Blood of Spain_An Oral History of the Spanish Civil War

by Ronald Fraser

  It was the second time that a churchman had saved Dionisio VENEGAS since the military uprising in Granada. A moderate socialist, member of the UGT schoolteachers’ union, he had very rapidly learnt of the repression being carried out against his colleagues. One day his mother-in-law crossed the street to the cathedral where she spoke to a priest.

  —A saint of a man, that don Francisco. At dawn the following day I went across the Gran Vía to the cathedral where he hid me in one of the towers. Every day my wife brought food in a basket which she left at the bottom of the stairs. I remained hidden there five weeks …

  Desperate to have someone to talk to, he sent the priest a message; the latter replied that he was unable to visit him because it was too dangerous: another priest was one of the major instigators of the executions that were taking place in Granada and which were aimed in particular at intellectuals.

  One day his sister arrived and told him that the superior of the Franciscan order from his home town of Chipiona, near Cádiz, had come to take him away. In the basket she brought was the friar’s habit, and he put it on with only a pair of pyjamas underneath. Then he went out into the cathedral precincts where a street photographer was brought to take a picture of him. This was attached to a paper which the superior had with him and which he now took to the military authorities to demand a pass for this lay-brother he had come to fetch.

  None of this might have happened had it not been for the convent burnings of May 1931, which had made such a disastrous impact on Catholic opinion.23 A liberal republican, VENEGAS’S father, who was head lighthouse keeper in Chipiona, had gone to the convent to offer refuge to the friars in his official residence. Although the offer had not been needed, the superior, Fray Agustín Zuluaga, had never forgotten the gesture. When VENEGAS’S father had vainly attempted to discover his son’s fate after the uprising – the new civil governor of Granada, Valdés, had replied to an inquiry from his opposite number in Cádiz: ‘whereabouts unknown, probably with the enemy’ – the superior had immediately offered to set out to find him.

  —The first night we spent in a convent en route. The superior of the order there asked Fray Agustín who I was. ‘Oh, he’s a red lay-brother I’m taking back with me,’ I heard him reply to my horror. Both of them laughed. When I remonstrated with him he replied I had nothing to fear, I was in his territory now and everything was peaceful. I wasn’t so sure: on the train I had seen a falangist guard, a man I had known since childhood, and he looked at me hard and I think recognized me, although he didn’t say anything …

  Despite his fear, they reached the small seaside resort of Chipiona safely. VENEGAS was given a cell in the convent while he thought out his next move. He and a couple of friars who had managed to escape from Málaga, still in the Popular Front zone, consoled each other. Victims of circumstances, they had – on both sides – been fortunate enough to escape. It was thought unwise that he should suddenly reappear in the town – even to see his father – until precautions had been taken. He persuaded the superior to speak to the new civil governor of Cádiz, Eduardo Valera Valverde. A retired cavalry officer, the latter had been civil governor of Seville at the time of Sanjurjo’s abortive rising in 1932 and had been tried for his alleged failure to put down the rising. Acquitted, he retired to Chipiona where he had come to know VENEGAS whom he treated like a son.

  The superior returned with a message from Valera saying everything was all right and handed him a package containing a falange uniform and blue shirt. He put it on and asked the superior to send for his father. The latter was overwhelmed with joy. He spent a couple of days at home and then appeared in the streets as a fully fledged falangist, evading as best he could the constant questions, for people were astonished at his sudden return in the guise of a falangist. The situation did not seem entirely safe, and Valera Valverde suggested he go to Cádiz where he would be a member of the civil governor’s family. He gave the young man a vague job as his private secretary, but he had no real work. For five months, until the end of February 1937, he amused himself in Cádiz.

  A month earlier, Córdoba newspapers announced in rapid succession that Major Ibáñez – don Bruno – the public order chief in Córdoba, had been promoted to civil governor of the city. Only a short time elapsed before another announcement said he was being replaced by Eduardo Valera Valverde.

  —Queipo de Llano came to Cádiz and told Valera Valverde that don Bruno had been such a disaster that Valverde had to take over. He didn’t want to go, but he had no choice. I went with him. In Córdoba everything continued without problem until the summer of 1937 when suddenly the tranquillity was shattered. I could see things were going on in the civil government building that I didn’t understand …

  For some time, without his knowledge, the authorities in Granada had been summoning Valera Valverde to hand him over; the latter had repeatedly refused, had even sent his private secretary, chief of the Cádiz Falange, to Granada to find out what was happening. The latter returned without a satisfactory answer. Finally, the civil governor received a formal order to hand him over. ‘Everything will be all right,’ he told him, ‘I shall do everything necessary to protect you.’ Unable personally to accompany VENEGAS to Granada, he sent his private secretary with him. For two or three days in Granada, lodged in a comfortable hotel next to the Alhambra, he waited while the secretary had talks with Pelayo, don Bruno’s equivalent, who assured him that VENEGAS would probably have to be expelled from Granada for a year but nothing worse.

