"I don't know where we are going, but I do know that wherever we
may go we will lose our way".
(Praxedes Mateo Segasta, 19th c. Spanish liberal. From Roads to
Santiago" Cees Nooteboom)
Prologue
Our local discussion in Croatia about whether lustration is called for
- about who is worse, the Bolsheviks or the ustaši; about whether
"leftist" Croatian Governments are promoting the policy of the
Bolshevik revolution, and the "rightist" ones fascism - gave us an
idea and we mounted the bike and rushed West. Spain is maybe the
last state in Europe, other than Croatia, in which the wounds of the
1936-1939 Civil War and of the conflict between Nationalists and
Republicans/the rightists and the leftists/conservativism and
liberalism/fascists and democrats have not healed completely.
Interestingly enough, France has never been mentioned in the
context of divisions between fascists and democrats although it was
split for two years between the Vichy "southern" France, which
toadied to the Germans and signed the armistice, and the occupied
remainder of the country, "northern" France. Over the two years of
its existence, with it race laws and hard line policies Vichy France
did not in any respect differ from any of the other fascist regimes in
contemporary Europe. Including the regime of the Independent State
of Croatia (Nezavisna država Hrvatska). But that is not being
mentioned!
Another qualification: this story is only geared to a motorist trip.
Thanks to it the trip got a mission. But let us not fool ourselves!
The Spanish Civil War is an immense theme and tragic episode in
human history which claimed one million lives and brought misery
to countless other people. Therefore, by writing about those events
we have only brushed against the margin of the drama and, maybe
quite inadequately, raised serious topics through a leisure trip.
However, the danger that this may encroach upon the seriousness of
the subject is nevertheless lower than the possibility that it might
make us seem frivolous.
Barcelona
The photograph of this member of the Republican militia, probably
of the anarchist CNT, standing guard on the roof of the Colina Hotel
in Plaça Catalunya, downtown Barcelona, was taken in the summer
of 1936. In the unstable political atmosphere after 1931, when the
Second Republic was proclaimed, after which the king promptly
packed up and left the country, elections were held in intervals of
about two years and governments alternated regularly in the country
deeply divided into Royalists and Republicans, rightist and leftist,
etc. In the nineteen-thirties Spain lagged behind the rest of Europe:
95% of the land was owned by a small percentage of land nobility,
and serfs lived in conditions such as had prevailed, for instance, in
England two hundred years before. After winning the first election,
the Republicans promised to distribute land to the landless peasants,
but the decision was never implemented. At the same time, on the
wave of an unusually intensive and fanatic antireligion movement
churches were torched. Crypts were opened and mortal remains
thrown in the street. Since there were also deeply religious wealthy
people but also peasants, serfs, workers and citizens, this deepened
the division of the country even more.
The army rebelled for the first time already in 1932, and the revolt
was quickly put down.
The followers of the left, the poor and the discontented accepted the
promises of the anarchist CNT about the society of equals. In 1933
the party was one million strong. Of course, the anarchists did not
believe the state, but with such a membership they were a
continuous threat for any authority. In the same year the
conservative party won the elections! At the same time, in Europe
Hitler and Mussolini assumed power. The decision to release the
leaders of the failed coup d'état from prison brought the Republican
followers in the streets and violent clashes ensued. The members of
the new, just formed fascist party, joined the monarchists. The first
victims who lost their lives in the defence of the Republican idea
were the miners of Basque country. They were massacred by the
army sent by the government to intervene. Spain will remember for
decades the name of the general who distinguished himself in that
operation: Franisco Franco. Finally, in the sporting of 1936 the
Republicans again won the elections by a tight margin. They set all
al the political prisoners free. At the same time the head of the
Republican police was assassinated in Madrid. The police retaliated
by arresting leading conservative politicians, and the head of the
conservative opposition was killed in the process.
