Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  —However, the priest’s own attitude helped him considerably. As soon as he knew he was discovered, he displayed a willingness to discuss the matter openly and frankly, and his fearlessness won him a certain sympathy. Moreover, like the rest of us, he had been fighting rifle in hand against the enemy. And he went on to say that he believed history was on the side of the poor, not the rich. He came out of it pretty well, indeed freed of the fear with which he had been living. But he would never teach history, claiming that he knew nothing about it …

  What impressed Núñez most was the profound democracy of the masses which the revolution had initiated. When he thought today of a society without exploiters and exploited, without the mistakes that had been committed in the name of socialism, it was of that democracy he thought.

  —The masses in movement, when everything is put at the service of the revolution. As a petty bourgeois, I learnt everything from my contact with the masses during the war. If I am where I am today, in the front line of the struggle,19 it is because my experience during the war was decisive. Life isn’t worth living for anything else. You can only live for the people …

  Not that the revolution should be idealized. There were mistakes, pettiness, egoism, cowardice, even in the revolution’s finest hour at the start when everything had to be improvised, when a worker suddenly found himself the commander of a militia force, when the people were mastering their own destiny. A revolution was not just light but shade too.

  —Mud, cowardice, misery, they all exist as well. But it was none of these things that most struck one. A revolution is a process. It is difficult to be a coward when your companions are being brave. Or at least to be one for long. For us marxists, the lesson is never to forget the people and what that people bear within them. That is the source of everything …

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  18. The instructions never forbade the creation of collectives, whether industrial or rural; but the communist party inveighed against ‘forced’ collectivization, anarcho-syndicalist ‘socialization’ (union management), the single or family wage and other tenets of the libertarian revolution. The basis of much of the communist attack on collectivization concerned less the actual question of collective work (Stalin’s rural collectivization was at its height) than the more vital question of who controlled it. See below, p. 372.

  19. A member of the PSUC leadership, he was living in clandestinity in Barcelona at the time of the interview in 1973.

  MADRID

  In the rear, as at the front, educational expansion and reform – the field in which the republic had achieved most – was being given a new impetus by the revolution. The transformation of traditional attitudes, patterns of awareness laid down long before and which lagged behind the rapid socio-economic change, would come only as a result of new forms of experience opened up by the revolution. Education was a vital area; in the rear, many of the old pedagogical attitudes were being radically altered.20

  Marisa SOLER was among a group of Madrid teachers who, at her union’s call at the start of the war, took over a school of some 300 working-class pupils which a religious order had abandoned. The changes they proposed were not effected without considerable resistance from the children.

  —We changed all the textbooks. Under the old system, the girls were taught needlework and prayer; the boys manual trades and prayer. All the textbooks were religious ones – the main one being the catechism …

  The teachers’ major problem as far as teaching was concerned – religion was no longer part of the curriculum – stemmed not from the children but from the fact that not enough new textbooks were being published. Where the real problems began was when they tried to change other practices. For example, under the former regime, the girls had to wear shirts when they took a shower.

  —‘No one needs anything but soap to wash themselves with,’ I said. ‘But señorita,’ they protested. I pointed out that each shower was completely enclosed and that the boys’ and girls’ showers were separate; they had immediately imagined that the boys would use theirs. Still they were unhappy, the older ones especially. ‘You’re making us get water all over our bodies which are exposed – and that is a sin.’ ‘You’ve been inculcated with the idea of sin and you are unable to tell what is and what is not sinful,’ I replied …

  Another change which aroused the girls’ protest was the school’s sexual desegregation, the fact that boys and girls were allowed to play together at recreation time. The teachers believed in encouraging a healthy relationship between the sexes, telling the girls that boys weren’t their enemies, and the boys that they must not mistreat the girls, for they were all companions.

  The showers, desegregation, the absence of religion – all these ‘sins’ led to increasing trouble from the older girls.

  —‘You’re not believers,’ they said to us. Their former teachers had been good, we were not. They used their perfectly understandable affection and admiration for their old teachers to fight the changes we were making. In the end I decided to take a step I would have preferred to avoid. I asked three or four of the oldest girls to come with me to the former directress’s office …

  There she laid out a series of photographs on the table; they were of a woman naked except for black stockings in different poses in front of a mirror. Today the photographs, she thought, might seem laughable but at the time they were distinctly pornographic.

  —‘Do you recognize this woman?’ One of the girls began to cry. ‘Yes, it is our directress.’ I hadn’t wanted to go this far. Another of the girls asked forgiveness, she hadn’t known. ‘No one knew,’ I answered. ‘But remember, someone took these photographs. You see, this is the sort of false virtue we have to struggle against in order to reach real virtue’ …

  Most important of all, she felt, was to try by every possible means to prevent the children being traumatized by the war: the boys, in particular, many of whose fathers had gone to the front. She and the other teachers told them that the war was being fought to ensure that in future their fathers always had jobs, that their families would never again go in want. Little by little, both the boys and girls settled down, until – because of the siege – all schools were closed down as the children were evacuated. Later, some schools reopened for children whose parents did not want them to leave.