  —That suited me; I was happy to go to Seville where I could practise law. We went to the military commandant’s office to confirm the arrangement. I waited several hours while the secretary talked to the commandant. When he came out he told me he was sorry, the commandant refused to accept the arrangement. I was to be arrested immediately and court-martialled …

  He was clapped in gaol. In October 1937, he was court-martialled with twenty others, accused of aiding the rebellion (i.e., defending the legally constituted republican government), of defending lay education, of having exercised influence on the republican civil governor of Granada and of being a mason. He was sentenced to life imprisonment.

  —Not one of the accusations was true. I was not a mason – as the special tribunal for the repression of masonry and communism which they set up later recognized; I had never been inside the civil government building, let alone influenced the governor; the latter had refused to distribute arms to the people on 18 July and I had certainly not taken part in any resistance to the military uprising. No, I was the victim of some private grudge by someone I have never been able to identify …

  At the end of the war his sentence was reduced to twelve years; and he was released in 1941, having served four.

  * * *

  CORDOBA

  Sacked as public order chief after four months in office; sacked as civil governor barely a month after his appointment, Major Bruno Ibáñez was given command of the 18th tercio of the guardia civil in Córdoba. Barely a week passed before he was relieved of his command.

  —People in bars openly celebrated the fact that he had gone, even in front of the police. They believed he had been shot, which wasn’t true, recalled a local baker, Juan POSADAS . The people said that if he had been allowed to stay he would have had all Córdoba shot. So great was the fear that people fled the city every night – there wouldn’t have been anyone left to work if it had gone on much longer …

  —Once the dirty work had been done, they got rid of him, thought Roberto SOLIS, a Catholic law student. The executioner is only useful for a certain length of time …

  Francisco PARTALOA, the Madrid public prosecutor whose arrival in the nationalist zone from France had nearly cost him his life, was told by Queipo de Llano that he had been responsible for sacking the infamous major.

  —He told me personally that when he found out what don Bruno had been doing he wanted not just to sack him but to give Cordobans the satisfaction of having him shot publicly in Las Tendi
llas – the city’s main square. But General Mola demanded his services in the north. Córdoba was lucky to be rid of him; Eduardo Valera Valverde, his successor as civil governor, was a humane man …

  * * *

  … The good National-Syndicalist state rests on the family. It will be strong if the woman at home is healthy, fecund, hard-working and happy, with the windows of her home and soul open to the sweet imperial dawn that the sun of the Falange is bringing us.

  Azul (Editorial on the 2nd national council of the women’s section of the Falange, February 1938)

  * * *

  May no home be without light nor any worker without bread

  Francisco Franco

  * * *

  What we shall never do is put women in competition with men because women will never succeed in equalling men; if they try, women will lose the elegance and grace necessary for a life together with men …

  Pilar Primo de Rivera (Opening speech to national council of the women’s section of the Falange, February 1938)

  * * *

  ONE FATHERLAND, ONE STATE, ONE CAUDILLO

  * * *

  The Margaritas of Tafalla

  Solemnly promise on the Sacred Heart of Jesus

  1. To observe modesty in dress: long sleeves, high necks, skirts to the ankle, blouses full at the chest.

  2. To read no novels, newspapers or magazines, to go to no cinema or theatre, without ecclesiastical licence.

  3. Neither publicly nor in private to dance dances of this century but to study and learn the old dances of Navarre and Spain.

  4. Not to wear makeup as long as the war lasts.

  Long live Christ the King! Long live Spain!

  * * *

  22. Broadcast on Seville radio (7 March 1937).

  23. See Points of Rupture, B.

  Spring 1937

  While in the ideological perspectives of the nationalist zone women were ‘complementary’ to men, seeking ‘neither votes nor equality of rights but rather equality of sacrifices and duties’, they were participating fully in the war effort. The latter had ‘shaken Spanish woman from her apparent civic lethargy in the home and thrown her to work in hospitals, clothing workshops and, above all, in the marvellous Auxilio Social,’ commented a falangist newspaper.1

  Auxilio Social (Social Aid) began in Valladolid and was arguably the most important practical social work undertaken by the Falange during the war. In the view of Dionisio RIDRUEJO, poet and orator who had been promoted from Segovia to chief of the Falange in Valladolid, Auxilio Social illustrated the idealism and politicization that was taking place in the nationalist zone.

  —Political involvement reached its highest level in recent Spanish history in both zones during the war. People were willing to volunteer for self-sacrificing work. Those who started Auxilio Social, which was first called Winter Aid and was an exact copy, down to the emblem, of the Nazi organization of the same name, demonstrated great idealism. The immediate cause of its creation in Valladolid by Onésimo Redondo’s widow was the enormous number of fatherless children due to the repression …

  The first thing the new organization did was to open public dining halls for needy children where they received not only food but clothing and medicine. The example soon spread from Valladolid to other provinces. Financing followed the German model: weekly collections, money boxes, flags. Gradually, the organization created family-style orphanages where young girls were put in charge of a group of young children, usually not exceeding fifteen, who lived as a family in a house.