At a secret meeting held in June in a forest on Tenerife general
Franco, then commander of the Canarian Corps, accepted the call of
the leader of the new coup general Emilio Mola who hatched a plot
against the Republic in Madrid. Bearing in mind the earlier failure,
this coup was prepared more carefully. On 18 July 1936 the army in
all cities left the backs and, following the instructions of the main
plotters, proclaimed a state of war. The text of general Mola's order
made history: "... "we must extend the terror; we must impose the
impression of dominion while eliminating without scruples everyone
who does not think as we do ".
"From Cortes to Pizarro and Pablo
there are no better or worse people in the world", says Ernest
Hemingway's Robert Jordan in For Whom the Bell Tolls. And so the
time of terror began.
Emilio Mola:
In the first months of the coup d'état the army managed to control
only one third of Spain. After the Government distributed weapons,
in the rest of the country the armed workers, citizens and peasants
managed to defend their cities. The city of Barcelona was defended
and the army surrendered after a seven day clash in the Catalonya
Square during which police forces also joined the CNT militia.
While the socialists, communists and anarchists, now armed, having
defended the city began to organise the revolution, local middle-
class politicians proclaimed the independence of Catalonia.
We appeared in the city eighty years later, in late spring. Rambla,
the central "zona piedale" of the city, the rush hour, full of leisurely
tourists capturing with their cameras. Deep shade of the tall trees.
Street musicians. Acrobats. Calls to get a seat from countless
terraces and bars. Essentially an indescribable nervousness, you
have the feeling that you are being attacked. Nevertheless, I look for
places and addresses described by George Orwell in Homage to
Catalonya. He came there in December 1936 in order to defend
democracy. There are the scenes he found:
"Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where
crowds of people streamed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers
were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night.
And it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of
all. In outward appearance, it was a town in which the wealthy
classes had practically ceased to exist. Except for a small number of
women and foreigners there were no 'well-dressed' people at all.
Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes, or blue
overalls, or some variant of the militia uniform. All this was queer
and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some
ways I did not even like it, but I recognized it immediately as a state
of affairs worth fighting for. Also I believed that things were as
they appeared, that this was really a Workers' State and that the
entire bourgeoisie had either fled, been killed, or voluntarily come
over to the workers' side; I did not realize that great numbers of
well-to-do bourgeois were simply lying low and disguising
themselves as proletarians for the time being."
Catalonia, Barcelona in particular, was truly transformed into a
Workers' State. Private property was abolished, so was prostitution
and tipping. In compliance with the new code of behaviour people
addressed one another with "comrade" and "thee". Even the stalls of
the shoe shiners were collectivised and painted in the anarchist red
and black colours. The most expensive hotel in the city was turned
into a public canteen. Unemployment disappeared. In his Hope
André Malraux described a similar atmosphere in the streets of
Madrid: "That was the night of the poor saved when the Government
decided to open all pawn shops from which the miserables of Madrid
took away, with no compensation, all their tatters, watches, bedding
and clothes and took them back to the suburbs". In the collectivised
factories and businesses the workers spontaneously continued to
work after a strike of a few days. Noam Chomsky has called such
conditions a unique case of workers' self-management in the history
of humankind.
Yet, in the explosion of violence wrought by armed groups made up
of frustrated paupers and people who never had any prospects, many
wealthy people were killed. Churches were torched, priests killed.
Fifteen bishops and six thousand priests were killed during what was
for some the revolution and for others a civil war. About 250,000
people died behind the lines and not on the front as the consequence
of leftist or rightist retaliation. Gaudi's masterpiece, the Sagrada
Familia cathedral, was spared major destruction because the
anarchists were impressed by its "artistic value". Orwell cynically
found in that a proof of the anarchists' lack of taste because that
would have been a good opportunity for razing the "ugly" structure
to the ground.
Contrary to usual stereotypes, in the nineteen-thirties only 20% of
the Spanish population took active part in religious rites and
attended church. After the fall of the Republic and during Franco's
regime this ratio was reversed. Torn by the lack of unity and by the
permanent conflict between the pro-revolutionary anarchist CNT and
the anti-Stalinist communist party POUM on the one hand, and the
supporters of independent Catalonia ERC, Catalonian
socialdemocrats and the PSUC, the pro-Soviet Catalonian communist
party on the other hand, which ended in 1937 in mutual distrust,
armed clashes and the ban of the POUM by order of Stalin's envoys,
the defence of Catalonia and Barcelona weakened and in 1939 the
city surrendered to the fascists with almost no struggle. The
Government left Barcelona and one hundred thousand people fled to
France.
