Condemned to death in a looking glass world

It’s when they get personal that historical events become most interesting. When they involve us or our families. That works too when it’s the family of friends.

Now my friend Conchi is English. As is her husband John. But they live, as we do, in the Spanish province of Valencia, and that name – Conchi – could hardly be more Spanish. It’s one of the traditional (and affectionate) shortenings of the name Concepción. That’s natural, since her parents were both Spanish, from the village of Cañete de las Torres in the province of Córdoba in Andalucía, southern Spain.

Her mother, whose family eventually moved to Valencia, now lives here again, after many years in England.

Since they moved to Spain, Conchi and John have spent some time investigating the background of her grandfather and great-uncle, José and Lorenzo Zurita Aguacil. Both were in agriculture at Cañete de las Torres. Both were active in left-wing politics.

José Zurita Alguacil
Conchi’s grandfather

Of the two, Lorenzo was the more militant. That got him into trouble again and again. That’s trouble that came to him from the left as well as from the right.

In December 1931, the king was forced off his throne and the second Spanish Republic was proclaimed. There wasn’t, however, just one movement behind that change. A host of parties and unions took part, ranging from liberals and centrists, through socialists and communists to the far left of the Trotskyists and anarchists.

The trade union most closely associated with the Anarchist organisation, the FAI or Iberian Anarchist Federation, was the National Confederation of Labour or CNT. Conchi’s great-uncle Lorenzo was a member. A member apparently prepared to take his rights as a unionist to considerable lengths. A Córdoba paper, Conchi and John discovered, records his release from gaol on 1 July 1933, to which he’d been sent after “the latest CNT strike”.

Release of Lorenzo

Prison didn’t teach him better manners, though. Just a few months later, on 28 January 1934, the then oldest paper of the province, the Diario de Córdoba, reports his sentencing to fourteen years in prison for holding explosives and committing crimes against the form of government. That’s the Republican government, led by men of the left. Not left enough, I presume, for Lorenzo.

Lorenzo gets sent back inside

Conchi and John tell me that, despite the sentence, family tradition is that Lorenzo didn’t actually serve any time. So he may have been out by July 1936, when events took the sharp turn that violently overthrew the way of life of both brothers and, indeed, of the rest of Spain.

On the 18th of that month, a bunch of senior army officers decided to mount a coup against the Republic. It failed and what followed was a bitter civil war lasting nearly three years. It ended with the rebels victorious and the Franco dictatorship established for another 36 years, while the Republic and those who fought for it, like the Zurita brothers, had been defeated.

Again, there’s only family tradition concerning what happened to Lorenzo. He apparently got out of Spain at the end of the war and made it into France, which was a smart move: with his record, all he could hope for in Spain was a firing squad. His smartness didn’t help him for long, though. The French government, no keener on refugees than today’s politicians in most countries, reacted badly to the arrival of nearly half a million from Spain. It didn’t help that many of them were battle-hardened soldiers from left-wing revolutionary parties. 

They were held in concentration camps (that’s not a slur, it was what they were officially called) although the word ‘camp’ is a heck of an overstatement for many of them. At the most notorious, Argelès-sur-Mer, inmates were simply held in a wired enclosure on the beach, with no shelter or latrines, and with little food or even water. Many thousands died and the family believes, though it can’t document the fact, that one of them was Conchi’s great-uncle Lorenzo.

Her grandfather José, on the other hand, stayed and was captured in Spain. The story in the family is that his brother-in-law denounced him. The in-laws were devout Catholics, and the Church was closely associated with the nationalist rebels’ cause. If that’s what happened to José, it’s a reflection of the kind of terrible split within families that civil wars always produce.

José was put on trial in a classic piece of what Orwell’s 1984 calls ‘doublethink’. The regime that emerged from a mutiny in the army and an attempted coup d’état applied a looking-glass logic. Those who had served the constitutional and elected government were tried by military tribunals set up by the rebels and faced a charge of rebellion.

Ministry of Defence papers Conchi and John obtained show that a military tribunal condemned José on 27 June 1940. Condemned to what? Why, to death, of course. 

However, unlike 700 of his inmates who were executed by firing squad over the next few years, and the 300 who died of disease or malnutrition, José was one of the lucky ones whose death sentence was commuted and who made it out alive. 

What was his sentence commuted to? Thirty years of what was called ‘major’ prison. That meant no leave from prison for any reason and strictly limited visiting. But at least he got to live. That, no doubt, the regime would have regarded as a generous and humanitarian act on its part. 

Nearly three years later, on 6 May 1943 his case was referred to a ‘Commission for the Revision of Sentences’. The record reveals some interesting information.

José, his death sentence and its commutation

Isn’t it striking how the capitalised, emboldened word ‘MUERTE’, ‘DEATH’, dominates the page? 

The next page gives more detail.

