Ghosts of Spain (11 page)

For the last stretch of the road to the
charco
I gave a lift to Benjamín Ruiz. A miner's son from the rebellious northern region of Asturias, he had first seen the inside of a police cell in 1934, at the age of fifteen. An Asturian miners' revolution was put down by Franco on behalf of the elected Conservative
government
. Some consider this to be the first skirmish of the Civil War. Benjamín would later be Tito's
enlace
, his contact for information and food, in El Raso. He was the last person outside his group to see him alive. ‘None of those captured gave me away. If they had
ever found out that I was the
enlace
they would have killed me,' he said. Now in his eighties, he had recently suffered a mild heart attack and had trouble walking. But his spirits were lifted by the sight of so many young people. ‘Back then there were only a handful of us prepared to do anything against Franco. The young people should know that,' he said.

The valley is fairly steep here and, right above the pool, a
narrow
crack in the rock gives way to the cave where Tito had spent his last night. I imagined a handful of desperate men, staring at defeat and wondering whether it was better to fight and die or give up and be executed.

The great-nieces and great-nephews read poetry and threw red carnations on the water. Amongst the revolutionary icons dusted off for the occasion was Ernesto ‘Che' Guevara. ‘Tomorrow when I die, do not come to me to cry, nor look for me in the ground, I am the wind of freedom,' someone read. A wreath of flowers in the purple, red and yellow colours of the Republican flag was cast onto the water and left to float downstream. Curiously distant from the proceedings, however, was Tito's nephew. A man in his sixties, he was Enrique's father and the closest living relative to the deceased ‘hero'. I sidled up to him. ‘Moving, don't you think?' I asked. ‘No,' he replied. ‘Just sad. He had no need to escape from the prison work camp. He didn't even have a long sentence to serve. They were three brothers. But, because of politics, they never saw one another again after 1936.'

The person closest to Tito, I realised, was the most reluctant to participate in what had clearly become a left-wing homage to him. Later, the nephew would, once more, stand away from the crowd as Mariano – on crutches, having badly singed his legs a few days earlier while using a blow-torch to make a rough, iron plaque to Tito – harangued the gathering. The nephew's
generation
had been given the option of being ardent, and privileged, pro-Francoists, downtrodden opponents or simply apolitical. Like many Spaniards of his time, he had chosen the last. He still blamed ‘politics' for the tragedy of his father and his brothers. Mariano's words just made him uneasy.

Franco's regime publicly claimed the
maquis
were nothing more than a bunch of rural
bandoleros
. The Spanish parliament belatedly agreed in 2001 that official references to them as
bandoleros
should be removed. It was something, one of the forty aged survivors who turned up said, that happened ‘twenty years too late'.

Small stories, picked up along the way, gave me some idea of what it had been like to be on the losing side of the war. In Poyales del Hoyo one woman told me that, as a child, a neighbour had tipped a bedpan of faeces and urine over her head in the street ‘for being the daughter of a
rojo
'. Another starving boy, son of a
rojo
, was invited by a local right-winger to dip some bread into a steaming cauldron of stew being prepared for a hunting party, only to have his arm thrust deep into the boiling pot as a cruel joke.

In Palacios del Sil, a small village in the hills of León, an
eighty-four
-year-old woman, Isabel González, told me she was still bitter about the way her father, whose son was shot and left in a
roadside
mass grave, was continually humiliated by his Falangist neighbours. ‘They would come at any time of the day or night and demand milk from the cow or take whatever they wanted. My father just had to do what they said. It killed him,' she recalled.

