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 arethat 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 delHoyo 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
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 arethat 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 delHoyo 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
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