1 See for example ‘Lorca’s skeleton stirs Spain’s ghosts’ The Globe & Mail , August 14, 2004, p R8 and ‘Lorca’s bones” by Jon Lee Anderson in the New Yorker , June 2, 2009, pp 44-49. 2 Lorca’s assassins were members of Franco’s death squads. The poet was just one of thousands to be summarily, and anonymously, executed. 3 The law was instituted in 2007. 4 Between the years 2000 and 2004, sixty anonymous mass graves around Spain were exhumed. (Fabrega 2005:106). 5 These German tombs are located at the cemetery close to the Yuste monastery in Extremadura (Silva 2006:195). 6 See www.memoriacatalunya.org 7 Some of these graves hold 4,000 dead in Merida, about 1,600 in Oviedo, about 1,000 in Leon, about 1,000 in Madrid and about 3,000 in Badajoz (Silva 2006:191). The excavation of remembrance It is in the context of the ‘full stop’ law (implemented in 1977 to avert trials of Franco’s regime members) that the present excavation has taken place. The effort is perforce very slow and painstaking, for there are more than 30,000 non-identified corpses still lying in common graves. 7 All of them belong to defeated Republicans or to innocent bystanders caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. To date this law has not been abolished even though it contravenes article 14 of the 1978 Constitution, which stipulates the right to equality under the law. This illegal situation has obstructed the efforts to clarify the circumstances surrounding the type of death and the location of the deceased. Many relatives therefore have been unable to find and bury their dead. On the whole, the excavation of remembrance reiterates that the fate of overpowered communities reclaiming a place in history is an indication that although memory is not a self-sufficient ground of identity, ‘… it remains an inescapable part of the process through which we claim or accept the burdens and responsibilities, rights and privileges, of any complex form of human existence. As such, it is an essential part of the moral life’ (Poole, p 156). A moral life entrenched in the geographical, historical, political and ‘architectural’ implications of Spain’s victims of fascism, and their ephemeral memorialisation. C references: Bakhtin, Mikhail. Art and Answerability. Early Philosophical Essays . M Holquist and V Liapunov, editors. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1990. p 106-7 Fabrega, Albert. Mort a les cunetes. (1939) Barcelona: Angle Editorial, 2005. pp100-1 Fonseca, Carlos. Trece Rosas . Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2006. Poole, Ross. ‘Memory, history and the claims of the past’ Memory Studies Vol. 1(2), 2008. pp 149–166 Preston, Paul. The Spanish Civil War: Reaction, Revolution and Revenge . New York, Lon- don: WW Norton & Company, 2006 Silva, Emilio. Las fosas de Franco: crónica de un desagravio . Madrid: Temas de Hoy, 2006. p 139 acknowledgments: I wish to express my appreciation to Santiago Macias of the ARMH, and the grand- children of those lying in mass graves for their tenacious effort to amend the official side of history. Thanks to my sister Silvia, who drove me to Cuelgamuros, and to Stephanie White for her insight into the victims’ ephemeral memorialisation.
The anonymous mass graves are scattered all over the Spanish territory. 4 In Catalonia, for example, the tombs’ examination and disclosure began only in 2005. Investigated case by case, they are not just anecdotal minutiae; instead the graves reflect a pattern of what Paul Preston calls a policy of systematic extermination of republican and democratic values. The instance of eight non-combatants executed without trial in 1939 in the woods around Suria, an area between Manresa and Montserrat, confirms the nature of the repression. They were not indicted or tried, except for the rebels’ declaration that they had a Marxist and revolutionary affiliation. In spite of the painstaking effort to document this and other cases that would finally allow the descendants to come to terms with the disappearance of their relatives, the regional Government stopped all the initiatives to open more graves in 2005 (Fabrega). In contrast, the Spanish state recently disbursed millions to repatriate corpses of the military contingent sent by Franco to fight alongside Hitler’s troops against the Soviet Union during the Second World War. The German dead on Spanish territory during the two world wars were also interred with honour and their graves inscribed with names and dates. 5 Recently, the pressure of ‘memory’ groups and associations compelled the Catalan government to establish a new law as of July 9, 2009 to locate all the disappeared, identify their remains and designate the graves as spaces of memory. 6
above: ‘To the memory of the 100,000 Spanish Republicans interned in Argeles camp during the Retreat of February 1939. Their sorrow: to have died in the defence of democracy and the Republic against fascism in Spain between 1936 and 1939 Homme Libre, souviens toi’
Mireya Folch-Serra is Professor Emerita of Geography and Adjunct Professor at the University of Western Ontario, London.
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