Ghosts of Spain

by Giles Tremlett

  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.

  He lays down his arms./He raises his arms over his head./He will not tell.

  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.

  The shame, if that is the case, is only now lifting. At the end of the third decade without Franco, the dam holding back the gorier details of Francoism has finally burst. One publishing house has set up an entire series that seems dedicated to nothing else. There is still resistance, however. The People’s Party went as far as it would in recognising the Francoist right’s historic guilt in the same parliamentary motion in which it permitted local councils to spend money digging up Civil War graves. The motion recognised the existence of victims of ‘the repression of the Francoist dictatorship’ and denounced ‘the violent imposition of ideologies’. But the People’s Party – which speaks for more than a third of Spanish voters – has so far refused to go any further. It was the only one of eleven parties in Las Cortes, the Madrid parliament, to boycott a parliamentary homage to Franco’s victims in 2003. Its habitual claim is that the left is indulging in ‘mothball politics’ whenever it brings the issue up.

  The details of what happened come, anyway, too late for most of the victims – who are dead. But studying, in any rigorous detail, what actually happened remains a Herculean task. A disturbing number of archives, be they military, prison, police or Church, are an impenetrable mess, with some left rotting, unclassified, in warehouses dotted around the country. Like the statues, they have been shoved to the back of the cupboard by ministries or government departments. In some archives, especially those run by the Church, investigators are not allowed to dig randomly but must say precisely what they are looking for – a question many of them, following vague clues, are unable to answer. Others, such as those of the Francisco Franco Foundation, a drab Madrid apartment that holds many of his papers and receives state funding, have proven almost impossible for non-friendly historians to access.

  How, I wondered as I went seeking the Generalísimo, would a young Spaniard, a child of today, first encounter the man who dominated his country’s history in the previous century? An answer to that came from an unexpected source. When he was six, my eldest son came back from his Madrid primary school singing the following ditty to the tune of the Spanish national anthem: ‘Franco, Franco que tiene el culo blanco, porque su mujer lo lava con Ariel’ (‘Franco, Franco, his arse is very white, and that is because his wife washes it with Ariel’). Children have a special knack for taking the sting out of scary, authority figures by lampooning them. Generations of schoolchildren, I am told, have learnt the same song. Part of the joke, today, is that Spain has one of the few national anthems in the world with no words to it. The old Francoist words were purged after his death, and nothing replaced them.

  The fact that he knew the ditty did not mean my son knew who Franco was. We had to explain that to him. It was a rare sighting, though, of Franco in modern Spain. For a moment he had escaped from the storeroom or from the inside of a history book. He had lived on in the playground, a buffoon-like, but still threatening, figure. It was a sign, however, of the old Caudillo’s potency that he should survive here as a modern bogeyman, as unrealistic to the children singing about him as Guy Fawkes is to British children.

  LaTransición – as Spaniards called their transition to democracy – had returned to Spain its pre-Francoist wordless national anthem. It had also laid down, it seemed, many of the unwritten rules of silence that were now being broken. Spaniards, and foreigners who observed this transition, had generally described it in glowing terms. It certainly achieved its overall aim of converting Spain to democracy. I was beginning to wonder, however, whether it was quite as perfect as it had been described. The Transición, clearly, was the key to many of the things I was coming across. If I wanted to understand it all, I would have to move on and find out some more about one of the most exciting – and unique – moments in Spanish history.

  3

  Amnistía and Amnesia:

  The Pact of Forgetting

  I will call him Don Heliodoro, though we knew him simply by his nickname as ‘el hueso’, the bone, because, someone told us, he was ‘so hard to digest’. He was an elderly Madrileño, an old-fashioned Francoist into whose company I was forced as I set about buying an apartment. He was also a man who, as Spaniards say of those who speak their minds, no tiene pelos en la lengua – has no hairs on his tongue. One day, as we shared a taxi, we began talking about Spain’s monarch, Juan Carlos I. ‘The king?’ he bellowed. ‘He is a traidor [a traitor].’