In spite of the countless victims, there is no monument related to
that period in Barcelona. Only on the church of St. Philip, which
still shows traces of the bombing, a memorial plaque was put up
after 70 years with the inscription "Forty-two children were killed
in the air raid of the Francoist airplanes" (Above!).
In 1985, almost fifty years after the end of the Spanish civil war, a
memorial was opened at Fossar de la Pedrera, near the Barcelona
cemetery, on the site of a mass grave of 4000 victims of the so-
called White Terror perpetrated by the followers of the Francoist
regime in the period between their assumption to power until,
probably, the end of the first dozen years of Franco's rule. It was
not advisable to be a political opponent during Franco's
dictatorship. The atmosphere began to thaw quickly in 1975, after
his death, but let us not forget that the last execution by the
traditional garrotte was carried out in the Barcelona prison in 1974.
After Franco's death, Catalonia has continued to dream about its
independence. Catalan flags fly on the windows and balconies of
buildings throughout the city. A huge number carry a radical
message: the yellow-red Catalan flag with the Cuban coat of arms.
Why Cuba, wonder the tourists. Well, Cuba was the last Spanish
colony. The message is clear.
On the main city square, Plaza Catalunya, there is a monument to the
Catalan struggle of independence in the form of an upside-down
staircase. If the staircase symbolises the struggle of the Catalans,
climbing it is clearly a difficult task! The last step is left
incomplete.
Girona
Girona is only a hundred kilometres or so from Barcelona. That was
the last town that fell before the onslaught of the Nationalists seven
days after Barcelona. The fall of Girona marked the end of the
Spanish Civil War.
A hundred thousand Spanish refugees fled across the French border
and ended up in refugee camps. Owing to the horrendous conditions
in the camps more than fifteen thousand died of starvation and
disease. Those that survived starvation and disease in the camps
were deported from France to the German death camps, mainly
Mauthausen. Few survived to welcome liberation. No monuments in
Girona mark these events. In the City Museum there is only a
miniature exhibition of photographs and posters from the days of
revolutionary enthusiasm...
and days of sorrow:
In the Catalan sierras
We drove for hours on a twisting mountain road. Pastures and black
forest woods. Lleida with the royal palace and a church abandoned
since the wars with France. During the civil war it was ruthlessly
bombed by German and Italian airplanes. Three hundred people were
killed on a single day in November 1937.
Some fifty kilometres further, in the small town of Barbastro in the
Catalan mountains, members of the Popular Front militia dragged
fifty-one Claretian priests from the monastery and shot them. On the
church, hidden by an olive tree, there is a vandalised plaque
commemorating the event. Someone splashed it with red and black
paint, anarchist symbols. This fact, albeit not particularly dramatic,
is suggestive of the coexistence of two views of things in present-
day Spain. Although the plaque is on a church that is still in use and
in the centre of the small town, no one seems to bother and clear
the plaque and restore dignity to the memorial. The plaque, with the
names of the killed Claretians and splashed paint, marks the
dialogue between the followers of the two streams, sustained,
assumably, for decades just like in Croatia. In our brutalities we
have not lagged at all behind the Spaniards. The same fate befell
twenty-one Franciscan monks from the monastery at Široki Brijeg,
liquidated jauntily and mercilessly by some partisans in February
1945. In Croatia, however, as time goes by the dialogue seems to
become louder rather than subsiding, it creates unbearable noise,
teeth are gnawing on either side and the whole nation rambles about
events that happened seventy years ago as if they had occurred
yesterday.
Only two years later, the Francoists retaliated by murdering all
Republicans, socialists and communists.
