by Pete Ayrton
The bombing of cities
Conditions on the home front were harsh and became harsher as food supplies ran low and the towns in Republican areas were subjected to the aerial bombardment of German and Italian planes. Juan Goytisolo’s mother was killed in one such air raid over Barcelona:
She had gone shopping in the center of the city and was caught there by the arrival of the airplanes, near where the Gran Vía crosses the Paseo de Gracia. She was a stranger, also, to those who, once the alert was over, picked up from the ground that woman who was already eternally young in the memory of all who knew her, the lady who, in her coat, hat, and high-heeled shoes, clung tightly to the bag where she kept the presents she had bought for her children, which the latter, days afterward, in suits dyed black as custom ruled, would receive, in silence, from the hands of Aunt Rosario: a romantic novel for Marta; tales of Doc Savage and the Shadow for josé Agustín; a book of illustrated stories for me; some wooden dolls for Luis that would remain scattered round the attic without my brother ever touching them.
(p. 255)
For Laurie Lee, who witnessed the bombing of Valencia, it was clear that important lessons were being learnt by the Fascists:
Those few minutes bombing I’d witnessed were simply an early essay in a new kind of warfare, soon to be known – and accepted – throughout the world.
Few acknowledged at the time that it was General Franco, the Supreme Patriot and Defender of the Christian Faith, who allowed these first trial-runs to be inflicted on the bodies of his countrymen, and who delivered up vast areas of Spain to be the living testing-grounds for Hitler’s new bomber-squadrons, culminating in the annihilation of the ancient city of Guernica.
(p. 123)
The bombing of Guernica on 26 April 1937, carried out by German and Italian air forces at the behest of Franco, was systematically planned to inflict maximum damage and loss of life to the region’s inhabitants (for example, it took place on Monday, a market day). It became the most famous of the bombing raids through Picasso’s mural commissioned by the Republican government for the World’s Fair in Paris, and completed in June 1937 – a mural that then toured the world.
The Retreat/La Retirada
As the war advanced and Franco’s forces occupied more and more of the country, many in the Republican areas saw no other way out than to flee to France. After the fall of Bilbao in June 1937,120,000 refugees fled the Basque Country and were taken by boat to ports on the Atlantic coast. Another several hundreds of thousands Republicans crossed the border into France from Catalonia after the fall of Barcelona in January 1939. The conditions of La Retirada were perilous and many died on the way. The French border guards were rough in their treatment of the refugees and made clear their contempt.
The French government of Daladier quickly recognized the legitimacy of Franco’s triumph and was hostile to the refugees who were sent to internment camps from which they were offered the choice of joining the Foreign Legion or deployment into work brigades. Many of these brigades were sent to the North of France to work on strengthening the Maginot line fortifications against a German invasion. Conditions in the camps were brutal and totally inadequate to deal with the numbers of refugees – in March 1939, there were 260,000 Spaniards in the camps in the Roussillon, which was more than the local French population.
Today the camps are almost forgotten and over the years Republicans and their descendants have had to fight for an occasional plaque to remember their existence. Remembering is essential as Jordi Soler writes in The Feast of the Bear:
Besides, this is the twenty-first century, and Spain and France are no longer what they were in 1939; we don’t have pesetas or francs anymore, and there isn’t even a frontier between the two countries: to get to the place where the event was being held, I had climbed into my car, which was parked outside my house in Calle Muntaner in Barcelona, and driven for two hours without stopping once to Argelès-sur-Mer; in two hours I had completed the same journey it had taken my grandfather Arcadi and most of the Republican exodus several weeks to cover in 1939. The traces of that exile have been buried beneath a toll motorway you can drive along at a hundred and forty kilometres an hour, and a crowd of tourists who, smothered in cream, expose their bodies to the sun on the long beach of Argelès-sur-Mer. Very little can be done to ward off oblivion, but it is essential we do so, otherwise we will end up without foundations or perspective. That is what I thought, and that was the reason why in the end I gave up my domestic morning, took off my pyjamas and got into my car, still thinking obsessively of that verse from the Russian film I had memorized and which had robbed me of sleep; ‘Live in the house, and the house will exist’.
(p. 382)
There are clear parallels in the treatment of Republican refugees in 1936 and the treatment of refugees and political exiles from Africa and Syria in Europe in 2015. Both are (were) treated harshly and made to feel unwelcome in the countries they escaped to.
The Civil War continues to attract the attention of artists and intellectuals: it divided regions, towns, villages and families and to an extent still does. It also reminds us that there can be times when not getting involved can have disastrous consequences. In 1936 this was recognized by a generation of idealists.. As Laurie Lee writes:
But in our case, I believe, we shared something else, unique to us at that time – the chance to make one grand, uncomplicated gesture of personal sacrifice and faith which might never occur again. Certainly, it was the last time this century that a generation had such an opportunity before the fog of nationalism and mass-slaughter closed in.
