Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  The conditions in the building were primitive. Six refugees slept on mattresses on the floor of his bug-infested room which was about 15 foot square; in the daytime, they rolled up the mattresses to make a bit more room and lived in the corridors. They never saw daylight since the blinds were perpetually drawn so that no one could see in from the street and discover how many were sheltering there. They had always to talk in whispers so that the militiamen on duty outside couldn’t hear. There was no heating and, because food was so scarce, they suffered from the cold. At Christmas 1937, their meals consisted of sugarless barley coffee for breakfast; a bowl of hot water spiced with red pepper and a few grains of rice, with a piece of bread about one centimetre thick at noon, and the same in the evening.

  —We calculated that our total daily intake was under 600 calories. There were fifty or sixty of us, but the embassy applied for only twenty-five ration-cards. Of the rations received, the chargé d’affaires’ mother-in-law sold half on the black market and kept the proceeds. Some managed well enough on the diet, but others preferred to leave the embassy and run the risks outside rather than continue on so little food …

  The majority of the refugees were conservative Catholics and monarchists, with a handful of falangists and Carlists. As a clerical Catholic, he had believed the counsels the clergy had been giving and had sympathized with the military uprising. The problem began when he started to live in the embassy with people who said they thought as he did. The first thing he noticed was that the most religious among them were also the most conservative, in everything from religion to politics.

  —On the other hand, the majority didn’t give a hang about the church or Catholicism. They were Catholics, but their Catholicism was a sort of social security for the other life. I began to feel like a fish out of water. I had never been able to understand why so many Catholics equated the monarchy with their faith. I felt myself a republican. But at the same time, the republic was anti-clerical, I felt. Now, in the embassy, I came to see that the clergy had practised a great deception on us by asserting that to be Catholic meant to be conservative, and anti-Catholic to be on the left. Even the republic’s anti-clericalism came to seem healthy when I viewed the people around me …

  They were concerned, he saw, with only one thing: revenge. Their fantasies, articulated day after day – ‘for talking was an endemic disease’ – revolved about what they would do when they got out of this situation: ‘kill, kill, kill – all the workers, all the republicans, all the reds.’ Everything that smacked of social progress was automatically condemned; yet they had no religious grounds, as far as he observed, on which they could base such attitudes.

  Among the refugees was a priest in his forties, an exemplary man who at 5 a.m. daily celebrated mass in secret with only MIRET MAGDALENA present. It made him think of the catacombs, of the authentic simple mass, an experience he would never forget. But the other refugees didn’t like the priest.

  —It was curious, those clerical Spaniards seemed at heart to harbour a certain anti-clerical resentment. They showed it plainly in the embassy by their treatment of the priest. When they saw that sexual jokes and stories upset him they made a point of telling them in front of him; they reserved their vulgar remarks for him and in general treated him with disrespect.

  Since I had to remain in the embassy with these people, I decided that I would hold staunchly to my Catholic principles but without arguing with anyone. That, too, had a curious result: I was respected by the others because they saw that my conviction was absolute, and this in turn had tangible advantages. My suitcase was the only one from which nothing was ever stolen. There was no solidarity whatsoever, even amongst people whose lives were in danger. The most ferocious egoism was unleashed in that place; frequently I asked myself what could religion mean to them when each thought only of saving himself and displayed not the slightest concern for his neighbour …

  Some of the refugees maintained they had contacts with the fifth column, but MIRET MAGDALENA suspected it was all talk. The republicans, however, infiltrated agents provocateurs into the embassy. A man who had ‘taken refuge’ put it about, little by little, that some militiamen were in his confidence and that it was possible to escape by paying a certain sum.