We turned onto a mountain road, then uphill, to a clearing and the
remainder of the trenches in which George Orwell spent some
months. Just exchanging a shot or two with the enemy, he was
mainly bored until a sniper shot him through the throat. After
treatment in hospital, he fled Barcelona with his wife and thus
probably saved his life. That is, in 1937 Stalin blackmailed the
Government with choice: either forbid the POUM and its brave
militias in which Orwell also fought with thousands of other
fighters, or forget all military aid. Controlled by the NKVD,
communist party commanders arrested all the POUM leaders and
after torturing them cast them into pits. Orwell escaped arrest by the
skin of his teeth. Six months after his return to "idyllic and sleepy
England", he wrote the first pages of Homage to Catalonia, and the
malignant actions of the Big Brother were certainly a lasting
inspiration for his later masterpiece.
"When we got up with the Americans they were lying under some
olive trees along a little stream. The yellow dust of Aragon was
blowing over them, over their blanketed machine guns, over their
automatic rifles and their anti-aircraft guns. It blew in blinding
clouds raised by the hooves of pack animals and the wheels of motor
transports.
But in the lee of the stream-bank, the men were slouching fearful
and grinning, their teeth flashing white slits in their yellow-
powdered faces.
Since I had seen them last spring, they have become soldiers. The
romantics have pulled out, the cowards have gone home along with
the badly wounded. The dead, of course, aren't there. Those who are
left are tough, with blackened matter-of-fact faces, and, after seven
months, they know their trade.
They have fought with the first Spanish troops of the new
government army, captured the strongly fortified heights and town
of Quinto in a brilliantly conceived and executed fashion, and have
taken part with three Spanish brigades in the final storming of
Belchite after it had been surrounded by Spanish troops.
After the taking of Quinto, they had marched twenty miles across
country to Belchite. They had lain in the woods outside the town and
had worked their way forward with the Indian-fighting tactics that
are still the most life-saving that any infantry can know. Covered by
a heavy and accurate artillery barrage, they stormed the entry to the
town. Then for three days they fought from house to house, from
room to room, breaking walls with pickaxes, bombing their way
forward as they exchanged shots with the retreating Fascists
from street corners, windows, rooftops and holes in the walls.
Finally, they made a juncture with Spanish troops advancing from
the other side and surrounded the cathedral, where 400 men of the
town garrison still held out. These men fought desperately, bravely,
and a Fascist officer worked a machine gun from the tower until a
shell crumpled the masonry spire upon him and his gun. They fought
all around the square, keeping up a covering fire with automatic
rifles, and made a final rush on the tower. Then, after some fighting
of the sort you never know whether to classify as hysterical or the
ultimate in bravery, the garrison surrendered."
Thus Ernest Hemingway described, in 1937, for a US paper, the
battle for Belchite on the Aragon front. In spite of the described
victory, the fortunes of war turned and the insurgents again took the
small town. Fifty thousand people died in the offensive on the
Aragon front.
The small town of Belchite was never rebuilt, and a new one was
built next to the old settlement.
We drove on to Catalan Teruel, a town that changed hands several
times. It is situated on the border with Andalusia an altitude of 1200
metres. The horrendous number of casualties the Republicans
suffered while taking the naturally excellent fortress affected the
changes of war fortunes, and after the fall of Teruel the Republicans
lost the initiative. The international brigades which took part in the
battles, mainly organised by the Comintern, were 45,000 strong; the
members came from 50 countries. The US brigade, Thomas
Jefferson, had several thousand members. The "Spanish fighters"
from out part of the world were for a long time an icon of the
League of Communists of Yugoslavia. However, George Orwell did
not get a recommendation of the English Communist Party to join
the international brigades, and set off with the assistance of the
Independent Labour Party, ILP, and joined with a small number of
like-minded volunteers the later defamed POUM.
"At that time in Aragon", wrote Orwell, " hope had replaced apathy and
cynicism. Equality, where there was an absence of fear of superiors and
where the word 'comrade' really stood for comradeship. There are systems
where Socialism means no more than a planned state-economy where
human predatory nature is left intact. There also exists a vision of
socialism quite different from this where the idea of equality is its actual
strength."
