Places of memory and oblivion An important dimension in which memory operates is spatial—the visual impact of the Valley, the tangible character of war memorials, churches, mosques, cemeteries and the rediscovered roadside graves. Those in mourning use the above not only for ceremony, but also for a ritual of separation, wherein touching a name point to what has been lost, but also what has not been lost. ‘Internment and putting up a memorial are followed by memory. Commemorating the dead… provides a valuational approach to the temporal and already completed whole of a human being’s outer and inner life’ said Mikhail Bakhtin. Naming names, engraving them, adds an exceptional dimension and significance to spatial representations of the past. In Spain, forgetting meant the effacing of traces –be these the traces of actual mass graves made invisible by neglect, or the banned names of those imprisoned and executed by the fascist regime. After the implementation of democracy, Spain’s selective commemoration of the dead kept the memory of Franco’s followers in streets, cities, and monuments while failing to remember the defeated anti-fascists; it denied them the basic right of having a completed outer and inner life, and also denied their relatives the right of a place to remember and express grief. Two spaces of death As the exhumation of summarily executed anti-fascist political prisoners is happening, the newly-found place of their demise highlights a contrast between two spaces of death: the nameless graves of those who fought for democracy and the engraved names of those who fought and died for the fascist cause. Excavating the experience of victims counteracts the narrative of monumental history through insightful remembrance. Fragments of the past become visible in the present, and bring an awareness that has the function of translating a past responsibility in a present resolve. This is precisely the work undertaken by the associations for the recovery of memory. Altogether, they have shifted the place and time of forgetfulness in present-day Spain, and have given rise to a different narrative. Their effort to find and recover the names of those lying in anonymous mass graves means that their history can at last be etched in the country’s collective memory. The whole process of facing Spain’s unsavoury past began in October 28, 2000 when some people decided to open the common grave of thirteen Republicans in Priaranza del Bierzo, aided by a team of anthropologists and forensic medics. Two years later, on March 16, 2002, a University of Granada forensic expert took samples from four of the thirteen corpses. The procedure’s expenses were privately paid under the aegis of the ARMH (Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory). On July 2003 another grave was exhumed at Valdedios in Asturias. In it laid the bodies of fourteen nurses and three attendants who worked in what had been a psychiatric hospital. On August 5th 1939, thirteen young women, seven of them teenagers, had been executed outside the walls of the East cemetery of Madrid, accused of belonging to the youth branch of the Socialist party. Their story and remains were recovered only recently. (Fonseca, 2006). In Franco’s Spain women were not spared death by firing squad if they were suspected of having affinities with the Republican parliamentary government (Silva).
Mass Graves in Cataluña
Probable – maybe there are mass graves in these areas Area of numerous mass graves
A mass grave inside cemetery grounds
A mass grave outside cemetery walls (in general cemeteries are walled in Catalonia and Spain)
Front line on the 23rd of December 1938, the last frontier of the war
above: a map of mass graves in Cataluña, showing probable and actual mass graves, inside and outside cemeteries. The front line shown here was the last frontier of the 1936-1939 Civil War. below: exhumation of a mass grave site at Gurb, near Vic, in Cataluña, completed in the spring of 2008
54 On Site review 22: WAR
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