Report of the commission revising José’s sentence

José Zurita Alguacil, a married agricultural worker, from the village of Cañete, appeared before a military tribunal in his local town of Bujalance on 27 June 1940. He was tried in the ‘plaza’, which normally means square, but I imagined – when I first read this document – that it was just another way of referring to the town. Two of my neighbours, Nacho and Isabel, independently corrected me.

“Oh, no,” Isabel assured me, “it really means the main square of the town.”

The trial would have been held in public so that any other sympathisers with the ‘reds’ could see what fate awaited them if they failed to mend their ways.

Since the sentence was commuted to one of imprisonment, it was accompanied by ‘inhabilitación absoluta’, ‘absolute disqualification’. That meant the confiscation of any property but also a total ban from any paid employment. Conchi and John have been to see the fairly substantial farmhouse where José had lived with his family and, so they’ve heard, farmed a little land and owned a few horses. What happened to the property isn’t clear, but it does look as though José never got it back.

What’s more, there was no system of unemployment benefit at the time and, if there had been, he would certainly have been barred from receiving it. So José could look forward to a long prison term at the end of which he would be reduced to penury or whatever his wife could earn.

Nacho tells me that his grandfather spent 17 years disqualified. He and his wife were both teachers. She’d never joined a political party, so she was able to keep providing an income for the family. He gave private tuition, which stayed below the authorities’ radar, which allowed him to add a little to the family earnings, though far less than a full teacher’s pay.

His offence? He’d been a member of the Republican Left. That was the party of the President of the Republic, Manuel Azaña. Perhaps a reasonable modern equivalent would the Democratic Party in the US. For membership of a party of the moderate left, a party of the constitutional government, the rebels who overthrew it condemned him to seventeen years of virtual unemployment. 

Nacho was also amused when we read that the charge of rebellion against Conchi’s grandfather José had been backed by his having been a member of the UGT union, during the time the document calls the ‘red domination’. Funnily enough, Nacho once worked as an organiser of that same union, though by then, with the return to democracy, it was legal again.

In any case, José was more than a union member. He’d taken up arms under the direction of the local ‘revolutionary committee’. With a militia man, he’d taken a neighbour of theirs to a local building serving as a prison, from which he only emerged to be assassinated. These, claims the document, are PROVEN FACTS, using capital letters to underline the authority behind them.

Did José take part in the murder, if murder there was? The record doesn’t say. I suppose his judges felt that his action in detaining the victim was sufficient to make him an accomplice. 

So what happened to his sentence?

Well, the Commission recommended that it be commuted to six years in prison. That would have been a piece of luck, since the starting date for his sentence was set at 1 September 1939, a few months after the defeat of the Republic, and presumably the day of his arrest. When the decision over the revision of his sentence was taken, in the early summer of 1943, he would have been nearly two-thirds of the way through his sentence.

It wasn’t to be. The leading military authority of the region, the Captaincy General, decided that six years was far too little. It only reduced the sentence from thirty years to twenty. At least, though, it also replaced ‘major’ prison by ‘minor’, allowing more visits and occasional home leave for family reasons.

To be accurate, the sentence was reduced not to twenty years, but to twenty years and one day.

“That day mattered,” Nacho explained to me, “because it was specified nowhere when it would come. It wasn’t necessarily the day after the completion of your twenty years. You could be held indefinitely longer until the authorities decided you’d served the extra day.”

Fortunately, that wasn’t José’s fate. On 29 September 1945, the Official Bulletin, the journal which publishes government decisions, announced that the penalty of absolute disqualification inflicted on several condemned men, one of them our José, had been lifted. That meant he could work again.

End of disqualification for José

That rather suggests he was out of gaol. In which case he did, in the end, serve only just over six years, as the Commission had recommended. Perhaps the Captaincy General changed its mind. Perhaps the regime decided that by 1945, the year after the last attempt to overthrow it by armed force had failed in a Communist-led invasion of the Valley of Aran in the Pyrenees, it no longer had much to fear from such men as José.

Conchi’s grandmother, another Concepción like her granddaughter, had left her children with various convents so that she could travel to Burgos where her husband was imprisoned. It seems that it was nuns that saw to the prisoners’ being fed and, to make sure José was fed properly, she found it necessary to be among the nuns herself. Again, a family tradition is that she had to intervene several times, via the nuns, to stop José being taken out and executed. If that’s true, it shows that even commutation of a death sentence wasn’t a guarantee of survival.

As soon as José got out, he gathered up his family, his wife and four kids – Conchi’s mother had been born after he’d served a month of his sentence – and moved them a long way from his native Andalucian village, to the province of Valencia. Conchi’s mother lives there again today, as well as Conchi herself and John.

The extraordinary novelist Almudena Grandes points out that such a release only meant that he’d been freed, not that he was living in freedom. That would have to wait another thirty years, until the death of the dictator in 1975. It was the return to democracy that allowed Conchi and John to hunt down what documentation remains about José and Lorenzo. The information they found paints a saddening picture of what it means, within one family out of the millions affected, for a democracy to be overthrown and replaced by a dictatorship.

A great way to bring that lesson home, don’t you think?