Memory of mass murder

It was a first for me. 

I’d been to rather more funerals than I care for. However, I’d never been to the reverse. On Wednesday, I attended my first exhumation.

Well, the start of one.

Removing the lid

It’s being conducted with extreme care, by a group called ArqueoAntro, archaeologists and anthropologists, and admirably professional. They’re meticulous. Careful. Painstaking. I saw them remove the black marble lid of the tomb in the morning, and then the concrete covering with a jackhammer, after which they started, centimetre by centimetre, removing the earth, sweeping away as they went. When I returned in the afternoon, they’d maybe dug down a couple of centimetres more from when I left at lunchtime.

Painstaking work

Careful work, slow work. State of play at the end of day 1

This was no ordinary grave. It wasn’t designed for single occupancy. On the contrary, it was a pit that contains, as far as we know, 76 bodies. Or, by now, bones. They were buried between 15 and 21 July 1939. 

Pit 21: 76 names, a few photos

Buried then because they were shot between those dates. 73 men. 3 women. And one more victim: the unborn child of one of the women, who was heavily pregnant at the time of her death.

The Spanish Civil War ended, technically, on 1 April 1939. That was the moment when Francisco Franco established his uncontested power across the whole country. But though the formal fighting had ended, the reprisals certainly hadn’t. 

Those 76, as I understand it, would have spent their final night in a military barracks in Paterna, the town whose council controls our own neighbourhood, and which includes the cemetery I visited. On the day of their execution, victims were taken to a military firing ground nearby. There’s a low wall still standing there, but behind it there used to be a mound of earth, now long gone, to catch bullets from live-firing practice by soldiers. It also caught stray bullets from executions.

The wall where they died

I say executions, but that’s not really the word. I don’t believe in the death sentence, if only because it relies far too heavily on fallible human judgement, but I think even those who do, would accept that it requires due process with a right to a defence, before it’s carried out. None of that kind of fussy formality was respected in these cases. That makes murder a far more accurate description. Mass murder, in fact. Our 76 were only a small proportion of the estimated 2238 shot in Paterna in those reprisal killings.

Many would counter that Franco’s enemies also carried out mass murders. That’s perfectly true. Perhaps only 50,000 compared to Franco’s 200,000, but once you’ve started killing people by the dozen, you’re a mass murderer even if you kill fewer than the other lot.

That doesn’t mean both sides were the same, however. Any more than it’s true, as many claim, that all politicians are the same. They’re not. 

Conservatives like Britain’s John Major or America’s George H W Bush, or figures of the Centre-Left like Britain’s Gordon Brown and America’s Jimmy Carter, accepted there were rules and that they had to abide by them. When they were beaten, however little they liked it, they went. 

It’s what gives all of us who dislike our government hope: we know it can be brought down and replaced. In time.

That contrasts with successful autocrats, like Putin, or the ones still pursuing success like Trump, who simply can’t accept that there’s any legitimate way they can be defeated. With them, there’s no hope of change. The cold, dead hand of sclerotic inertia descends instead, and we remain stuck with the horror and the shame for as far as we can see into the future.

That was Franco in Spain. It wasn’t enough to defeat his opponents. He wanted to exterminate them. Indeed, his side regularly used medical language to describe the other side: a disease, a cancer, something that had to be cut out surgically from the body politic, to return it to health. With serious military force behind him, a force that had just tasted complete victory, he wielded the surgeon’s scalpel freely. 

The Republic wasn’t like that. It tried to maintain the rule of law. But with most of the police going over to the other side, it quickly lost control of its own areas of the country. Mass murders certainly took place, often led by lawless elements, some of them recently released from jail, often with accounts to settle. Priests, police unfortunate enough to be caught, nuns, politicians of the right, any might be murdered. And, wherever the Communist Party exerted authority, often exactly the same people were killed as Franco would target: anarchists, so-called Trotskyists, socialists who wouldn’t bow to Moscow. 

Such behaviour was abhorrent to the democrats on the Republican side. On the Franco side, on the other hand, the murders were deliberate, a policy relentlessly and ruthlessly pursued. It led to the filling of graves like the one I visited yesterday.

Why was I there? 

One of the surnames of the bodies in that grave, ‘pit 21’, was ‘Huguet’. That’s the surname of one of our neighbours and friends. The organisers of the dig had asked whether he might be a relative. He doesn’t think so, but he went anyway, and I accepted his invitation to go along with him.

Friend and neighbour, Santi Huguet

What will happen when they get to the bones? Well, they hope to do some DNA testing to see whether they can identify relatives. And then they’ll give the remains a decent burial.

That might be valuable to the people in Spain today. As the organisers of the dig say, “to remember them is to give them their place in history”. 

The flag of the Republic, and the message (in Valencian):
Remembering them is giving them their place in history

That feels like a lesson that needs learning. There’s a growing nostalgia for Franco in Spain today. For instance, just this week, the city of Madrid changed a street name back to what it was called under Franco: General Millán Astray Street. 

A Madrid street reverts to honouring an apostle of violence

Astray built the Spanish Foreign Legion, with the slogan “Long live death”. He acted as Franco’s propaganda chief during the war, importing many ideas from their allies, Nazi Germany, including virulent anti-Semitism. Many believe that his brutality helped stoke the atmosphere that produced atrocities in the war.

This feels a little like a German town calling a street after Goebbels. That would never happen. Which leaves me feeling that their memory is something a lot more Spaniards need to refresh.

And, to be honest, not just Spaniards.