Dying Witnesses of the Spanish Civil War: Rethinking Spain’s Memory Gap in the Time of Covid-19
Serena Aznar Ballarín
The last Spanish survivor of La Nueve, Rafael Gómez Nieto, and the last Spanish survivor of Mauthausen, Juan Romero, both passed away in 2020. Nieto died of COVID-19, while Romero, at the age of 101, died of natural causes. At present, the COVID-19 global pandemic is
threatening what remains of the entire generation that lived through the Spanish Civil war and Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. As a result, the pandemic is silencing testimonies that address the lacuna (gap) in the Spanish collective memory pertaining to this period. Globally, we can notice similar occurrences. In 2020, around 900 Holocaust survivors passed away in Israel due to COVID-19. Similar events are echoed in Argentina, where witnesses of the “dirty war” of the 1970s and 1980s are dying because of the pandemic, without having completed their testimonies and without seeing justice. As Ana Messuti, a human rights lawyer working in the “Querella Argentina” – The Argentinian Lawsuit against crimes committed during the Francoist Spain (1936-1975) – states: “En esta causa hay varios protagonistas pero el tiempo es uno de ellos”
(Carracedo and Bahar 2018); she claims that there are many protagonists in this situation, time being one of them. The plaintiffs, portrayed in the 2018 documentary film The Silence of Others, are also dying due to the pandemic in Spain. For instance, activist and ex -political prisoner Chato Galante died on March 28, 2020 from the virus, and shortly after, Antonio González Pacheco (Billy el Niño), the man who allegedly tortured the former on three occasions, also passed away in May 2020 due to COVID-19. González Pacheco died before being stripped of his four medals of honour, and before ever being judicially investigated for crimes of torture and illegal
detention, despite more than 15 complaints filed in recent years by his victims.
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 2 The year 2020 will be remembered as the beginning of the COVID-19 public health crisis.
However, 2020 also marks the loss of an entire generation of both victims and perpetrators of the Spanish Civil war, the forgetting and silence of unrecorded collective memories of the
Republican side of the civil war and post-war dictatorship. Most significantly, this shocking loss has occurred before voices of participants had a chance to be recorded and recognized. The loss of these witnesses is unfortunate, especially because in 2020, Spain announced the draft of a new Democratic Memory bill, a possible steppingstone towards filling this void in Spanish collective memory. The Memory bill has come too late for many victims that have passed away, still waiting for their requests for recognition to be heard. This bill is an opportunity to address past traumas and is intended to help Spain’s progress towards its development as a democratic society. The Memory bill addresses historical wounds that were never truly closed, due to the institutionalized amnesia imposed by the 1977 Amnesty, which prohibited the scrutinization and examination of these wounds for decades, even after the end of the Francoist Dictatorship.
In this paper, I analyze how there is a lacuna (or gap in memory) in the Spanish collective memory, similar to Raczymow’s concept of “mémoire trouée”, created by the systematic murder of the European Jews in the Holocaust. This has resulted in a divided society, where the
terminology of winners and losers is still used. I argue that this binary opposition should be abandoned, as there is enough room to find common ground. With guidance from the Holocaust as an example, as well as from other post-military Dictatorships in Latin America, Spanish society is finally positioning itself to address the lacuna in its shared memory. The valuable lived experiences, memories and testimonies of the Franco generation have been lost at a pivotal moment in Spain’s history.
