Volume 3: Descent into the Blue Hell

In thirty-five years of democracy, the history of the Second Republic and its destruction by the 1936 military coup has been written against the political tide. Today, well into the 21st century, it has become increasingly difficult to unravel the history and to present the Spanish people with a responsible study of the repression and crimes during the great Francoist repression during the war and in the post-war period: the genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes.

More than half of the Spanish population have been force-fed a simplistic conservatism and the evident socio-political so-called pact of silence that existed during the period of transition and they are not ready to sit back calmly and receive the historic truth. They show no interest in learning of the humanitarian catastrophe for which Francoism was responsible. No one knows, or wants to know, the full truth of what they were taught at school or the information they get through the media.

“I have not heard anyone say that we should forget the Holocaust, forget the ‘train of death’ that went to Auschwitz ... but in Spain, we still have to draw a thick veil, forget all our relatives, forget the sufferings and the anguish, and all the rest.  Here, I know not why, we are supposed to forget everything, to erase it all and turn over a new page; we are not even supposed to seek those responsible, and they even are against our attempts to obtain closure through the exhumation and identification of our dead.”

Clara Gonzalez, Cordoba, 2003.

“I have not heard anyone say that we should forget the Holocaust, forget the ‘train of death’ that went to Auschwitz, forget Pinochet (…) But in Spain, we had to draw a thick veil, forget all our relatives, forget the sufferings and the anguish, and all the rest. Here, I know not why, we are supposed to forget everything, to erase it all and turn over a new page; we are not even supposed to seek those responsible, and they even are against our attempts to obtain closure [exhumation and identification of the dead].”

So spoke Clara González in 2003, whose four uncles lay in the Piedrafita de Babia (León) mass grave. Clara’s aunt, Isabel González, one of tho supremely distinguished Spanish women and whose two brothers also lay in that grave, commented in words worthy of a philosopher:

“What was the purpose of all of this? What good has come from killing these people? What has been the good of these deaths and the deaths of so many others?”