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Although historical revisionism casts doubt on the past, reality is stubborn in demonstrating the forcefulness and breadth of Franco’s repression. Sometimes little hints come to the surface to remind us.
The firsts years. The repression of the first Franco regime developed systematically: prisons in the most unexpected places, summary executions and anonymous graves are part of a network of terror perfectly designed by the regime and whose signs frequently emerge. As happens with the strange little bottles, recently unearthed, that identify some executed people. A mystery of eight decades.
War on communism. The persecution of dissidence used denunciation or violence, but also infiltration. The historian Fernando Hernández Sánchez has just published Falsos Comrades (Criticism) in which he narrates the betrayals, espionage operations and tips that caused the fall of the clandestine PCE structure, in times of the post-world war, which involved 2,000 arrests and which deactivated to the party for a decade.
The agrarian question. Repression was especially intense in industrial centers, but also in the countryside. There, in the 1930s, leftist organizations had demanded agrarian reform and the Republic initiated policies in that sense, although they were ineffective. The problem, in the tense years that the democratic regime lasted, remained unresolved and later with the Franco regime came the response of the rural elites.
A very distant past. Despite the intensity of the political persecution and the suffocating authoritarianism of those years, the first Franco regime – and also that of the following decades – is largely unknown to current generations. Repression has become, for many, a distant memory like so many other hallmarks of the time, such as Agua del Carmen or religious veneration.
A torrential life. Caravaggio is a very important name in the early Italian Baroque, but his career goes far beyond the brushes. The scandals, his character, his turbulent relationship with power and the Church and even a homicide, have carved out the legend of a unique character. It is the latest installment of the History and Life podcast.
The Magpie factor. Pedro Urraca has gone down in history as Franco’s agent in defeated France who facilitated the capture of illustrious republicans in exile such as President Lluís Companys, later executed. Her granddaughter, Loreto Urraca, discovered her grandfather’s past barely fifteen years ago. In this interview, published by Conversación sobre la historia, she tells her experience.
Barbers and surgeons. Medicine today is very different from that of the Middle Ages and even the professionals who practiced it were different. It is true, of course, that there were doctors, but they did not practice surgery, a profession performed by barbers, and this was the case for many centuries in Europe. This Ted-Ed video explains why. (with Spanish subtitles)
Again, the children of war. Two years have just passed since the start of the war in Ukraine, a conflict that once caused the exodus of hundreds of thousands of people to other European countries due to the proximity of the fighting and the deterioration of living conditions. Today, faced with a stagnant war, many of them have returned to their country, but a very large contingent remains abroad. Currently, according to UN estimates, about four million Ukrainians live in EU countries. Approximately 1.3 million are school-age minors.
A phenomenon of these characteristics seemed unthinkable in Europe since the continent, except for the Balkan wars, had been free of major armed conflicts. However, going further back in time, the exodus of minors has a very close precedent, that of the children who emigrated during the Civil War, who were separated from their families in order to isolate them from violence.
Although the dimensions are much smaller than those of the Ukrainian case, the situation is similar. It is estimated that a total of 34,000 children from republican families left Spain between 1937 and 1938. France was the country that welcomed the most of these minors (20,000), followed by Belgium (5,000), Great Britain (4,000) and the USSR (almost 3,000). Many of them returned, but a part, especially the contingent that ended up in the Soviet Union, remained in that country forever. This RNE documentary remembers his story of uprooting.
It is true that history does not have to repeat itself. The vast majority of Ukrainian minors can probably return to their country, but events remind us that today, as in the past, children are the most vulnerable to war catastrophes.