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 3 A Country Without Memory: The Development of Spain’s Lacuna
In the aftermath of civil wars, a forgive and forget attitude is commonly practiced by countries to facilitate a speedy social and political integration, especially with the application of amnesties. In her discussion of Meier’s book, The Imperative to Forget and the Inescapability of Remembering (2010), Aleida Assmann examines how this approach could be traced back to Ancient Greece, in particular to the process of pacification after the Peloponnesian War based on “Mneisikakein”, or the “prohibition to-remember” (54). Another example cited is the 1648 Peace Treaty signed after the 30 Year War, which contained the words “perpetua oblivio et amnestia” or perpetual
oblivion and amnesty (54). During the 1980s and 1990s, in the af termath of military dictatorships and “dirty wars”, some countries in South America, notably Argentina and Chile, gave in to social pressures and decided to overturn their amnesties, developing Truth Commissions and implementing new investigation committees (Assmann 2012, 62). This set a precedent for Spain to address the injustice and traumas of its past. When Dictator Francisco Franco died in 1975 and the country slowly started transitioning into a democracy, the political left demanded an amnesty to liberate the prisoners incarcerated for their political views during the Dictatorship. However, while this new law guaranteed the release of all political prisoners, it also guaranteed that the Francoist repressors would not be held accountable for their crimes (Davis 2005, 863). A pact of oblivion was established: “Spain chose amnesty and a kind of institutionalized amnesia” (Davies 2005, 863). According to Paloma Aguilar, there was also a sense of collective guilt and a fear of a right-wing military coup, even a return to civil war (2001, 94). In a discussion of the perceived need to ignore the past in postwar Germany, Assmann argues that this desperate need to move on resulted in a democracy founded upon a lack of “self-critical discourse” and fear of returning to a totalitarian regime (2012, 64). In Spain, this fear would later prove to be founded, given General Antonio Tejero’s failed attempt of a coup-d’état in 1981 that put Spain’s young democracy to the test. Forgetting was seen then as a “civic virtue and peace (the prevention of a renewed round of violence) was considered as more important than (transitional) justice” (Baer and Sznaider 2015, 335).
The forty years of silence, repression, and the systematic erasing of Republican memory in Spain since the end of the Civil War resulted in a “one sided-version of history” (Assmann 2012, 64).
This dominant version of history has been preached for years in schools, through monuments and
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 4 anniversary celebrations, declaring July 18 –the day of the military coup – a national holiday (which only ended in 1977), and
To this day, national laws state that Spaniards will receive double pay checks from their employers in the month of July, just as they do in December in celebration of Christmas (Cazorla 2010, 19).
This miseducation and the silencing surrounding it has led to a partial collective memory for the generations born after the war. This lack of true memory has manifested itself as a lacuna: a gap in memory similar to the “mémoire trouée” created by the systematic murder of the European Jews in the Holocaust. Henri Raczymow, a second-generation French author, defines the term mémoire trouée as a hole in memory, a “parenthesis” in his memory “formed by the before and after, the prewar and postwar; it was a frame in whose center lay silence. For me at that time, only silence could evoke the horror. A taboo weighed upon it” (1994, 102). The memory of the Holocaust for him is “a memory of no knowledge that was handed down to him” (Sicher 200, 64), and for many of those survivors:
there are neither graves nor any family photographs of the dead. Children hidden in the Holocaust may have been too young to remember their original families and identities.
Mourning work becomes well-nigh impossible, while the psychological scars of the trauma leave their mark on the next generation (Sicher 2000, 63).
The concept of mémoire trouée is similar to experiences of the Spanish second and third generations after the Civil War. Older generations never openly discussed their horrific experiences or did so late in their lives. Generations growing up after Franco never formally learned about the experiences of previous generations and the undocumented version of Spain’s Civil War history in educational curriculums. For the most part, families also did not discuss experiences in the home, out of fear. Spanish journalist Juan Miguel Baquero addresses this national amnesia among the post-war generations in his book El país de la desmemoria (2019) and states: “España es el país de la desmemoria” (16). Spain is a country where historical memory is still an unresolved matter.
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 5 Recovering the Memories of los Paseados
The 1977 Amnesty Law prevented any judge from investigating the crimes of Franco’s Regime.
To this day, thousands of people still do not know what happened to their loved ones or cannot give them a proper burial. As Aleida Assmann states, this silence imposed by the new law and by society itself “did not dissolve the memory of the traumatic past; it was materially preserved in the earth and in the families” (2012, 66). According to the 2014 United Nations “Report of the Committee on Enforced Disappearances,” from July 1936 to December 1951 in Spain, there were 114,226 enforced disappearances. Moreover, a recent study financed by the Spanish government states that around 20,500 bodies remain buried in mass graves all around the country, and only 7,000 could be recovered. Francisco Etxeberria —anthropologist, medical examiner, and director of the report, stated in an October 2019 interview to the newspaper Diario Público that toomuch time has passed since those deaths, making the task of recovering the bodies much more arduous:
La mayoría o se exhumaron o se han perdido para siempre por el paso del tiempo.