(p. 117)
The idealism of the International Brigades is very much a gold standard for altruistic behaviour. This idealism was disingenuously invoked by Hilary Benn, Shadow Foreign Secretary, in his speech in December 2015 in support of British government bombing in Syria: ‘What we know about fascists is that they need to be defeated. It is why socialists, trade unionists and others joined the International Brigade in the 1930s to fight against Franco ... ’
The International Brigades, unlike the British air force, were fighting in support of a democratically elected government. Even so, those who went to Spain were threatened with the Foreign Enlistment Act of 1870. The British government warned that anyone volunteering to fight would be ‘liable on conviction to imprisonment up to two years’.
Now, eighty years after the end of the Civil War, the issues that it raises are just as relevant. The strength of nationalist feelings in Catalonia, the Basque Country and Galicia, the desire of those who lost kith and kin in the war to know their fate, the need for a history that treats equally the vanquished and the victors, and an examination of the idealism that draws individuals into armed conflicts, are part of the legacy of the war. I hope the writings in ¡No Pasáran! illuminate this legacy.
* The Spanish Civil War, Helen Graham, OUP, 2005. Much of the important history on the Civil War has been written in English – by Paul Preston, Helen Graham, Herbert Southworth and Michael Richards, amongst others.
LUIS BUÑUEL
THE CIVIL WAR [1936–1939]
from My Last Breath
translated by Abigail Israel
IN JULY 1936, Franco arrived in Spain with his Moroccan troops and the firm intention of demolishing the Republic and re-establishing ‘order.’ My wife and son had gone back to Paris the month before, and I was alone in Madrid. Early one morning, I was jolted awake by a series of explosions and cannon fire; a Republican plane was bombing the Montaña army barracks.
At this time, all the barracks in Spain were filled with soldiers. A group of Falangists had ensconced themselves in the Montaña and had been firing from its windows for several days, wounding many civilians. On the morning of July 18, groups of workers, armed and supported by Azaña’s Republican assault troops, attacked the barracks. It was all over by ten o’clock, the rebel officers and Falangists executed. The war had begun.
It was hard to believe. Listening to the
distant machine-gun fire from my balcony, I watched a Schneider cannon roll by in the street below, pulled by a couple of workers and some gypsies. The revolution we’d felt gathering force for so many years, and which I personally had so ardently desired, was now going on before my eyes. All I felt was shock.
Two weeks later, Elie Faure, the famous art historian and an ardent supporter of the Republican cause, came to Madrid for a few days. I went to visit him one morning at his hotel and can still see him standing at his window in his long underwear, watching the demonstrations in the street below and weeping at the sight of the people in arms. One day, we watched a hundred peasants marching by, four abreast, some armed with hunting rifles and revolvers, some with sickles and pitchforks. In an obvious effort at discipline, they were trying very hard to march in step. Faure and I both wept.
It seemed as if nothing could defeat such a deep-seated popular force, but the joy and enthusiasm that colored those early days soon gave way to arguments, disorganization, and uncertainty – all of which lasted until November 1936, when an efficient and disciplined Republican organization began to emerge. I make no claims to writing a serious account of the deep gash that ripped through my country in 1936. I’m not a historian, and I’m certainly not impartial. I can only try to describe what I saw and what I remember. At the same time, I do see those first months in Madrid very clearly. Theoretically, the city was still in the hands of the Republicans, but Franco had already reached Toledo, after occupying other cities like Salamanca and Burgos. Inside Madrid, there was constant sniping by Fascist sympathizers. The priests and the rich landowners – in other words, those with conservative leanings, whom we assumed would support the Falange – were in constant danger of being executed by the Republicans. The moment the fighting began, the anarchists liberated all political prisoners and immediately incorporated them into the ranks of the Confederación Nacional de Trabajo, which was under the direct control of the anarchist federation. Certain members of this federation were such extremists that the mere presence of a religious icon in someone’s room led automatically to Casa Campo, the public park on the outskirts of the city where the executions took place. People arrested at night were always told that they were going to ‘take a little walk.’
It was advisable to use the intimate ‘tu’ form of address for everyone, and to add an energetic compañero whenever you spoke to an anarchist, or a camarada to a Communist. Most cars carried a couple of mattresses tied to the roof as protection against snipers. It was dangerous even to hold out your hand to signal a turn, as the gesture might be interpreted as a Fascist salute and get you a fast round of gunfire. The senoritos, the sons of ‘good’ families, wore old caps and dirty clothes in order to look as much like workers as they could, while on the other side the Communist party recommended that the workers wear white shirts and ties.
Ontañon, who was a friend of mine and a well-known illustrator, told me about the arrest of Sáenz de Heredia, a director who’d worked for me on La hija de Juan Simón and Quién me quiere a mí? Sáenz, Primo de Rivera’s first cousin, had been sleeping on a park bench because he was afraid to go home, but despite his precautions he had been picked up by a group of Socialists and was now awaiting execution because of his fatal family connections. When I heard about this, I immediately went to the Rotpence Studios, where I found that the employees, as in many other enterprises, had formed a council and were holding a meeting. When I asked how Sáenz was, they all replied that he was ‘just fine,’ that they had ‘nothing against him.’ I begged them to appoint a delegation to go with me to the Calle de Marqués de Riscál, where he was being held, and to tell the Socialists what they’d just told me. A few men with rifles agreed, but when we arrived, all we found was one guard sitting at the gate with his rifle lying casually in his lap. In as threatening a voice as I could muster, I demanded to see his superior, who turned out to be a lieutenant I’d had dinner with the evening before.
