4 - Agents of memory: Spanish Civil War veterans and disabled soldiers

Summary

But in the black corners

in the blackest ones, they lie down

to weep for the fallen,

mothers who gave them milk,

sisters who bathed them,

brides once of snow

but now in the black of mourning,

and now with fever;

dazed widows,

shattered women,

letters and photographs

which portray them as they were,

there, eyes bursting

from seeing them so much and so little,

from so many silent tears,

from so much absent beauty.

The traumatic collective memory that most Spaniards have, even today, of the Civil War is explained not only by the events of the war of 1936 to 1939, but also by the experience of millions of Spaniards in the aftermath of the conflict itself. During the last weeks of the war as many as half a million Spaniards on the losing side fled to escape the justifiably feared repression of the victors. Most of the exiles who crossed the French border were confined in appalling conditions in refugee camps in the south of the country. Some managed to escape the German invasion of France and went on to Latin America, and above all Mexico. Yet many Republican veterans remained in France and joined the Resistance, so suffering a second experience of war even before they had had time to recover from the first. Two decades after the end of the Civil War, some 300,000 Republicans remained in exile.