How Spain is beginning to face up to its painful past
You can see the cross for miles around. It catches the morning light above the Guadarrama hills, marking a mass grave. In the valley below, a pale stone church contains the remains of 40,000 of the men who died in Spain’s civil war, united in death as they were divided in life.
Now, the families of some of those men are removing them. Nationalist and Republican soldiers alike had been reburied in that austere vault, sometimes without the knowledge of their next of kin. After a series of legal cases, the first of the remains are being identified by their DNA and exhumed.
Spaniards disagree about the Valley of the Fallen, as about much else. For Francisco Franco and his supporters, the basilica, raised between 1940 and 1959, was a symbol of reconciliation in a nation that badly needed one.
For defeated Leftists, it was a pharaonic mausoleum built with slave labour: several of the convicts who heaved the stones had been Republican prisoners. They loathed the way the Generalissimo lay surrounded by his warriors like some Bronze Age emperor, the only man in the tomb to have died peacefully in bed.
For a long time, Spain left its ghosts undisturbed. No one much wanted to dwell on the abominations they had lived through between 1936 and 1939. The front itself had tended to be a ramshackle, Iberian affair, with ordnance hurled perfunctorily back and forth. But, behind the lines, grudges were settled, often with unspeakable cruelty. Spaniards knew that the atrocities had occurred in every town and village, and that both sides were to blame.
They had, in short, every reason to want to bury the whole foul business. Spain’s official amnesia persisted for a generation after Franco’s death in 1975. The first rule of every public conversation was Don’t Mention the War. Throughout the twentieth century, the standard histories of the conflict in Spain tended to translations of works by British historians.
This collective oblivion helped the country come back together, but it was resented by Leftists, who felt that their dead were forgotten while Nationalist soldiers were recalled in memorials across the country.
When José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, the socialist leader, was elected in 2004, he decided that the time had come to disinter the past – literally as well as figuratively. His grandfather, a Republican army captain, had been shot in León in 1936, and he was determined to correct what he saw as a lopsided amnesia. Conservatives reacted furiously, and arguments that had lain dormant for 60 years flared briefly back to life.
Now, though, Spain seems to be reaching a new consensus, acknowledging the crimes of the civil war, and openly recognising their victims. It is a delicate business but, so far, the excavation of this painful history has been carried out every bit as sensitively as the actual exhumations: patiently, reverently, with gentle brushwork.
The dead deserve no less. God knows they have suffered enough.