  —Without attempting to check up on what the man said, people put their names down on a list, so great was the desire to escape to the other side. The first five to leave agreed that once they reached the nationalist zone they would arrange for the radio to give a certain password. It never came. Later we learnt that they had gone through the famous ‘tunnel of death’; this was supposed to be a secret tunnel in Carabanchel which led from the republican to the nationalist lines. In fact it was a trap. Such was the fear in the embassy that no one dared confront the man whom we were all convinced was a republican agent; the decision was taken simply to expel him …

  * * *

  As many as 20,000 people were estimated to have taken refuge in Madrid embassies at one time or another, especially in the first months of the war. Only some 10 per cent to 15 per cent of these remained by the end of the war. Many, although by no means all who wished to, were evacuated. Some, like David JATO, falangist student union leader, left for safer refuges when the nationalist failure to capture Madrid made it evident that the war was going to continue for months, if not years. Looking back on it, he thought, the idea of frontally attacking a city of 1 million inhabitants with a shock force of only a few thousand troops was a complete folly. Unless there was a deeper reason.

  —From what Franco said after the war, it may well be that he had come to the conclusion that a rapid end to the war would leave half the country, half the population with its political ideals intact. A civil war, he said, was quite different from an international war. The latter ends with the conquest of enemy territory; but in a civil war military occupation of enemy territory is not the final goal …

  One of the several buildings taken over by the Finnish embassy in which JATO had taken refuge was forced to open to republican police and the refugees were arrested. This hastened JATO’S determination to leave; he got out thanks to his family’s friendship with a Frenchman with whom he went to live. Embassies issued their nationals with a document to post on their doors.

  —Once the terrible days of November and December 1936 were over, these documents proved effective. The two worst periods of assassinations were from July to September and November to December. After that, though never totally ended, their numbers were very considerably reduced …

  He got hold of false documents showing he was sixteen instead of nineteen; he had always looked younger than his age. As time went on it became increasingly easy to get hold of false papers.

  —As the repression eased up, a sort of breach opened in the republican administration, and all sorts of things became possible. There was another reason. Within six months of the start of the war the majority of the best militants in the red zone were dead. They had been the first to go to the fronts, the first to be killed. Those who remained in the rearguard were not, ideologically speaking, the same men …

  * * *

  Episodes 6

  Liberation

  María Carmen QUERO, aged nine, peered through a crack in the window of the Málaga clinic, where, for nearly six months, she had been hiding. It was the morning of 8 February 1937. In the street she saw two Moors crouching, ready to shoot at the top-floor windows. Then a red and gold flag appeared on the balcony opposite. ‘Ay, mama, there it is!’ she shouted. They flung open the shutters and breathed in the fresh air. In the street below they saw people embracing. Tanks began to roll by, bearing soldiers in plumed hats who carried olive branches. They were singing a beautiful song.

  —‘Who are these people, mama?’ ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, but then suddenly she said: ‘Italians!’ The streets were full of blue shirts and people giving the fascist salute. Where had so many falangists come from all of a sudden? …

  The night before they had heard
people shouting in the streets, children crying, the sound of mules, oxen, carts. Entire villages from the surrounding countryside appeared to be pouring through the city along the only escape road to Almería. ‘It was like the exodus of the Jews from Egypt.’ Why were they fleeing, her mother, doña Pepa, asked sadly.

  Pepa LOPEZ came from one of those villages herself. Her husband, a lawyer and former CEDA parliamentary deputy, had gone into hiding as soon as they heard the mob advancing towards their house on the day the war started. A couple of minutes later, with an instinct born of long years lived close to the peasants, she was throwing off her señora’s dress and slipping on an old smock. She replaced her shoes with a pair of hemp sandals, grabbed three bracelets which she had inherited from her mother and put them in a basket under a pile of tomatoes, pimentos and other vegetables. Holding on to her children, she hurried from the house looking like a street-seller.

