the sentence to be carried out, not that late in the war; but all appeals were in vain. It was said that there had been a massacre in the nationalist zone and that the republic was determined to show that it could reply in kind.

  My first memory in life is of going to the SIM headquarters in the Calle Colón in Valencia to visit h
im. Then he was transferred to the model prison where I used to visit him alone, taking the parcels my mother sent. I had been taught to give the clenched fist salute to make things easier. The warders laughed: ‘Here comes the fascist’s son.’ One day when someone sneezed, I said, ‘¡Jesús!’ and they all laughed: the salute and the exclamation contradicted each other. It’s a curious thing, all that time in prison I don’t remember his face at all; it’s like a shadow. He would tell me that he was engaged on some very difficult, special work, which was why he was there. I didn’t even realize he was in prison. I never had any sense of tragedy until that last night.

  They let my mother, who was thirty-three, my aunt, two years younger, myself aged five and my brother who wasn’t yet two, in to spend the last night with him. As soon as I heard the sentries’ shout, as soon as we went through the prison yard, I knew that something terrible was going to happen.

  My father was perfectly calm. He embraced us, we sat down, we watched my brother trying to walk, playing, and it made us all laugh a bit. Then my father told me the story of Brother Wolf. Some of the warders started to swear, and he went up to them and said that he was about to die for the things they were blaspheming about, and asked them to keep quiet. Then he told me I must sleep for a while in order to be rested for the morning. ‘I am very tired, too, I am going to rest a little, because there is something important I have to say to you and your mother later on, and I want to do so with complete serenity.’ He sat on the bench leaning against the wall. I suppose I slept a bit. My mother says she didn’t cry at all, but she must have looked so tragic, have been so obviously holding back her tears, that despite my father’s sustained confidence throughout the night, I was in a constant state of terrible shock. I felt I understood perfectly what was going to happen. Not only because of my mother but from the sight of the other condemned man in the opposite corner, whose wife and daughter were both hysterical with grief. From their cries and sobs I knew that this was not a farewell such as might take place at the beginning of some ordinary journey.

  During the night there was an air raid. As the bombs fell, my mother – she told me later – said to my father: ‘If only a bomb would fall and kill us all – ’ ‘For the Lord’s sake, don’t think of such a thing. I shall go straight to heaven, and there I shall be able to intercede on your behalf.’ His death, he assured her, was a step into the other world, where he would be awaiting her, his death was a passport to a better life.

  His serenity was impressive. He had never been a very decisive or determined man; nor unduly religious, going to mass only on Sundays. None of his family expected such resoluteness of him in his last hours.

  At last he told us what he wanted us to know: a message of love and fraternity. He said that he was going to die for a better Spain, for a social justice that would be brought about within a framework of order. He said that he was dying not only for us but also for the sons of people like his guards. And because this was the case, he enjoined us never to manifest a spirit of vengeance, never to want to avenge his death, because to do so would be to divide Spain into two opposing camps yet again, and therefore to perpetuate all the ills which the country had been suffering from. ‘They believe they are right, and I believe that I am right. It would be tragic if Spain were to be divided again. Never hate, never harbour enmity.’

  At five o’clock in the morning they came for him. As he got up to leave, he took his watch off and gave it to me. He was wearing an ordinary jacket over a pyjama jacket, and he took the former off and left that too. He was executed an hour later by firing squad. My mother’s brother was serving in the barracks from which the squad was drawn by lot; happily, it did not fall on him to be a member of it.

  We took a tram home. The journey seemed to last an eternity. My mother and aunt were completely silent except for their sobs. Once in a while they embraced me. I looked at their faces, saddened and fear-ridden, and the journey stretched on and on. When we got to my grandmother’s house, I was put to bed, and my grandmother kept saying, ‘Tomorrow father will come, tomorrow – ’ And I knew perfectly well what had happened …

  Until he was fifteen, José Antonio PEREZ believed that he had not lived through that night, that he had been told about it later by his mother and aunt. But in 1949 he had occasion to visit the prison where an uncle was serving as an army officer. The latter did not know the prison well, but José Antonio was able to locate the positions of the sentries, and the room where they had spent the night. ‘In that corner was the low bench, there was the corner where my father was, over there the other condemned man. The warders sat at that table, there was the statue of Liberty. All those things had been engraved on my memory; I knew now that I had lived through that night –’

  * * *

  LAW

  … Whatever concept of local administration inspires future legislation, it is clear that the Catalan Autonomy Statute, unhappily conceived by the republic, lost all Spanish juridical validity from 17 July 1936 …

  But the entry of our glorious forces on Catalan territory poses the strictly administrative problem of the practical implementation of that abrogation. It is necessary, in consequence, to re-establish a legal system which, in accord with the principle of the Fatherland’s unity, restores to those provinces the honour of being governed on an equal footing with their sister provinces of the rest of Spain.

