Unearthing the Past

Emilio Silva. David Frey photo.

These days, it’s hard to find evidence the Spanish Civil War ever happened. Battlefield tours don’t meander through Madrid. Towns that Franco’s forces carpet-bombed have been rebuilt. When Franco died in 1975, he returned the country to the king, who returned it to democracy. With Franco gone, his 40-year dictatorship shamed supporters into silence. But in transition, the opposition had agreed to a pacto de olvidar, a pact of forgetting, which forgave the sins of both sides and gave Franco’s assassins amnesty.

The civil war that had divided the nation was buried.

“I never studied anything about it in school,” said Emilio Silva. “Never. Usually you only have two pages about it high school textbooks. It’s in the end of the book and the teachers never get there.”

More than any other person in Spain, Silva has worked to dig the civil war out of the past, very literally. He began with his grandfather, a victim of rightwing militias that embarked on a brutal “cleansing” campaign against their enemies, real and perceived, during the civil war. Silva’s grandfather became the first slain Republican to be exhumed, identified with DNA testing and returned to his family for a formal burial. Silva soon found himself leading a movement. He founded the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory

“Our work is not only to look for the people,” Silva said. “It’s also to open a debate, a public debate, about the past.”

Silva welcomed us into his modest apartment in the outskirts of Madrid, where his doormat read “Welcome to the Independent Republic of my Home.” His group, despite its successes, has few funds and no office. The government gave 40,000 euros in 2010. That’s not enough, Silva said, but it’s more than he wants. Rather than handing out funds, Silva wants the state to take on the work itself.

“If volunteers have to guarantee human rights they’re not rights,” he said.

Silva’s work has been controversial. On the right, critics want the atrocities of the past left in the past. On the left, parties want to honor the pact that allowed for a bloodless transition to democracy. That agreement, though, had its own drawbacks, which emerged as the grandchildren of the civil war came of age. Freed from the terror that had gripped previous generations, they began to ask long-silent questions about the buried past.

Any war has atrocities on both sides, and Republicans’ hands were hardly clean. Leftist brigades took the law in their hands just as their Falange counterparts on the right did. Enraged by the Catholic Church’s support for the wealthy and powerful, Republican Loyalists burned churches and killed some 6,000 clergy alone. Their brutality happened without the government’s approval, though, and leaders fought to stop it, often without a police force. The nationalists’ killings happened with their leaders’ blessing, part of a strategy of limpimiento, a “cleansing” of the red hordes they believed were loosed on Spain. Civilians weren’t just victims. They were targets.

Among Franco's victims.

In a book Silva set on the coffee table in front of me, the hordes became faces. A man in a three-piece suit, a pocket watch strung from his vest. Beside him stood his wife, a folded fan in her hands. A man in a bow tie and moustache, a folded handkerchief in his jacket pocket. A man with serious, steady eyes. Another with a grin on his chubby face. One posed in military dress. One in a white suit beside bearded Moroccans in robes.

“The people on the right say we are opening wounds,” Silva said. “No. No. We are closing them. If one family can recover the bones of his relative and put them in the cemetery, they are closing wounds. They say we are separating the Spanish people. No. No. The Spanish people are always separated. We have rich people, poor people, the left, the right. But the tragic division is the vision about the past. They say we are awakening passions about the past. I’ve been to 60 exhumations. I never hear anger. Never.”

Silva is angry, though. The pact of forgetting brought an end to the dictatorship, but it also barred its victims from justice. “None of the relatives of the victims of Franco have ever seen a killer in front of a judge,” he said. “Never. Never. And perhaps they never will.”

This entry was posted on March 28, 2011 at 10:09 am and is filed under Spain, Travels. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.