  —Once I got out into the street I ran to a cousin’s house. From there I saw the furniture being dragged out of our house and burnt in the street. My cousin was frightened. Within twenty-four hours we had to look for another place …

  —One after another of our relatives began to fail us, recalled María Carmen. Their faces turned white when we asked them for shelter. There came a moment when no one would take us in. That was the saddest experience of my life …

  After wandering the streets in shirt-sleeves and a beret, her father had been given shelter by a medical assistant. He was on the point of turning himself in, hoping friends on the left would come to his help. The assistant’s daughter wouldn’t let him carry out his plan and arranged for her fiancé’s family to shelter him. ‘Rejected by relatives, he was saved by people he didn’t know … ’

  Doña Pepa moved to a poor civil guard’s house near the women’s prison. The chauffeur and maid accompanied her. One day the porter at their house managed to smuggle out some of her clothes, amongst them a new tricorne hat resembling a civil guard’s. As soon as she saw it she went to the window and threw it out.

  —‘But mama, your hat!’ I cried. ‘Bah, a hat,’ she replied sternly. I watched it spinning through the air. With it, for me, vanished a whole epoch. A hat had gone; it summoned up everything …

  A few days later their chauffeur warned them that a neighbour had recognized María Carmen. They had to move again. Their last resort, an aunt on the outskirts of the city, refused them. She suggested that doña Pepa try to get into a clinic run by an outstanding gynaecologist, Dr José Gálvez. ‘A devout, right-wing Catholic, a saint revered by all social classes in Málaga’, he took her in on condition that she contact none of her family.21 María Carmen was allowed to join her. She slept on a sofa in her mother’s room. The clinic was full of refugees: the ancient prioress of a Carmelite convent who had arrived in her full nun’s habit after the convent was burned; an archbishop’s sister, a number of politicians’ wives, priests whom no one saw.

  María Carmen got up praying and went to bed praying; she had never prayed so much in her life. She prayed for her aunt and her niece whom she read in the paper had been arrested. The niece had belonged to the JAP. Every time there was an air raid the reds took out prisoners and shot them. One day – she later learnt – her aunt was being tied up ready to be taken out when someone shouted from the door: ‘That’s enough for today.’

  María Carmen grew pale; her mother complained she wasn’t getting enough exercise. Dr Gálvez pulled a piece of string out of his pocket: ‘Skip with this twenty times a day and you’ll get exercise,’ he said in his kindly voice. The windows were permanently shuttered to prevent anyone seeing in.

  One day they heard shouts in the street. The nursing nuns told everyone to go down to the basement. Outside the shouts grew closer, louder. ‘Let’s go in and get them!’ María Carmen was old enough to know what that meant.

  —I felt at that moment as though I had been born only to die. We all knelt and prayed. Even Dr Gálvez thought the reds were going to break in. ‘As long as it doesn’t hurt too much,’ I said to myself …

  The shrieks were the same as those of the mob which burnt houses on the first day of war, doña Pepa recalled. ‘Have you ever heard that sound? No? Well, it’s better not –’ The women were worse than the men. This war was terrible, a war between lower and upper classes was much worse than a war between nations. She supported the army’s desire to restore order. But at the same time she had to admit that for the lower classes it was an army of occupation.

  —And when you provoke the masses – sssh – that’s when things become dangerous. Passions overrun, they can’t be stemmed. Frightening things happen. The lower classes hated those who had power; don’t they always when there is such inequality? …

  The shrieking – could it be? – was growing fainter, the mob was moving away. Finding it hard to believe they rose from their knees.

  Only later did they learn what had happened. A mother and son had been dragged through the streets. The mother, an old woman, wore a metal truss for her hernia; someone had taken it for a secret radio. A crowd gathered. As a result of the manhandling the old woman had died.

  The clinic faced the cathedral. Doña Pepa saw men bringing out religious statues and dumping them into a lorry. The heads appeared to have been split by an axe. She was reminded of the church burnings of May 1931, a month after the proclamation of the republic. Within a short while, the people who had taken part in the burnings were bringing holy images out in procession or standing by and applauding as they passed. ‘How do you explain that? ¡Dios mío! The people who destroy holy images kiss them –’

  Refugees from the villages began to live in the cathedral. In each corner María Carmen could see a family cooking over a fire, sleeping on mattresses, defecating in the Patio de los Naranjos.

