Last night I finished Gamel Woolsey’s memoir, Death’s Other Kingdom. This is from the epilogue, and it made me pause. She is relating a pair of impressions that were made upon her in Lisbon, on her way back to England in 1936/37. The contrast between an advertisement in a Portuguese newspaper for an arms manufacturer who is selling machine guns, and a scene in which a pair of poor fisherwomen enter a shop where one of them spends some hard-suffered savings to buy a yellow handkerchief, makes her remark:
“Even the Civil War… some day will be over: even its inevitable aftermath of terror and suffering will be forgotten at last. Perhaps one day it will please us to remember even these things when generations have passed away and the Civil War is a dim half-forgotten story of old tragedy—as legendary and far away and as shadowy and faint in its power to evoke pain as the War of the Seven against Thebes or the wars of Clusium and Rome.”
Seventy years later, in Spain, the Republican victims have never been allowed to make their peace with what happened, and therefore they cannot remember without pain. There are no memorials to the Republican dead and no national museum of the Civil War. It was Franco’s intention that no one be allowed to remember what really happened, at least that no one be allowed to remember those who lost the war. This highly enforced obligatory collective amnesia has operated within the body politic of Spanish society like a malign tumor, and needs to be extricated. Until the illness is fully recognized—the first step in any curative process—there can be no “dim half-forgotten story of old tragedy,” because the tragedy continues in the form of all the unanswered questions. And even if the direct memory of these questions are taken to the grave, the questions will outlive those who used to fearfully ask them because some trace of the doubts about what actually happened to some beloved individual in one’s life-line will linger in the young minds of the descendents who know only that a mystery still shrouds their own undeclared past. This is the sense in which the wound continues to suppurate, even if invisibly, deep within the body politic, and spreads its venom, like a metastasizing cancer. Those who fear “opening the wounds” fear the revelations that might solve some of the mysteries, because so much of what happened happened, as Woolsey pointed out, not because of political and ideological disputes, but simply because the opportunities arose for the vengeance of petty griefs and few could resist this temptation. In addition, as Helen Graham has noted in her brief history of the Spanish Civil War, the nature of the authoritarian system established by Franco required—and succeeded in attaining—widespread collaboration on the part of many otherwise disinterested citizens. This happened throughout Nazi Germany and occupied Europe as well, where practically anyone who did not actively resist collaborated with the regime—if not by actually persecuting the regime’s victims or denouncing them to the authorities—by merely looking the other way. These memories too are extremely painful, and usually avoided at all costs. Hence the reluctance in Spain by one segment of society (usually those who one way or another pertain to the side that won the Civil War) to allow the disinterring of the mass graves and the DNA sampling that can help answer at least some of the outstanding questions concerning what really happened.