Daniel
It is completely anarchic and no-one knows what’s going on, anarchist militiamen, communist militiamen going all over the country shooting people who are bourgeois the local lawyer, the local priest, the local teachers, anyone with any standing. Burning churches, raping nuns, the whole thing. I’m not saying the others aren’t doing horrible things. I’m giving background to what happened to my grandfather. He is working in the fields and sees the lorries coming down to the village and he knew they were coming for the priest. Because they knew the war was happening. He manages to tell his friend to get on your horse and disappear because they are coming for you.
One of the men coming to kill him was a relative of his, to kill his uncle who was the local priest. The militiamen arrive, they realise my grandfather has told him to go away.
We came here to shoot someone so we will shoot you because you are obviously a fascist. It was like that. People got shot because they went into a café and said ‘good morning gentlemen’. Because to say ‘gentlemen’ was a class thing. It’s really complicated. It cannot be told. It is not politically correct.
My grandfather was taken away in front of my grandmother and my father who was only 3 yrs old. They were going to shoot him against the wall.
He manages to escape. To walk across the village. To cross into Galicia. He had cousins somewhere. He was in hiding for so many months. He sends a letter to my grandmother that he is alive.
Noelia
In truth it is a very sad story, but she barely remembers her aunts on her father's side. She didn't meet them in person and what little she knows is from hearsay. She was orphaned by her father at the age of 4 due to the war.
Pedro was taken from his home one night and two stories are told of him: one that he was shot and is in a mass grave and another that managed to escape from the truck that was carrying him and managed to reach America with the help of a sister who lived in Bilbao.
But we don't really know which of the two stories is true.
Inés
I know my grandfather took the portrait; his familiar signature is recognisable on the right-hand side of the image. It intrigues me to imagine what might have happened. Did Leopoldo touch the sleeve of Francisco at a certain moment? I know he must have stood in front of Franco and made this image, probably spoke to him, asked him to turn his face a little more to the right perhaps to get a flattering portrait? Where did he take it, at Franco’s residence, or in his own studio in the centre of Madrid?
I speculate. The security around El Jefe will be intense. People fuss around him, making sure all his needs are taken care of. The picture will be taken in El Pardo under maximum security. Leopoldo arrives under escort to prepare his equipment in a room set aside for the purpose. He is very carefully dressed in a dark suit and his habitual silver-topped cane, an established, respectable middle-aged man entrusted with the care of El Jefe’s image. He is well prepared for the task.
I don’t know enough about Leopoldo to sense his political leanings entirely, but the 1930s seemed to change things for him in his life and work. Gone are the creative, pictorial, carefully composited images of the early years. He is now an established studio portraitist in Spain’s capital city, but the difficulties of the time have meant that as an immigrant from Venezuela he must prove his worth. He moves from the red zone to the nationalist zone on the strength of a report from his landlady who states that he has “observed good socio-political behaviour.” [i] There is evidence of a testimony from him in 1939 that the war has taken him by surprise. I immerse myself in reading about the tensions of that time to understand the need he may have felt to protect his family and at what cost.
[i] Ayuntamiento de Madrid, Document 28-311-39, November 16, 1939. Archivo de la Villa, Madrid. Translation author’s own.
Searching for Leo Historical memory blog
The project investigates Spain’s collective memory, and tries to relate the past, present and the future. this pilot project will explore methods and strategies for further discussion. A longer term aim is to develp creative approaches which can be used to bring together people with potentially divisive opinions in order to listen to each other, to recognise the other side of a story.
Research around memory, archives and autoethnographic practice impacts on how we think about therelationship between the past and now. This has a wider influence on strategies for health and well-being. Some of the content I am dealing with relates specifically to the traumas of the Spanish Civil War (1936-39), as a personal history,but also in relation to the nation state and its ability to process that trauma. The methodologies adopted have a significance which go beyond the immediate reference of the project and might be utilised in other communities and civic groups to address how we experience personal and collective history through the examination and interpretation of archive material.
Taking as a starting point the discovery that my grandfather was a photographer for the Nationalist Propaganda division during the civil war, and my great-uncle fought for the Republicans, the work aims to broaden the understanding of how families and communities come to terms with these tensions in a context where forgetting has been the main impulse. Given the prevalence of absence, gaps and silence in many of these stories, alternate truths have sometimes replaced and reconstructed memories from the past.