In the photograph, Hemingway after the capture of Teruel. The following
photographs show Teruel today.
Andalusia. Cultivated fields. Here the wheat is already yellow, and here
and there also harvested. Olive groves and vineyards. Boundless areas,
hills of olive trees or vineyards. We are closed to Marrakesh than to
Brussels. Greenery also sweeps into the cities, tree-lined avenues and
streets, parks everywhere. The love of green was probably inherited from
the desert people who were present in Andalusia for eight hundred years.
Granada
"If I die leave the balcony open...
The child eats oranges
(From my balcony I can see him)
The reaper is harvesting the wheat
(From my balcony I can hear him)
If I die leave the balcony open!".
Thus wrote Gabriel Garcia Lorca who was killed in Granada in August
1939 as one of the first victims. The insurgents quickly took control of the
town. The leftists, the reds, people who thought differently, were dragged
out of their homes and murdered. Including Lorca who was, for God's
sake, just a poet who was terribly afraid and who found shelter in the
house of a leading Falangist, the father of his friend and fellow artist. A
deputy of the Madrid parliament came for him with some Falangists. After
spending the night in a suburban house, so the story goes, along with some
other unfortunate people, he was murdered in the morning and thrown into
a pit. His body was never found, and his executors have long been dead.
We found no memory of these tragic events in the city. However, the city
park is called Gabriel Garcia Lorca. That would probably do. But would
it? Does oblivion reconcile people? And have they all forgotten?
Maybe a little more on the subject later. Let us go on!
Malaga, cheerful city on the Mediterranean shore. Cruisers in the port.
Buildings five, six storeys high, greenery, pedestrian zone. Tourism!
Malaga
Eighty years ago the scenes were different. The Republicans, the workers
and the citizens managed to defend the city in 1936, but in February 1937
Malaga surrendered. Arthur Koestler, the English writer, then reported for
the English press. He had joined the Republicans and his reports were
attuned accordingly. He was soon defamed as an "enemy of Spain" and
was as such sentenced to death. He remained in Malaga two days after the
Republican army left the city, but so did part of the population. One
hundred thousand people fled towards Almeria in the Death Caravan,
called that name because it was bombed by the air force and the navy.
In his Dialogue with Death Koestler does not clearly mention his reasons
for staying in Malaga. He found shelter in the house of the British consul,
Sir Peter Mitchell, who had become his friend. He loathed the cowardly
escape from Malaga, he loathed deserters, and defiantly decided to stay
and help his friend.
Malaga surrendered on 2 February 1937.
This is what he wrote: "Ever since this morning there has been a white
flag on the Civil Governor's residence" (a refugee woman told Koestler).
"I feel the ants of fear creeping over my skin... Refugees in the streets
with baskets and packages, chiefly containing bedding. There is a touching
conventionality about the way in which the poor and wretched rescue their
bedding before everything else. Next in this hierarchy of earthly treasures
come pots and pans and household crockery... Third on the list comes
usually the cage with the canary, the pet cat or a dog... They stand for the
sunny side of existence."
Of course, they came to pick up Koestler and his friend the next day. Tied,
on the back seat of the car, in front of the army command in Malaga, they
waited, saying nothing. Koestler knew that he would be killed, and so did
Sir Peter who hoped that the military would recognise his diplomatic
status. But nothing was certain. The shots of the executions echoed all
around. Five thousand Republicans were executed immediately after the
capture of the city. Koestler was not afraid of death, said he in his book,
but he was afraid of the torture preceding execution. And then his friend
the consul, amidst the apparent silence of the closed car, his hands tied
behind his back, with no introduction or additional words, addressed the
following verses, certainly to Koestler, and maybe even to himself :
"Pray thou thy days be long before thy death,
And full of ease and kingdom;
seeing in death There is no comfort and none after growth,
Nor shall one thence look up and see day's dawn
Nor light upon the land whither I go.
Live thou and take thy fill of days and die
When thy day comes; and make not much of death
Lest ere thy day thou reap an evil thing."