Además, se está identificando a uno de cada tres cuerpos, porque hay limitaciones técnicas. Con todo, quedan miles y cada día seguimos buscando.
Most were either exhumed or have been lost forever due to the passage of time. In addition, only one out of three bodies is being identified, because there are technical limitations. Nevertheless, there are thousands left and we continue searching every day.
These victims are called the paseados, those who were “taken for a walk”, executed and buried in an unmarked grave. Emilio Silva, head of the most prominent memory organization in Spain, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARHM), is the grandchild of a paseado.
Silva was the driving force behind the first public exhumation in Spain in 2000, that was carried out following a scientific method still applied in exhumations today. While waiting for the exhumation to take place, he wrote the article “Mi abuelo también fue un desaparecido”
published on October 8, 2000, in La Crónica de León. Until that moment, the word desaparecido had only been used to refer to people who had disappeared in countries like Argentina, Chile or
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 6 even Cambodia. In a 2020 interview for the podcast De eso no se habla, Emilio Silva
commented on how he came to use the word. By calling his grandfather a “desaparecido”, Silva managed to connect what happened to him — and to the thousands murdered in Spain — to other stories of persecution in the world, and he also gave them juridical recognition. As Isabel Cadenas Cañón states:
Esto no era algo solamente simbólico. Llamar a esas personas desaparecidas implica darles reconocimiento jurídico, aplicarles una categoría del derecho internacional, que obliga a investigar los hechos y los culpables y a reparar a las víctimas. Implica hacerlas reales y hacerlas visibles, implica que el Estado tiene la obligación de hacerlas aparecer (2020, 21:24-21:44).
This was not merely symbolic. Calling these people desaparecidos implies giving them legal recognition, applying to them a category of international law, which compels them to investigate the facts and the culprits and to make amends to the victims. It implies making them real and making them visible; it implies that the State has the obligation to make them reappear.
This concept of borrowing from other stories of persecution echoes Michael Rothberg’s (2009) view of memory as multidirectional. In his discussion of Jewish Holocaust collective memory, Rothberg argues that we should see memory as multidirectional, “as subject to ongoing
negotiation, cross-referencing, and borrowing; as productive and not privative” (Multidirectional Memory 2009, 3). Rothberg’s concept of multidirectional memory is a valuable tool in
understanding Spanish memory politics. It is exceptionally relevant in Spain’s case, because 9 000 Spanish Republicans were deported to Nazi extermination camps, the majority of whom would never return (Gaspar Celaya 2010). According to Baer and Sznaider,“The Holocaust serves not only as a bridging metaphor and a powerful symbol, but also as a cognitive model — a script —for structuring and framing the events of the Spanish past” (2015, 330). Historians even use the terms associated with the Nazi regime such as “genocide,” “war of extermination,”
or “Holocaust” to refer to the atrocities committed during the Civil War or Franco’s dictatorship (Baer & Sznaider 2015, 337). The ARMH has used the Holocaust not only as a “human rights frame” (338), but it has also included it explicitly and implicitly in the discussion of the events of
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 7 the Spanish Civil War and the subsequent Francoist Dictatorship (337). Thus, the Spanish
memory gap is being addressed with the help of terminology and legal precedents from other nations with histories of persecution and overturned amnesties.
Monuments of Memory and Public Reactions
A partial, incomplete and lacking memory of what happened has been transmitted in Spain’s private and the collective memory. It is also present in contemporary memory politics and the public space. There is an imbalance in how both sides —Francoist and Republican— have publicly been honored by the State since the Civil War. Even today, we witness in Spain a strong competitive memory at play. Competitive memory is defined by Rothberg in Multidirectional Memory (2009) as “a struggle for recognition in which there can be only winners and losers” (3).
This struggle is especially visible through the monuments honoring both sides in the Spanish Civil War. Unlike countries such as Germany, which have addressed the consequences of fascism with their “Vergangenheitsbewältigung” or “mastering the past” (Assmann 2012, 59), Spain has yet to acknowledge the fallout of a Civil War and Franco’s 40-year dictatorship.