  Preamble to law, signed by General Franco,

  abrogating the Catalan autonomy statute (Burgos, April 1938)

  * * *

  1. The most striking part of the treatment, which he had slowly developed from his pre-war experience of road and industrial accidents, was the immobilizing of the wound in a plaster-of-Paris cast; but this was only one – and indeed the last – of the five stages in the treatment. The others were: early surgical intervention made possible by efficient ambulance services; cleansing the skin and wound with non-toxic materials such as soap and water; the meticulous removal of all foreign matter and the excision of all devitalized tissues; open drainage with dry gauze and no skin suture; and finally, immobilization in a plaster cast. Of the 1,073 war fractures he treated with this method in the course of the war, only six died. (See Reflections on the Past and Present Treatment of War Wounds and Fractures, mimeographed, undated, speech by Prof. Trueta to US Army medical conference.)

  2. Mussolini declared his delight that the Italians were horrifying the world. In Britain, France and the US the raids raised a storm of protest. Thirty years later, Franco declared – contrary to Ciano’s statement that Italian air raids on Barcelona two months earlier, in January 1938, had been carried out without consultation with any Spanish commander – that ‘all the air raids were always carried out by special decision of the Spanish command’. (Lt Gen. Francisco Franco Salgado-Araujo, Mis conversaciones privadas con Franco, Barcelona, 1976, p. 494.) Whether this statement could be applied to Guernica, where the Franquista version continues to maintain that the Condor Legion acted without knowledge of the Spanish high command, is a moot point.

  3. His opposition to the republic’s anti-clerical legislation, in particular the suppression of religious orders, had led him, indirectly, to join the Lliga Catalana, representing the conservative big bourgeois Catalan nationalist interests (see also Points of Rupture, C).

  4. Servicio de Investigación Militar, the counter-espionage and political police organization created by the republican government after the May events in Barcelona.

  5. Where the CNT textile union continued to pay him the same wage as other workers though he did not return to his mill, according to the union’s secretary, Josep COSTA.

  6. The impossibility of collecting taxes from industrial and agrarian collectives was an important factor in the central government’s hostility to them, particularly under Negrín who had been finance minister before becoming prime minister.

  7. See Militancies 7, pp. 239–41.

  8. Points of Rupture, A.

  9. See pp. 331–2.

 
; 10. Frente Rojo (Barcelona, 29 March 1938).

  11. The reformist socialists, under Prieto, were essentially in agreement with Azaña, the republic’s president, in believing that a negotiated settlement must be reached on the basis of ‘safeguarding republican institutions as far as essentials are concerned’; on this basis, ‘a number of concessions’ could be made to the enemy. There would be neither bolshevism nor dictatorship in Spain. (M. Azaña, 31 August 1937, see Obras completas, vol. IV, Mexico, 1966–8, p. 761.) The communists would certainly count among the ‘concessions’ to the enemy in a negotiated settlement. Negrín’s goals were the same – but his tactics two-pronged: negotiations alternated with all-out resistance, depending on the circumstances. As the former failed so resistance became the only hope of linking the civil war into the coming world war and ensuring what had so long been vainly counted on: English and French aid.

  12. See pp. 57–8.

  13. By September 1938, the Popular Army had 6,444 temporary war-trained officers, according to Alpert, El ejército de la república. The nationalist army up to the end of the war, six months later, had trained 22,936 provisional second lieutenants. (Payne, Politics and the Military in Modern Spain, p. 389.) Both sides mobilized about 1 million men each in the course of the war. Speaking of the republican officers’ training schools, Rojo, the chief of staff, told Azaña that ‘they produce very little’. (Azaña, op. cit., vol. IV, p. 840.)

  14. Prieto proposed having him escorted to the French frontier and freed. The cabinet opposed the idea, and the bishop was held in prison until the following year when, in the last moments of the retreat from Catalonia, he was assassinated.

  15. Despite its name, the Legion had always been composed predominantly of Spaniards.

  16. Early in 1938, the Italian foreign minister, Ciano, told VEGAS LATAPIE and a visiting Spanish mission in Rome that nationalist Spain must come out of the war with a ‘clear and strong ideology, like that of Italy or Germany.’ He went on to attack high Franco officials for being anglophile. The war, he insisted, was being waged more against Britain and British influence in Spain than against the Soviet Union or the republic, VEGAS LATAPIE: ‘The idea that the main danger to Spain came from Britain and France was fairly common in the nationalist zone. Britain still officially recognized the republican government – as by international law it was obliged to, for it was the nationalists, the military, who were the rebels. In spite of that, many British actions – not least Non-Intervention – helped the nationalist cause. I know that the duke of Alba, who was Franco’s unofficial agent in London, was being given information by an officer in the Admiralty on ships carrying arms for republican ports.’