I cried as I imagined the situation. Nothing is over until it is over, that was
the message of encouragement, chivalrous and gentlemanly, sent by Sir
Peter to his friend. The consul was released immediately, and Arthur
Koestler waited three months for torture and death, first in the jail in
Malaga, and then in Sevilla. He was saved thanks to the uproar raised in
England by Sir Peter.
An addition.... with no relation to the theme at hand, but since we are
talking about chivalry ... Laurence Oates was a member of Scott's
unfortunate expedition to the South Pole in 1912. On the way back,
believing that he was slowing the others with his exhaustion, Robert Oates
left the tent into the icy polar night with the words: "I am just going
outside and I may be some time".
Ronda
Ronda is a small town in the mountains above Malaga. It is perched on a
sheer rock the cliffs of which drop down to the valley and a stream one
hundred metres below. At the town gate a detachment of the Republican
militia surrounded the Guardia Civil which surrendered after a brief
exchange of gunfire. The commander of the militia detachment, a robust
local peasant, Pablo, ordered the guardias to kneel down, and then shot
them one by one in the head. They then proceeded into the town and seized
from their homes all the people known for their Nationalist leanings,
locked them in the town hall and sent for a priest to hear their confession.
After that Pablo ordered his soldiers to form a gauntlet from the town hall
to the edge of the precipice at the edge of the town square (see the photo
above). He called the priest and asked him whether he had heard the
confessions of the civiles, entered the town hall and called for a volunteer
to come out and run the gauntlet. Nobody volunteered. He then pointed to
the first man and ordered him to run the gauntlet. As the man began to run,
he was beaten with rifle butts, arms and legs, and when he reached the last
pair, bleeding and stumbling, they grabbed his hands and threw him down
the cliff. Then the next man came out and began to run the gauntlet
defiantly, fell and got up, and when he remained lying on the ground,
exhausted, the last two militiamen dragged him to the end and threw him
into the chasm. And the same fate befell the rest...
This is approximately how Hemingway described the massacre at
Ronda in For Whom the Bell Tolls.
It is not quite certain whether Hemingway described the event on the
basis of real events on just wanted to be "truer than life". The point has
also been the subject of discussion. Nevertheless, the fact is that about
five hundred inhabitants of this small town were killed during the civil
war, that there was a cliff...
What makes one a conservative, nationalist or inclined to a traditional
idea; and how does one become a liberal, favouring novelty? For or against
LGBT? Hard line, soft line. According to a well-known study (John
Hibbing, University of Nebraska), the case seems to involve a
combination of psychological and biological factors, and not choice, i.e.
decision as the outcome of consideration. In their formative time, in
childhood, the "conservatives" were more surrounded by a "negative"
environment which responds to stimuli carefully and with fear, or
experiences them as threats. This is why they react faster to a threatening
or negative stimulus, and the ideology founded on strong militarisation,
the police or anti-immigrant mood is based on the "biology of threat".
(Such behaviour which experiences a stimulus primarily as a threat was an
evolutional imperative for humans in the Pleistocene Two and a half
million years up to 12,000 years ago. A long time, indeed!). Furthermore,
research has shown that conservatives find the indistinct and the indefinite
obnoxious and intolerable. It is not clear, however, why conservatives,
having a strong negative charge, do not at the same time have a neurotic
personality to which, for example, liberals are inclined. Quite the contrary;
psychological studies have shown that conservatives feel a high degree of
happiness and pleasure in life. This is only an apparent paradox, according
to the interpretations of researchers, because the negative and cautious
attitude with which conservatives cope with changes contributes to the
feeling of happiness better that the continuous quest for new experiences.
What are we to do? How can we educate our children so that they do not
become fascists?