‘Well, Buñuel,’ he said calmly, ‘what’re you doing here?’
I explained that we really couldn’t execute everyone, that of course we were all very aware of Sáenz’s relationship to Primo de Rivera, but that the director had always acted perfectly correctly. The delegates from the studio also spoke in his favor, and eventually he was released, only to slip away to France and later join the Falange. After the war, he went back to directing movies, and even made a film glorifying Franco! The last I saw of him was at a long, nostalgic lunch we had together in the 1950s at the Cannes Festival.
During this time, I was very friendly with Santiago Carrillo, the secretary of the United Socialist Youth. Finding myself unarmed in a city where people were firing on each other from all sides, I went to see Carrillo and asked for a gun.
‘There are no more,’ he replied, opening his empty drawer.
After a prodigious search, I finally got someone to give me a rifle. I remember one day when I was with some friends on the Plaza de la Independencia and the shooting began. People were firing from rooftops, from windows, from behind parked cars. It was bedlam, and there I was, behind a tree with my rifle, not knowing where to fire. Why bother having a gun, I wondered, and rushed off to give it back.
The first three months were the worst, mostly because of the total absence of control. I, who had been such an ardent subversive, who had so desired the overthrow of the established order, now found myself in the middle of a volcano, and I was afraid. If certain exploits seemed to me both absurd and glorious – like the workers who climbed into a truck one day and drove out to the monument to the Sacred Heart of Jesus about twenty kilometers south of the city, formed a firing squad, and executed the statue of Christ – I nonetheless couldn’t stomach the summary executions, the looting, the criminal acts. No sooner had the people risen and seized power than they split into factions and began tearing one another to pieces. This insane and indiscriminate settling of accounts made everyone forget the essential reasons for the war.
I went to nightly meetings of the Association of Writers and Artists for the Revolution, where I saw most of my friends – Alberti, Bergamín, the journalist Corpus Varga, and the poet Altolaguirre, who believed in God and who later produced my Mexican Bus Ride. The group was constantly erupting in passionate and interminable arguments, many of which concerned whether we should just act spontaneously or try to organize ourselves. As usual, I was torn between my intellectual (and emotional) attraction to anarchy and my fundamental need for order and peace. And there we sat, in a life-and-death situation, but spending all our time constructing theories.
Franco continued to advance. Certain towns and cities remained loyal to the Republic, but others surrendered to him without a struggle. Fascist repression was pitiless; anyone suspected of liberal tendencies was summarily executed. But instead of trying to form an organization, we debated – while the anarchists persecuted priests. I can still hear the old cry: ‘Come down and see. There’s a dead priest in the street.’ As anticlerical as I was, I couldn’t condone this kind of massacre, even though the priests were not exactly innocent bystanders. They took up arms like everybody else, and did a fair bit of sniping from their bell towers. We even saw Dominicans with machine guns. A few of the clergy joined the Republican side, but most went over to the Fascists. The war spared no one, and it was impossible to remain neutral, to declare allegiance to the utopian illusion of a tercera España.
Some days, I was very frightened. I lived in an extremely bourgeois apartment house and often wondered what would happen if a wild bunch of anarchists suddenly broke into my place in the middle of the night to ‘take me for a walk.’ Would I resist? How could I? What could I say to them?
The city was rife with stories; everyone had one. I remember hearing about some nuns in a convent in Madrid who were on their way to chapel and stopped in front of the statue of the Virgin holding the baby Jesus in her arms. With a hammer and chisel, the mother superior removed the child and carried it away.
‘We’ll bring him ba
ck,’ she told the Virgin, ‘when we’ve won the war.’
The Republican camp was riddled with dissension. The main goal of both Communists and Socialists was to win the war, while the anarchists, on the other hand, considered the war already won and had begun to organize their ideal society.
‘We’ve started a commune at Torrelodones,’ Gil Bel, the editor of the labor journal El Sindicalista, told me one day at the Café Castilla. ‘We already have twenty houses, all occupied. You ought to take one.’
I was beside myself with rage and surprise. Those houses belonged to people who’d fled or been executed. And as if that weren’t enough, Torrelodones stood at the foot of the Sierra de Guadarrama, only a few kilometers from the Fascist front lines. Within shooting distance of Franco’s army, the anarchists were calmly laying out their utopia.
On another occasion, I was having lunch in a restaurant with the musician Remacha, one of the directors of the Filmófono Studios where I’d once worked. The son of the restaurant owner had been seriously wounded fighting the Falangists in the Sierra de Guadarrama. Suddenly, several armed anarchists burst into the restaurant yelling, ‘Salud compañeros!’ and shouting for wine. Furious, I told them they should be in the mountains fighting instead of emptying the wine cellar of a good man whose son was fighting for his life in a hospital. They sobered up quickly and left, taking the bottles with them, of course.