  —The basic concept underlying the organization was to substitute public solidarity for public charity; and while the organization remained fairly small and there was this intense sense of public-spiritedness, it worked well. Later things changed …

  The organization cared for the old as well as children. Within a year of its foundation, it was feeding more than 4,000 young and old in Córdoba province daily.

  The Carlist Margaritas ran a hospital and front lines’ organization. Indicative of the tension within the nationalist zone as to the aims and political outcome of the war, some of its leaders felt that not enough attention was given to their organization.

  —The women’s section of the Falange was given every sort of help to develop and expand, observed Dolores BALEZTENA, head of the Pamplona Margaritas. We wanted to play a positive role in the post-war. Our suspicion that we were deliberately held down proved justified in the end. We were tolerated only while the war lasted …

  But as long as it lasted there was important work to be done. Carmen GARCIA-FALCES, a Margarita and Pamplona bakery worker, now found herself doing unpaid overtime every day. Not only was there more bread to be baked for the front, but after work she went to make bandages because, like so many other things needed for the war, these were in short supply.

  —I don’t know how we won the war with all the shortages we suffered from. Girls went to make hand-grenades in a small family foundry which, before the war, produced agricultural implements. The manufacture of the grenades was simply improvised by a few people, and the girls worked there in their spare time without pay. Everyone did everything necessary for the war effort without thinking of rewards …

  The evidence of war was soon visible in the streets of Pamplona, as of every other city, which filled with war-wounded: men without legs, arms, blind. They were youths of her own age, so many of them people she knew. It was horrible; and yet mothers didn’t often cry at the death of their sons.

  —The war was a Crusade; their sons had gone to Heaven and that was their consolation. ‘Chica, how fortunate you are, you already have a son in heaven,’ was a remark one often heard …

  In the hospital where Dolores BALEZTENA worked a nurse told her she had never seen anyone die with the faith and resignation of the requetés.

  —‘One day as I was passing by the bed of a gravely wounded man,’ she told me, ‘he called and, groaning with pain, asked me to stretch out his arms in the shape of a cross. I did so, thinking that it relieved his pain. “No, sister, it’s not for that,” he replied. “It’s because I want to die like Christ on the Cross”’ …

  Dolores BALEZTENA used to accompany the war-wounded home sometimes when they were released from hospital. So many of them who had volunteered, she saw, were poor, owned nothing but ‘the air they breathed and the sun that shone on them’. She remembered one in particular. He had lost an arm. When they reached his house, a very poor place, his mother could hardly contain her tears; his father looked at him sadly, thinking that he could no longer help with the farm work.

  —‘Well, haven’t I got another arm to help you with?’ the wounded man asked. And he went out to feed the chickens. The poorer the home, the greater the sacrifice, it seemed to me. If communism had triumphed, these anonymous heroes would have lost nothing; indeed, materially, they would have gained. The fatherland, for which this requeté had given his arm and so many had given their lives, owed him no more than a tiny plot of land from which, by hard work, he was able to earn his daily living. But spiritually, he would have lost everything, and it was for this – to defend his religious beliefs, his ideals – that he had gone to war.

  How well I remember another war-wounded, a man whose leg had been amputated, and who said to me in the hospital where I was nursing him: ‘If it hadn’t been for God, we wouldn’t have gone’ …

  *

  A new state was being consciously formed in the nationalist zone. Designed to carry the class war to its ultimate consequences, this new state was to be a better instrument than the old for waging a civil war. Its very creation gave a revolutionary impulse to the counter-revolution. A ‘new life’ was under way.

  —All the normal routines had been overturned by the war; but a sense of impermanence, provisionality, arose also because everyone was aware – an awareness encouraged by the regime – that a new life, a new country, a total change was being made, recalled Paulino AGUIRRE, the liberal philosophy student. To a certain extent
, this newness corresponded to reality: the right had broken with the legitimate regime and was inventing a new order which, for being new, was that much more fragile. The newness didn’t give one freedom – that would be too noble a word; but it gave one the feeling of living within a process of creation, and the consequent sensation of social elasticity which people could take advantage of. Of course, there was a harshness; the political colouring was falangist. But even this harshness was somehow exterior: the ornamental and show aspects of fascism which the regime adopted …

  The sense of participating in, experiencing the creation of a new social structure which was to resolve the class conflicts of the past five years brought satisfaction to the middle class. Life in the rearguard was peaceful and, most important, there was no notable shortage of food. An exalted patriotism, a religious fervour, an ardent conviction that the war would be won, maintained middle-class morale. The failure to take Madrid was recorded but shrugged off, the Italian defeat at Guadalajara – last of the series of attempts to encircle Madrid in March 1937 – laughed off. Málaga had been captured meanwhile; the campaign was starting to take the north.