  —At night all the lights were on and there was a thick fog inside. I saw people sitting in the pulpit smoking and talking as though they were in a club. People died in there and were brought out in coffins …

  One day the maid who made the bed and cleaned the room arrived in a terrible state. ‘They’re coming, and they’re killing as they come … ’ ‘Don’t be stupid,’ doña Pepa replied, ‘they don’t kill anyone who hasn’t committed a crime.’ Later, during the day they heard cannon fire. The front was crumbling fast. They were frightened, they didn’t know how things would end. ‘Yes, I know,’ Dr Gálvez said to doña Pepa, ‘it’s our land, the land we love –’

  None of the feared last-minute resistance by stubborn or anguished defenders occurred. Instead, the latter escaped as best they could. Spearheaded by Italian tanks, the direct offensive on the city lasted barely three days: its capture at very little cost gave the nationalists their first Mediterranean port and wiped out an important Popular Front territory in the south. The repercussions of the loss were felt at the highest levels. Not yet strong enough to attack the prime minister, Largo Caballero, directly, the communist party attacked General Asensio, his secretary of war. The general was dismissed.

  María Carmen stepped on to the pavement. Her feet felt as if they had gone dead, the pavement seemed like cork. She felt herself sinking into it. Doña Pepa pulled her by the hand. ‘Come on, child, we’re going to see your father.’

  A few minutes earlier a tall and beautiful lady had arrived at the clinic with her son. She told doña Pepa that her husband was safe in her house. They set off. In the reception room, at the top of a marble staircase, stood a man with a beard, wearing a beret and a leather jacket. He looked like a militiaman, María Carmen thought.

  —Soon our problems began. My father said he felt depressed at being left alive. Almost all his political acquaintances had been assassinated. Then people came to ask him to make accusations against left-wingers. The purge was under way. He refused. We began to hear of the courts martial, the executions. Every day there were hundreds of cases. ‘Twenty death sentences,’ my father would exclaim. ‘What is happening?’ He was a criminal lawyer. Before the war when he had a death se
ntence on his hands he wouldn’t be able to eat or sleep. ‘Don’t tell me about the courts martial, they make my blood freeze,’ he said.

  Like everyone of my age, my youth seems to have been nothing but disaster and violence, tragedy and horror: sometimes on account of the reds, other times because of the whites …

  * * *

  The proscription in Málaga was ferocious. The Italian government ordered its ambassador to take up the matter directly with its Spanish nationalist ally as ‘a moral question affecting the reputation of both Spain and Italy’. In a radio broadcast a month after the city’s capture, General Queipo de Llano made no bones about it. ‘We are unfortunate enough to be forced to shoot plenty of people in Málaga, but all after trial by court martial … It must be borne in mind that those who are condemned to death are inexorably executed because we do not intend to imitate those weak governments of 1934!’22

  * * *

  21. Dr Gálvez’s two daughters were married to men who had become famous as nationalist aviators: Joaquín García Morato and Carlos de Haya. The latter’s wife was being held prisoner in the city. She was later exchanged for Arthur Koestler who was captured when Málaga fell to the nationalists.

  Episodes 7

  Escape

  Two friars sat in the train taking them through the Andalusian countryside. One of them, the superior of the missionary community for the Holy Land and Morocco, had made the trip to Granada especially. Being an important churchman, he had had no difficulty in securing the necessary passes and safe conducts, including one from General Queipo de Llano personally, to make the trip. It might have surprised the nationalist authorities if they had seen the spare friar’s habit the superior was carrying in his bags and which, on his arrival in Granada, he delivered to a house in the centre of the city. Their surprise would have been greater still had they known that, sitting beside him in the train, disguised in the habit, was the twenty-eight-year-old socialist schoolteacher and lawyer he had travelled through half Andalusia to rescue from the city which had already witnessed the assassination of its most distinguished son, García Lorca.