  *

  More muted than in Barcelona, a revolution was changing the face of Madrid a few hundred metres behind the front lines. The capital, essentially an administrative centre pre-war, was hardly industrialized: 25,000 metalworkers, engaged almost totally in small workshops, and some 40,000 building workers made up the bulk of the labour force (compared to Catalonia’s 200,000 textile workers, 70,000 metalworkers and an equal number of building workers). None the less, an important munitions industry was being built up.

  In a reshuffle of the Madrid defence junta some three weeks after its creation on the very eve of the nationalist offensive on the capital, the CNT gave up the department of Information and Propaganda in exchange for War Industry; twenty-four-year-old Lorenzo IÑIGO, secretary of the CNT metalworkers’ union, and a member of all three branches of the libertarian movement, set about organizing the engineering industry for the war effort.

  From the beginning, he saw, engineering could not continue in small, scattered workshops; it must be concentrated in one place to become efficient, and to be safe from the constant air raids and shelling which were disrupting production.

  —We couldn’t afford the sort of collectivization they were carrying out in Barcelona, their autonomy in production and administration. Nor could we afford the luxury of carrying on in their sort of commercial spirit. We were living on the front line …

  He came up with a simple idea: the city’s entire metalworking industry would be put into an underground railway tunnel some 7 km long which, at the start of the war, was being built between the Atocha station and the new ministries. He went to see General Miaja who agreed, but said he would have to ask the government in Valenci
a. The next day Prieto, the socialist leader who as public works minister before the war had planned the tunnel, sent a message asking what madman had come up with the idea.

  —‘Well, madmen sometimes come up with good ideas,’ I said to Miaja. ‘If you’ve no objection, we’ll go ahead without waiting for further government permission.’ And that’s what we did …

  Technicians managed to make the tunnel waterproof, and arranged an internal layout which gave access for lorries along one side of its length while work bays were laid out on the other. Then came the business of getting the owners to agree to move their shops into the tunnel.

  —As a good libertarian, I couldn’t simply send armed men to all the workshops and order the machinery to be sent to the tunnel. I called all the owners to a meeting. ‘Señores, we are at war. I need all your machinery for war production. I need you too’ …

  The owners, he told them, would be in charge of their own equipment, as foremen or skilled workers at the head of a team. An inventory of all machinery would be made and their property guaranteed; when the war was over they would be free to remove their equipment. All agreed. Within two months, the capital’s entire engineering production was working sixteen hours a day underground, undisrupted by air raids.

  Technically and administratively, the ‘tunnel’ was controlled by IÑIGO’S department, which also paid the workers. ‘A sort of self-management from above.’ For Pedro GOMEZ, a UGT turner, working in the ‘tunnel’ was like working in a state factory. Production norms came from above, from the workshop committee and the technicians. Work conditions were excellent. Wage differentials existed but they were not large. There were no strikes. Once things were organized, work continued round the clock in three shifts.

  —The norms needed no enforcing. If the night shift had produced 300 shells, the day shift would do its utmost to beat it. We never had to stop work for shortage of materials, only for electricity cuts as the war went on. Above us we had six metres of earth: there was no fear of bombing or shelling. There was only one problem – not enough unity at the top. We were united enough on the shop floor, there were no great problems between UGT and CNT workers. But it needed someone to prevent all that bickering and dissent at the top if we were to win the war …

  One day General Miaja, the defence junta president, refused to sign the weekly wage cheque, alleging that the government in Valencia had ordered him to fund no more war production, IÑIGO set off for Valencia to see Prieto. ‘Miaja at that time was a tool of the communists who knew they couldn’t get rid of us libertarians without evicting us from war industry.’ Prieto assured him the government had given no such order and dictated a message to be sent to Miaja. At the same time he read the report on arms production IÑIGO had taken with him. How was it possible, he asked, for Madrid to produce shells at a unit cost lower than Barcelona or Valencia?

  —‘For a very simple reason, señor ministro. Madrid metalworkers are putting in all the hours needed without overtime.’ Prieto asked if we could produce shells for other fronts. I explained that we couldn’t produce enough for our own needs yet …

  Instead, IÑIGO asked Prieto’s permission to buy the necessary equipment to produce rifle ammunition, explaining that special groups of militiamen each morning collected spent cartridge cases from the front lines for reconditioning. Madrid could produce only the lead bullets, but insufficient cases were being recovered, and the capital was totally dependent on the government for supplies. He showed the minister a Belgian catalogue and told him that the Catalans were buying such equipment.