Sevilla
Still dazed by the drive through Andalusian wheat fields and heat, we
reached the capital of Andalusia in the late afternoon. The ornate
architecture of the old buildings obviously relies on Moorish tradition. If
early May was so hot, on 17 July 1936 - when the insurgent army left the
barracks and immediately arrested all the key persons in the city
administration - it must have been infernally sizzling. In seven days the
army took control of the city. Whoever had any links with the leftist
movement, the Republic or barricades, was shot. According to some
reports, three thousand Republicans were killed in the first seven days
after the military coup. This is what Ronald Fraser (according to Cees
Nooteboom, Roads to Santiago) wrote in Blood of Spain:
"One morning we had to cordon off the area, the people surged so
forcefully that the firing squads no longer had any room for public
executions. We had to keep the crowd at a distance of at least two hundred
metres, and were given strict orders to remove all children. They brought
the detainees out of the tram depot. Among the first dozen, the first day of
my duty, there were some people from a village next to mine. You can
imagine how I felt! All of them, including a woman, refused a blindfold.
Just like some others, the woman raised her clenched fist and shouted
"Long live the Republic!" before the shots rang. On the other days of the
week, while I was on duty they shot a dozen people every morning. One
day there were also three women. When the firing squad raised their rifles,
two of them lifted their skirts about their heads and thus totally bared
themselves. Was it a challenge, or despair? I do not know why they did it
but people came to watch because of such scenes. And when we returned
to the city, the streets were deserted, all the watchers had disappeared into
their homes, crawled into their beds. The city stood still... "
Sevilla does not have a monument to the people killed either. On the long
trip to Toledo we whiled our time away by photographing poppy fields!
What a symbolism! In the absence of any artefact that would mention the
victims and comfort their descendants, these red flowers, found all over
Spain, now seem to guard the memory not only to the soldiers fallen in the
First World War but also of the killed Spaniards.
Toledo
We saw Toledo and its Alcázar on the bend of the river from a distance as
we approached from the south. André Malraux joined the international
brigade and - probably from an antediluvian plane donated by France to
the Republic - saw Toledo from the air in 1937: "On the ground houses
were burning quietly like village chimneys at sunset".
An operation that should have been relatively easy and completed after a
few days of action, the conquest of the Alcázar fortress turned into an
agony of two and a half months thanks to the defiance and determination
of the fortress commander, colonel of the insurgent army José Moscardó.
After the proclamation of the state of war on 21 July 1936, the Republican
troops, sent from Madrid to put down the insurgence, soon reached Toledo.
As we had already seen in all the places so far, developments depended on
the commitment. After taking control in a place, the Nationalists dragged
from their homes eminent citizens, intellectuals, physicians, lawyers and
all those known to have voted for the Popular Front and shot them
forthwith. Terror seems to have been the official politics of the nascent
regime. The Republicans were no less considerate toward their opponents,
but mass executions were mainly the consequence of actions of maverick
groups and lack of discipline in units mainly organised by militias of
various political parties. Thanks to the units dispatched from Madrid, the
Republicans already the next day took control of Toledo, with the
exception of the fortress and its military garrison. The Republicans took
Luis, the 16-year-old son of the commander Moscardó, hostage, and
demanded that the Alcázar be surrendered within ten minutes or
they would kill him. Moscardó asked them to give the phone to Luis.
"Commend your soul to God, shout 'Viva Cristo Rey' and long live
Spain, and die like a hero," he told him, "Alcázar will not
surrender." "That's what I'm going to do", replied Luis and was shot
forthwith. The defenders of Alcázar held their ground until the
arrival of reinforcements, troops of Franco's African Corps, after
which the Republicans retreated. The Nationalists never again lost
power over Toledo. (In the picture, colonel Moscardó, meanwhile
promoted to general, shows Himmler in 1940 the extent of the
destruction).
We tried to get more information about the events from the local
people. We were hardly successful because we did not have the luck
to come across anyone. Moreover, the mission would have required
more time. We managed to meet a woman who gave us the phone
number of an archeologist and occasional tourist guide. He was the
grandson of the mayor of Toledo who was arrested by the military
authorities 24 hours after assuming power, before the arrival of the
Republicans (the following day), and sentenced summarily to 30
years in prison for treason. Unfortunately, he could not meet us but
he sent me an e-mail message with the following explanation: "There
are no monuments in Toledo because the present-day exhibition in
the Military Museum in Alcázar cannot be considered a monument.