The desire to humiliate, terrorise and exact revenge – already apparent at the
Valle de Los Caídos
– was summed up by Franco's chief army psychiatrist, Lieutenant Colonel Antonio
Vallejo-Nagera
. This man, who went on to be Spain's first university
professor
of psychology, carried out tests on International Brigade prisoners and Spanish
roja
women prisoners in Málaga in an attempt to prove that Marxists were genetic retards. His
recommendations
on what to do with those from the other side
included
that they should ‘suffer the punishment they deserve, with death the easiest of them all. Some will live in permanent exile, far from the Mother Country which they did not know how to love. Others will lose their freedom, groaning for years in prisons, purging their crimes with forced work in order to earn their daily bread, and will leave their children an infamous legacy: those who
betrayed the Patria cannot leave an honourable surname for their children.'

It was an accurate description of what eventually happened. Some 300,000 people were imprisoned after the war. Tens of thousands were put before kangaroo military courts and shot. Many more went into exile. Some would even lose their children along the way. Even in the later years, when the regime's
totalitarian
instincts gave way to a form of authoritarian pragmatism, there were usually several hundred political prisoners in jail.

The most shocking recent discovery made by those investigating the excesses of Francoism, made in 2002, has been the treatment meted out to some
rojo
children. Historian Ricard Vinyes,
investigating
the fate of women prisoners in Franco's jails during and immediately after the Civil War in the state archives, came across a so-called ‘red file'. These hold documents covered by a law that protects material on events less than fifty years old in which named people are involved. Curiosity got the better of him. When he opened the file, he discovered, first of all, that the events described in it were more than fifty years old. He read on and so discovered part of the story of what became known as ‘the lost children of Francoism'.

These were children separated from
rojo
families and then adopted or handed over to Falange or convent-run orphanages. Some 30,000 children passed through their doors between 1944 and 1955. It was a story that, without realising it, Spaniards had been watching on their television screens for a long time. A popular, American-style live television programme, ‘
¿Quién Sabe
Donde
?' (‘
Who Knows Where
?'), had spent several years tearfully reuniting split families and runaway children with their parents. A surprisingly large number of cases dated back to the period following the Civil War.

Vinyes helped turn the story of the children into a two-part television documentary. Most of the evidence, barring the Falange papers found by Vinyes on the campaign to return the evacuated children of
rojos
to Franco's Spain, was given in the form of personal testimonies. What emerged was not a picture of
a centralised, organised system for removing children from their parents, but of a sinister atmosphere in which, in case of doubt, the authorities or the Church naturally ‘assumed' responsibility for
rojo
children. Vallejo-Nagera had said that saving the
raza
, the race, would require the separation of children from their mothers in places ‘away from democratic environments and where the exaltation of bio-psychic racial qualities is encouraged'. It was the kind of idea that Franco, who wrote the script of a film called, precisely,
Raza
, liked.

Two mothers told how their children were taken from them at birth. ‘They took my son to be baptised but they never brought him back. I never saw him again … I suppose they gave him up for adoption. But they never asked me … The
angustia
, the anguish, will stay with me until I die,' said Emilia Girón,
considered
especially dangerous because her brother was in the
maquis
. Those children evacuated by the Republic to England, France and elsewhere were to be returned, if necessary by force. Vichy France collaborated. The French family of Florencia Calvo tried to hide her, but eventually, at the age of ten, she was shipped back to Spain and sent to an orphanage. ‘I cried because I wanted to be back with my family in France. I wet my bed more than once when I arrived and the nuns made me put the sheets on my head. They made me parade through the dining room with the wet sheets so that I would feel even more shame.' Florencia did not find her sister, María, for another fifty years.

In Britain, where more than 4,000 children had been evacuated. The local Falange agent suggested bringing back the well-behaved, very catholic Basque children first. This would leave the British to look after the children of anarchists and communists from the Asturian coalmines who were described as ‘wild beasts'. They would thus learn ‘what their parents must be like'.

The documentary was shocking. State television, then
controlled
by the People's Party, declined to show it. The regional stations of Catalonia, the Basque Country and Andalucía – all controlled by opposition parties – did broadcast it. There were record audiences in Catalonia.