Numerous monuments honoring the Francoist dictatorship have been left untouched in Spain. A 2021 master dissertation by Eduardo España compiled in an interactive map all the traces of Franco’s regime in Spain — streets and reliefs, monuments, tombstones and inscriptions, and house plaques — which amount to more than 5 340 commemorative sites all over the country. In contrast, to this day, very few monuments exist to honor those who fought for the Republic, or the victims of the Francoist repression.
In recent years, every time a monument is put in place to commemorate the victims of the Civil War and the Dictatorship, it is met with reservations and protests. These protests argue that only one side is being honored and that there were casualties from both fronts. This does not allow the
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 8 lacuna in the memorialization of the
Republican side to be addressed. Sometimes the monument is even vandalized, even during the periods of quarantine decreed by the
government in 2020.
One major example of disrespect and
destruction of monuments is that of “El Mirador de la Memoria'' (Memory Lookout) (Figure 1). This monument gained notoriety by figuring quite prominently in the
documentary The Silence of Others. It was built to honor those who were imprisoned, tortured, exiled or displaced during the war and the autocracy, and is accompanied by the inscription: “A los olvidados de la Guerra civil y la dictadura. En estas sierras el olvido está lleno de memoria.”
(To the forgotten of the Civil War and the dictatorship. In these mountains, oblivion is full of memory).
The Memorial was inaugurated in 2009. A few days after its inauguration, someone fired a round of shots at the statues. Francisco Cerdenilla, the sculptor, decided that the projectile impacts that can be seen in the sculptures completed his work, and therefore retained them to show one more attempt to eliminate the memory of victims. The shooter has not been identified and his true motives are still unknown. Perhaps this is not a case of political protest, but it is striking how even seventy years after the end of the Civil War, and forty years into a democratic system, someone would fire a gun against a monument honoring the victims of a dictatorship. In October 2020, amid the pandemic, two fires a few days apart damaged the area around the “Memory Lookout”, which made the Association for the Recovery of the Historical Memory of
Extremadura (ARMHEX) suspicious of the fact that the fires could have been another attack to the sculptures. In May 2020, the monument “La llama Eterna” (“The Eternal Flame”) located in Chelva (Valencia) that honors the people who lost their lives and fought for freedom and
democracy during the Civil War and during Franco's dictatorship was intentionally destroyed.
The culprit has not yet been found.
Figure 1: “El mirador de la memoria”, photo by Jesús Pérez Pacheco.
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 9 These attacks on public monuments reflect Rothberg’s notion of competitive memory, that is, the belief that the public space is “limited” and that “already-established groups engage in a life-and- death struggle” for recognition (2009, 5). The political right often defends its posture that by honoring the victims of Francoism, the victims of Republican repression are being ignored.
Another common argument is that “they [the left] are trying to change history in order to look after their own interests”1. But does the remembrance of Republican deaths really erase the victims of Republican repression? It is only in recent years that the victims of Francoism and those fallen for the Republic are finally being acknowledged and remembered, because during the 40-year dictatorship, the only official victims were those “mártires” (martyrs) and “Caídos por Dios y por España” (Fallen for God and Spain) (Ledesma and Rodrigo 2006, 236). For those murdered by the Republicans, there was no oblivion under Franco, as stated by the newspaper ABC on April 1st, 1942: “La sangre de los que cayeron por la Patria no consiente el olvido, la esterilidad ni la traición” (ABC 1942). According to historians like Preston and Álvarez Rey (Baquero), those victims were honored and memorialized in every town, and if they were buried in a mass grave, they were exhumed after the war and given a proper burial paid by the State . In an interview for the Spanish newspaper El País in July 2019,. Julián Casanova, renowned professor of contemporary history, stated that:
It is true that not all the victims of the ‘Reds’ were found, but those missing were registered as murdered; there was a general cause, tributes and rewards, astounding measures that favored the winners over the losers (Junquera 2019).