On the Avenida de los Reyes Catolicos, opposite the Escuela de
Artes y Oficios there is a memorial plaque honouring the Toledo
Republicans who ended up in Nazi camps. I am sorry, but I cannot
help you more". (In the photograph, the memorial plaque).
In addition to the vandalised plaque on the church in Barbaresco,
this was only the second instance of somebody talking about past
events. This plaque was put up in 2014!
Guernica
From Toledo we rushed across the Castilian plain to the last
"official" stop on our trip, the small town of Guernica in the Basque
hills. A neat, well-urbanised place. Not quite centrally, the town
does have a monument commemorating the people who perished in
the air raid on 26 April 1937; about 400 people were killed, and the
town destroyed. Guernica, and later on Barcelona, marked the start
of a new style of warfare, the bombing of undefended cities which
could not be considered military targets by any standard. The
fashion was contagious because the style has been sustained to the
present day.
Epilogue
These are, then, things that link and bind us. Croatia and Spain are
both Mediterranean countries; the summers are warm, the winters
snowy in the mountains. Tourism. Wine and olive oil. We also have
a weakness for dictators: Franco ruled Spain between 1939 and
1975; Croatia was ruled by various old Yugoslav regimes, by the
dictator Ante Pavelic, by Tito's single-party regime, and we for the
first time became familiar with the idea of parliamentary democracy
just twenty-five years ago. Our two dictators, Croatia's Pavelic and
Spain's Franco, are buried in Madrid. The tomb of the latter is much
more sumptuous, but he also ruled for a longer time.
There is, however a huge difference which must be related to our
scant parliamentary experience. Painful memories of what was for
some the revolution in Spain, and for other liberation from the
bolshevik takeover, or what was for some in Croatia the people's
liberation war against fascism and for others the overture for the
introduction of the bolshevik dictatorship, can be treated - in an
adult, mature and responsible society - in several ways. By total
purification and distance - from their leftist or rightist fallacies,
just as Germany has distanced itself from its past. By a policy of
reconciliation of the black majority and the white minority as the
Republic of South Africa did encouraged by Nelson Mandela. By a
policy urging forced oblivion, as Spain seems to have done...
And by our style, by incessant provocation and constant fuelling of
old conflicts.
Across Bleiburg, Jasenovac, Thompson, Cyrillic/Latin script,
Marshal Tito Square, lustration... the overall dynamics of our
society appears to rest on conflict and squabbling. I have the feeling
that the vulgar patriotic trash - and that is what Thompson
essentially is - enjoys today the support of the authorities, e.g., he
is publicly recognised by the Prime Minister and by the President of
the Republic, not because they really enjoy his music but because
that is a good way to annoy the other side, which experiences
Thompson and his crosses, swords and banners like a red rag.
And that is why the uninterrupted sequence of authoritarian regimes
to which the Croats have been subjected, and the absence of
democratic institutions and experience in democratic behaviour have
brought us to where we are now. This does not mean that we have
no prospects, but today, when pseudo-leftists still dream about the
advantages of socialist self-management, and the rightists about a
nationally purified and class-wise lustrated state, and when both
unanimously respond with "No way!" to the question of immigrants,
there is a vast chasm between us and Spain, one that will, probably,
be bridged over time.
During the Terror, after the French Revolution, the Jacobins
guillotined hundreds of aristocrats while concurrently sparing their
children. It took five generations, two hundred years, to forget the
crime and to re-unite the French as a nation.
And, for the end, another control question regarding the
understanding of this text: for instance, how would Croatia react, in
your view, to demands about the secession of Dalmatia, Istria or
Slavonia? Would that be debated in a civilised manner in parliament
or would police pick up the proponents? Or, generally speaking,
what would happen? Because, as you know, Catalonia is ready to
proclaim its independence from Spain; so is The Basque country!
And there is also Gibraltar!... I had the impression that we are a
hundred years away from that country, from the Spanish and their
culture.