  ‘You know what I am talking about, don’t you, señor taxista,’ he shouted over the seat at the taxi driver, a man in his late fifties. The taxista smiled nervously and kept his mouth firmly shut. It must have been a while since he had had someone like this – one of the last, few diehard followers of Franco and the Falange leader José Antonio Primo de Rivera – in his cab.

  Don Heliodoro was a reminder of two things. First, that when Franco died and a young prince called Juan Carlos stepped into the shoes of the head of state, people like this occupied many of the key positions of power. The Don Heliodoros of this world were convinced that democracy would bring with it the evils of communism, divorce, freemasonry, pornography and homosexuality.

  The other was that Juan Carlos was Franco’s hand-picked heir. Spain has, uniquely in modern Europe, a king elected by a dictator. The rightful heir to the Spanish throne had been the king’s father, Don Juan. He had gone into exile with his own father, King Alfonso XIII, when the latter was chased out by Republicans in 1931.

  It is questionable, in fact, whether Spaniards would have chosen Juan Carlos, or any other monarch, to lead them had they been given a free choice immediately after Franco’s death in November 1975. Spain had not had a king for forty-four years. Neither the political left nor the more Falangist sectors of Franco’s regime were natural monarchists. Spaniards generally had lost their respect for monarchs long before. They had not only pushed out Alfonso XIII. They had also forced the abdication of two of his three predecessors.

  Juan Carlos felt real affection for the Generalísimo, his biographers say. Don Juan had initiated a tug-of-war with the Caudillo over his son’s future by sending him to Madrid on his own at the age of just ten. It was the first time the future king had been to his own country. Franco oversaw his education after that. After thirty years of watchful vigilance, the Caudillo would eventually see in Juan Carlos – as one biographer of both men put it, attributing the observation to Queen Sofía – ‘the son that he had never had’.

  When the Caudillo publicly named the young prince as his successor, six years before his death, Juan Carlos was effusive in his praise. He also publicly pledged to uphold the principles of Franco’s Movimiento Nacional. In his acceptance speech, Juan Carlos lauded not just Franco’s dictatorship, but also the 1936 uprising that sparked the bloodbath of the Civil War. ‘I receive from his Excellency the Head of State, Generalísimo Franco, the political legitimacy that emerged from July 18, 1936, amidst so much sad but necessary sacrifice and suffering so that our Patria could rejoin the path of destiny. The work of setting it on the right road and showing clearly the direction it must go has been carried out by that exceptional man whom Spain has been immensely fortunate to have, and will be fortunate to have for years to come, as the guide of our policy,’ Juan Carlos said. ‘My hand will not tremble to do all that is necessary to defend the principles [of the Movimiento] and laws that I have just sworn.’

  It was reasonable to think, therefore, that Juan Carlos would bring more of the same. ‘This is not a restoration of monarchy but the establishment of a new Francoist monarchy,’ one of Franco’s diehard supporters had claimed. The Don Heliodoros of this world certainly hoped for
that. What they got was something completely different. In fact, Juan Carlos had been secretly meeting the pro-democracy opposition for some time. Over the next four years, he would help lead Spaniards to write themselves a democratic constitution, freely elect a parliament and – at a referendum – choose to have a constitutional monarch, himself, as head of state. It was a time of breathless change, intrigue and excitement. It marked the life of a whole generation of Spaniards who, as they now see their children reaping the benefits of what they sowed, are, largely, proud of what they achieved.

  Spaniards, mostly, got what they wanted from the Transición. Age-old conflicts were resolved with words, not violence. A stable, working democracy was put in place. They can be extremely touchy about criticism of this period, or claims that some questions were left unresolved. ‘Spain’s Transición is envied the world over,’ one angry newspaper editorial told Amnesty Internationsl in 2005 when it demanded that justice be handed out to Franco’s victims.

  The Transición, however, was a change in which silence – that apparently alien Spanish quality – would play a key role. Events of the previous fifty years were deliberately pushed into a dark corner as Spaniards observed what came to be known as the pacto del olvido, the pact of forgetting.