The Spanish Civil War is personal. Nearly every family has a link to it
Kavita Puri is a journalist, author and broadcaster. Her BBC Radio 4 series Three Pounds in My Pocket is currently available on BBC Sounds
I WAS SHOCKED TO READ RECENTLY THAT THERE are still an estimated 114,000 bodies in unmarked mass graves in Spain. They are victims of the Spanish Civil War, fought between 1936 and 1939 between Republicans, loyal to the nation’s left-leaning government, and Nationalists, led by a military junta among which Francisco Franco played a key role. The sheer extent of the mass graves represents what cultural anthropologist Francisco Ferrándiz has called “an underground landscape of terror”.
Some of the bodies were excavated near a place I visit regularly, in one of four close villages in rural southern Spain. In the civil war, two were Republican, two Nationalist. The battlements still exist in the ground. But that time is rarely spoken of, when friends, neighbours and even families were divided. Taking my cues from those around me, I know not to openly discuss the war. I have a hundred questions, but know it’s best not to ask them, and will probably never get answers.
The Nationalist victory in 1939 saw Franco rule Spain as dictator until his death in 1975. In the years that followed, political consensus favoured a decision known as the Pact of Forgetting, which aimed to move forward by not directly confronting the legacy of the past – as if you can be made to forget. There was no truth and reconciliation commission, no reckoning with history. A 1977 law even prevented legal proceedings for crimes committed during the civil war and subsequent dictatorship.
Change, when it finally came at the turn of the century, was led by grandchildren of some of the people who had experienced those horrors. They challenged the pact and demanded reform and, in 2000, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory was founded. It grew out of the quest by a sociologist, Emilio SilvaBarrera, to locate and identify the remains of his grandfather, who was shot by Nationalist forces in 1936.
In 2007, Spain’s socialist prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, instigated the Historical Memory Law to move on from the Pact of Forgetting. The government supported the funding of exhumations, but this stopped once the opposition party took power in 2011.
Now national memory is changing once again. In 2018, the socialist government returned to power, and made the rehabilitation of the victims of the Franco era one of its priorities. In 2019 Franco’s remains were removed from a vast mausoleum near Madrid and transferred to a family plot. A bill known as the Democratic Memory Law was passed by parliament in early October, which plans to make unearthing the mass graves a state responsibility. The bill’s aims include the creation of a DNA database to help identify remains found in mass graves and prevent publicly funded institutions from glorifying Franco’s dictatorship. It also looks set to annul criminal convictions of opponents of the dictatorship, and appoint a prosecutor to probe human rights abuses across the decades from the 1930s to the 1970s. In a nation still divided over the legacy, all of this has been controversial, and rightwing opponents reacted angrily to the announcement.
Memory and how to deal with crimes of the past is still a live and divisive issue in Spain, and to this day there is no museum to this defining event in Spanish history. More than that, the Spanish Civil War is personal: nearly every Spanish family has a connection to it. How we remember a difficult past changes in time, interpreted and reinterpreted not only by historians but also by politicians and each new generation. But the question lingers: how far can a nation ever really heal when the fate of so many family members remains unknown, and with the knowledge that they could be buried under the earth?