Looking at the question of memory, the notion of binary oppositions such as winners and losers, a terminology widely used during the dictatorship, should be abandoned. In Spain’s collective memory lacuna, there is enough room to find common ground in shared memory. Instead of looking at memory as something limited, we should see it as multidirectional, which is Rothberg’s alternative to competitive memory. Perhaps now amidst the health crisis, when people of all political affiliations are potential victims, the time has come for Spain to rethink its memory politics, and to follow Latin American examples of creating truth commissions, to uncover what happened after the Civil War and the dictatorship .
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 10 Memory Politics in the era of COVID-19
During the difficult time of the pandemic, memory politics have become very much a part of the general conversation in Spain. For instance, in September 2020, the government announced a new bill of Democratic Memory, which goes f arther than the previous 2007 Historical Memory Law in addressing fundamental issues, such as the victims’ recognition and the condemnation of the Dictatorship. In a September 2020 speech, Vice President Carmen Calvo announced that this bill is being made for our present and future, not only for our past: “Es una ley para la
democracia española, que tiene que ver con el pasado pero que tiene mucho que ver con el presente y con el futuro”. The draft bill is named “Anteproyecto de Ley de Memoria Democrática” (Draft Bill of Democratic Memory 2020) and its objective is to promote the recovery and dissemination of democratic memory, focused on the knowledge of the vindication and defense of democratic values and fundamental rights and freedoms throughout our
contemporary history. The change in the name from the 2007 “Historical Memory” to the 2020
“Bill for Democratic Memory” shows a change of approach: remembering the past is now a sign of democracy and of politics of inclusion. A significant clause of this bill makes associations that glorify the late dictator’s memory such as the Franco Foundation, illegal. It also points to the need of establishing a specialized prosecutor’s office for democratic memory and human rights, and a national DNA bank to help with the exhumation of victims from mass graves. This should all be funded with public money. The bill also invalidates all the summary trials held in Francoist Spain, thus honoring the demands brought forward by historical memory associations. The bill also proposes a change in education and Spanish high school curriculum to include the tenets of democratic memory and train teachers to deliver these new concepts. Commenting on this change, Carmen Calvo states:
Spanish democracy could not afford one more day without a law like this one,” said Calvo. “Our young people need to know where we come from. They need knowledge about what must never happen again. (Carlos E. Cué 2020)
Memory Associations are somewhat wary of this project. The fifth State Meeting of Collectives of Historical Memory and Victims of Franco's regime was held on October 10th and 24th, 2020.
In the meetings, the Memory Associations discussed the new bill and concluded that while it is a
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 11 very important step in the right direction, it is still not enough. There are still many aspects to be amended. They also regret that it has come too late, as thousands have died waiting for their requests of justice, truth, and reparation (Conclusiones 2020, 3). The associations have demanded that the bill include an explicit condemnation of Francoism as a criminal regime, following the terms of the United Nations adopted in 1946, as well the declaration of the nullity of the 1977 Amnesty, or at least of those sections that allow for the impunity of the Francoist Dictatorship. In their opinion, the law should also include the right to access the archives of Francoist repression, public or private, which are still not open for consultation and study, and are crucial to ensure the right to justice and reparation for the victims of the dictatorship (2 -3).
The ARMH also expressed serious concerns about the government’s decision to give individual municipalities the authority to carry out exhumations instead of coordinating this matter
centrally. In a statement released in September 2020, the association claims that some town halls might object and interfere with the exhumations depending on their political allegiances.
Right-wing political parties in the opposition, such as the Partido Popular and Vox, have reacted by stating that they will not support the new law of Democratic Memory. Vox even accused the government of wanting to destroy the Spanish Transition, asking the following questions: “¿Por qué pretende liquidar ahora el Pacto de la Transición? [...] Estaría bien que enterraran el
guerracivilismo y se pusieran a mirar al futuro” (Casillas Bayo 2020). This is not surprising.
Assmann states that the demands for the perpetrators to be prosecuted, as well as for the victims to be compensated, could result in the reopening of old wounds and a polarized society (2012, 66), but what if those wounds have never been closed for the last 70 years, and the trauma of the pandemic is making them fester again?