Amongst the revelations was evidence that Franco's
ultra-Catholic
regime had indulged in the shooting of pregnant women at Torrero prison in Zaragoza province. The evidence came from the prison priest, a Capuchin monk, Gumersindo de Estrella, who tried to persuade a judge to desist. ‘Imagine if I had to wait seven months for each woman who we have to mete out justice to … it is impossible,' the judge had replied.

One testimony, of a seven-day train trip of women prisoners and their children locked into goods wagons, evoked Primo Levi in its detail of hunger, of people forced to live in their own filth, of cold, disease and the death of small children. One of the worst
testimonies
came from Teresa Martín, who spent her infant years in a disease-ridden women's jail in Saturraran, in the Basque
Country
. ‘The memories are still there. If anyone wants the memory of what happened to continue, all they have to do is ask. I am
sixty-two
. This is the first time I have talked about it. It is the first time anybody has asked.'

The Catalan broadcaster was inundated by letters. Some
correspondents
drew perplexed comparisons with Argentina, where the right-wing juntas of the 1970s stole children from prisoners who were secretly killed, the
desaparecidos
. ‘Why do we know more about what happened in Argentina or Germany during their dictatorships than we know about what happened here for forty years, even though it ended twenty-five years ago?' asked one viewer. ‘I am a university-educated woman. I cannot
understand
why, after so many years of study, this has never appeared in a history lesson,' wrote another.

Many victims found it hard to break their silence. I saw this at first hand, in Poyales, where people sometimes lowered their
voices
when talking about the Civil War. The historian Vinyes told me he found ex-prisoners he interviewed sometimes asked him to turn off his tape-recorder, or suddenly changed the subject, if their children appeared. Years of enforced silence had taken their toll. ‘They were scared of recounting things that might disturb the family,' he explained. ‘Fear remains in the blood.' At an exhibition on the takeover of Barcelona by Franco's army, sixty years after
the event, he found one woman sobbing by a board listing the people shot by firing squads. ‘That man is my father,' she explained. ‘My mother never told me. She just said he disappeared during the war.'

There is also evidence, however, that the generations that lived through both the Civil War and early, extreme Francoism were genuinely fed up with it and had applied their own, voluntary, silence to it long before Franco died. Already, in the early 1950s, V. S. Pritchett found them ‘politically tired out'. Gerald Brenan, looking for the grave of the poet and playwright García Lorca, would hear a rightist taxi driver say: ‘Between us all we have brought disgrace on Spain. Once it was a happy country; now it is a miserable one, racked from end to end with hatred.' Jane Duran, a Cuban-born, British-based poet whose father had been a senior Republican officer, devoted an entire book of poems to his silence about the Civil War. That silence, maintained in freedom and exile, had started the day war finished.

In between my visits to the Valley of the Fallen and my other trips looking for Franco, as the comparisons with the Latin American military regimes of the 1970s and 1980s became harder to avoid, I came across a book that had just been published by the Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman. It was called
Exorcising Terror: The
Incredible
Unending Trial of General Augusto Pinochet
. Dorfman, as a prominent intellectual in the Hispanic world and an
anti-Pinochet
campaigner, is something of a hero in Spain. In
Exorcising
Terror
he asked the following question. ‘Pinochet is a mirror … Are we willing to judge the country that gave origin to him?' That is a terrifying sort of a question for a country to answer. Had Spain addressed it? Should it have done? Perhaps silence had helped to avoid it.

Some people suggested to me that, indeed, there was a
general
feeling of shame. Gerald Brenan, during his 1949 journey around Spain, gave more clues. ‘Those who let their fanaticism get the better of them in the Civil War are often obsessed by
feelings of guilt, for no hangover is worse than that which
follows
a civil war and a reign of terror.' Perhaps, just perhaps, that is what this silence had really been about. Spaniards were ashamed and embarrassed – some for having supported him, others for having failed to overthrow him and others simply because he existed. It was like a family secret, best not talked about, best shoved to the back of the drawer and left there until it could do no more harm.