  —The Catalans were more advanced in arms production than we in Madrid. I had already exchanged 7,000 shells produced in Barcelona for several tons of copper. ‘You Catalans are very commercially minded,’ I had said to my CNT counterpart. ‘I won’t sell you this copper, I’ll exchange it.’ Prieto said the government had no intention of spending a céntimo on any machinery for Madrid; if it were purchased, it would be installed in Valencia or Catalonia …

  The government in Valencia was finding that the defence junta it had left behind in Madrid as a last-ditch measure had become the government of Madrid. There were those in Valencia who thought that Miaja, a popular hero if no politician, was acting as though he were the head of the government of Spain. From his post as sub-secretary of the interior ministry in Valencia, Sócrates GOMEZ, of the JSU, expressed the concern of a sector of the government.

  —A certain duality of power arose. Miaja, who was easily manipulated by the communists, interpreted the instructions he received from Valencia with some wilfulness. He had to be severely reprimanded and told to obey instructions …

  The growing power of the communist party lay behind the concern. The defence of Madrid, the weight of Soviet aid and the Comintern-organized International Brigades which had arrived in the nick of time, allied to the party’s determination to organize everything for the war effort and its opposition to pushing forward the socialist (not to speak of the libertarian) revolution, was winning the PCE considerable prestige among those who found the other parties and organizations wanting in clear policies or threatening to their interests. The Madrid defence junta was the only government organ in the Popular Front zone on which the communists had a dominant position. Eventually it was they who provided the government with the pretext for dissolving it.

  The junta was riven with internal conflicts mainly between the communists and libertarians. Foreshadowing what would shortly lead to a dramatic confrontation in Barcelona, a communist junta councillor was shot and wounded at a libertarian road block on the outskirts of Madrid. Subsequently, assault guards on the orders of the communist public order councillor disarmed some fifty CNT militants for failing to have arms licences. Finally, in April 1937, Melchor Rodríguez, the anarchist prison director in Madrid, published precise details of torture carried on in unauthorized communist prisons in the capital, and blamed José Cazorla, who had taken over from Santiago Carrillo as public order councillor. Largo Caballero, the prime minister, used the ensuing scandal to reassert the government’s authority and dissolve the junta.

  IÑIGO recalled the last meeting. Miaja informed the junta councillors of Caballero’s decision.

  —Carreño España, the left republican representative, looked across the table at Cazorla and said: ‘You’ – and he used the plural to indicate he meant the communists, not just Cazorla – ‘are the Juan Simón of the defence junta.’ Juan Simón is a grave-digger who buries his own daughter in a popular Spanish ballad. He was right. Even though the fronts around Madrid were stabilized by then, the junta could have continued to play an important political and moral role in the capital …

  A role that might have stayed the creeping demoralization that was to set in months later as the rigours of the war’s second winter were felt, that might have prevented the tragic events which two years after the junta’s dissolution brought the war to an end.

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  20. In Catalonia, the CENU (Consell de l’Escola Nova Unificada) carried out a remarkable scholastic programme and displayed an unparalleled political unity in doing so. ‘In setting up CENU, agreement was reached that only educational matters – not politics – should be discussed. The PSUC must be given full credit for their loyal cooperation throughout in the organization’s work,’ in the words of a CNT schoolteacher and CENU president in Sabadell, Ramón CALOPA. Even after the May events (see pp. 374–83), which led to the outlawing of the dissident communist POUM, the POUM vice-president of CENU remained at his post, defended by the communists of the PSUC.

  Episodes 5

  In hiding

  Ever since the uprising in Madrid he had stayed at home, fearing that he might be arrested or sent to the front. Militiamen from the Bellas Artes checa had come to the flat with an order to search and arrest. He had denied nothing, having long since made the decision always to tell the truth. Yes, he was a member of the Catholic Youth organization, had been for several years; yes, he had many religious books, bu
t the republic guaranteed freedom of religion. One of the militiamen wanted to arrest him, but another opposed the idea so resolutely that in the end they left to report back to the checa. The militiaman who had argued against his arrest was a mechanic who often went to his father’s shop for spare parts. While not a member of any party, his father was a businessman sympathetic to the right, while he, Enrique MIRET MAGDALENA, was a university student of chemistry, a ‘clerical Catholic’ much influenced by the type of christian democracy best represented by Giménez Fernández, the former CEDA agriculture minister. Before the war, he had intended to go abroad to study to become a Jesuit.

  One day he was told that a list with his name on it had been found during a militia search of the Jesuit Provincial’s house, and he was advised to hide. Angered at the Provincial’s folly in keeping such a list, his father agreed he should go into hiding and they set about looking for a place. He fast learnt his first lesson.

  —None of the people whom I expected to help was willing to do so, while, out of the blue, the person I least expected gave me shelter: our landlord who lived in the same house. After a month things became too difficult for him and I had to find another place. Once again, a woman I didn’t know, a friend of a friend, helped. She took me to the Cuban embassy where she knew the porter, going to the extreme of accompanying me in person, which was risky since I had no papers if we were stopped in the street …

  After three weeks in the Cuban embassy, all those who had not been given formal permission to seek refuge there were thrown out. Given shelter by another acquaintance, he was finally able to get himself accepted at a building which the Paraguayan embassy had taken over. It was March 1937, and he was to remain there for two years until the war’s end.