Attending to old wounds does not necessarily have to lead to polarization and new conflicts if demands are presented as integrative potential within the Spanish cultural framework. It can be argued that reopening the debate will have positive consequences on collective memory and society, and that it should be supported by Spanish society as a whole:
It must be founded on a general consensus that such self-critical memory work is a necessary step to a civil society. If understood as a transitional step, it does not need to
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 12 divide the community; on the contrary, it may decisively contribute to the democratic consolidation of the common cause. (Assmann 2012, 67)
A bill like this is an opportunity to move on together as a democratic society and actively fill the lacuna in Spanish memory before the remaining aging witnesses are taken away by the pandemic and old age. As Sicher points out: “No nation can have a future without acknowledgment of its origins and development or without some understanding of its past” (2000, 60). The pandemic has brought a sense of urgency to listen to the story of the witnesses before it is too late.
Since the beginning of the pandemic, the virus has been especially lethal towards the elderly population. The relatives who have waited since 1939 to recover the remains of their loved ones and give them a proper burial are now also in danger of disappearing. More than 70 years have passed since the Civil War, and according to Baer and Sznaider, most of the direct witnesses have already passed away (2015, 330).
For example, María Martín, an 83- year-old woman who appears in the 2019 documentary The Silence of Others, is one of the elderly interviewees who tells the story of victims of Spain's 40-year dictatorship (Figure 2). She walks through her village to lay flowers on the side of the road where her mother was killed and buried in a mass grave under this highway. With her haunting, breathless voice, María exp lains how her mother was killed at the beginning of the war. However, there are still those who have not had a chance to tell their tragic story, and the pandemic is threatening to silence them forever. María passed away in 2014, before the documentary was finished. The remains of her mother, despite her daughter’s (and now her granddaughter’s) attempts to recover her body, are still buried below the highway, alongside the bodies of other twenty -seven men and three women, killed on the same day in 1936.
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 13 Cristina Fallarás, a Spanish journalist who wrote about the COVID-19 crisis and its impact on the elderly in an article titled “Los ancianos son nosotros” (The elderly are us) states:
Son memoria, nuestra memoria y la memoria de la vida misma. Son Historia. Son lo que éramos antes de ser, antes de imaginar siquiera que lo seríamos. Y son sabiduría. En España, sin ir más lejos, hemos dejado morir a una generación sin preguntarles por el dolor del golpe de Estado, de la tortura, de la Guerra […] De nada sirve el deseo, la juventud, sin la memoria que atesoran los ancianos. O sea aquello que somos, que nos ha traído hasta aquí. Más allá, sólo queda la ignorancia (Fallarás 2020).
They are memory, our memory and the memory of life itself. They are history. They are what we were before we were, before we even imagined we would be. And they are wisdom. In Spain, without going any further, we have let a generation die without asking them about the pain of the coup d'état, of torture, of the War [...]. Desire, youth are useless without the memory that the elderly treasure. That is what we are, what has brought us here. Beyond that, only ignorance remains.
This statement highlights a critical need to listen and act upon the requests of the elderly for justice and compensation, which have long been ignored. We owe it to previous generations, but also to ourselves, because their story is ours as well. The year 2020 has been devastating for historical memory in Spain. However, it has also been a year of small and great a chievements, beginning with the historical ruling of the Pazo de Meirás. The ruling determined that the Franco family should hand over Franco’s summer residence to the State on the grounds that it never rightfully belonged to the dictator’s family. This is a small step in the right direction. It is also significant that, for the first time, the last democratically elected president of the Second Republic, Manuel Azaña, received an institutional homage in the congress in November 2020.
COVID-19 has threatened to eliminate those whose story has not yet been heard, but it has also accelerated some governmental decisions and the drafting of new bills. In other words, the trauma of COVID-19 may have helped in the struggle for the recognition of past traumas and achievement of justice.
MIC (Memoria, Identité, and Community), Volume 1 (2021). 14 Notes
1 In the words of Suárez Iliana — a Spanish politician from the Popular Party (PP) and son of Adolfo Suárez, the first Spanish President duringSpain’s Transition into Democracy— recovered in a 2019 article by Natalia Junquera at El País.
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