Lunes, 22 hs. La 2 de TVE emite Doctor Zhivago (David Lean, 1965). Cuenta en esta entrevista Geraldine Chaplin que cuando se rodó la escena en la que suena La Internacional, en plena dictadura, los extras comenzaron a cantarla. Se rodó en el barrio madrileño de Canillas. pic.twitter.com/YJsMlBm7T5
— Memoria_ARMH (@ARMH_Memoria) December 16, 2022
The digital Archive of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist Dictatorship is an initiative of UCSD in collaboration with several Spanish civic associations, such as the ARMH (Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica), the Asociación de Ex-presos y Represaliados Políticos, the Federación Estatal de Foros por la Memoria and others. With the assistance of these human rights organizations, since the summer of 2007 several teams of graduate students have been recording audiovisual testimonies of militants, witnesses, and victims of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist repression.
As is widely known, General Francisco Franco, together with other generals, and with the military support of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, headed a coup d’état in 1936 that interrupted the democratically elected government of the Second Republic (1931-1936). Since the coup d’état faced stiff opposition from many loyalists to the Republic, it gave rise to a civil war that lasted from 1936 to 1939. After the victory of the rebellious generals, Franco took power thus inaugurating the longest dictatorship in the history of Europe (1939-1975).
In the seventy years since the end of the Spanish Civil War scholars of the period have studied the conflict from several perspectives using different methodologies. Although some of these studies refer to the political repression implemented by Franco and the Falange (the Spanish Fascist Party), the magnitude and the scope of the repression is not yet fully documented. This absence in the historical record is the result of a “pact of silence” established by the Spanish policymakers in charge of the transition to democracy. The legal expression of this “pact of silence” was the Amnesty Law of 1977. This law grated amnesty to political prisoners, but also explicitly prohibited any legal proceedings against perpetrators of human rights violations as well. It also blocked the formation of Truth Commissions as was common in other post-dictatorial societies, such as in Argentina, Chile, and South Africa. In addition, during the transition to democracy, Francoist officials destroyed thousands of written documents pertaining to the implementation of repression both during the war and the dictatorship.
Since the year 2000 an increasing number of human rights organizations have attempted to reverse this process of amnesia and impunity through the exhumation of mass graves and other initiatives. The Spanish Civil War Memory Project seek to join forces with these organizations in order to create an audiovisual record with the testimonies of those who suffered and resisted the systematic violence implemented by the Francoist regime. As such, it aspires to constitute itself both as an archive of the repression and as an archive of the multiple political cultures (communism, anarchism, socialism, republicanism, etc.) that opposed the fascist politics of Francoism. Accordingly, the objectives of the archive are the following:
The interviews included in the Archive are based on a protocol that tries to empower the witnesses by listening emphatically and actively. This implies that the interviews are open-ended and that the interviewers are historically informed so that they can assist the interviewees in the process of reconstructing their memories. For this reason, the testimonies are minimally edited to “clean” external interruptions, noises, and other irrelevant footage. In sum, we understand the recording of testimonies as a “story telling” process that, as such, involves pauses, repetitions, and a non-linear approach to history.
Sample Interviews
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History Project
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Report from the Field
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We hope that you find the stories included in this archive a useful and inspiring resource to further your knowledge of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist dictatorship. If you or any of your relatives are interested in donating your testimonies to the collection, please contact us at: scwmemoryproject@ucsd.edu.
Spanish Organizations Collaborating in the Project
ARMH (Association for the Recuperation of Historical Memory)
Asociación de Ex-presos y Represaliados Politicos Antifranquistas (The Association of Former Political Prisoners and Anti-Francoist Fighters)
Asociación Memoria y Justicia, Andalucía (Association Memory and Justice, Andalusia)
Federación Estatal de Foros por la Memoria (State Federation of Forums for the Recovery of Memory)
Psychologists without Borders (Spain)
Advisory Board
Ángel del Río. Anthropologist, University Pablo Olavide, Seville (Spain)
Francisco Ferrándiz. Anthropologist CSIC (Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas), Spain.
Cristina Moreiras-Memor Romance Languages (University of Michigan)
Pamela Radcliff. History (UCSD)
Güenter Schwaiger. Filmmaker and President of the Collective Images Against Amnesia
Emilio Silva. Spanish Journalist President of the ARMH, Spain.
Carlos Aguero (ARMH)
Guillermo Fouce (Universidad Carlos III/PSF)
UCSD Researchers
Scott Boehm (Literature)
Jessica Córdova (CILAS)
Andrea Davis (History)
Jodi Eisenberg (Literature)
Viviana Macmanus (Literature)
Elize Mazadiego (Visual Arts)
Omar Pimienta (Visual Arts)
UCSD Undergraduate Student Collaborators
Viviana Bazan
Elizabeth Diaz
Natasha Flores
Cristina Gonzalez
Karina Gutierrez
Caitlin Krull
Doug Willcox
Silvina Yi
Volunteers in Spain
Miriam Duarte
Guillermo Izquierdo
Jessica Plautz
Daniel Rojo
Jorge Rojo
Coordinator of the Project (P.I.)
Title: Testimony of Agustí Alcoberro. Interview with Andrea Davis and Elize Mazadiego; July 20, 2010.
Published: Barcelona, Spain, Spanish Civil War Memory Project, 2010.
Description: 2 tapes
Notes: Agustí Alcoberro's testimony is in Spanish without subtitles. The testimony was recorded in the Museu d'História de Catalunya in Barcelona, Spain.
Summary: Agustí Alcoberro was born in 1958 in a small town outside of Barcelona. Agustí tells that his family later moved to Clot, a working-class neighborhood of Barcelona. He recounts his educational experiences and early political formation at the age of fifteen. Agustí details his political activism in the Joventuts Revolucionàries Catalanes (Catalan Revolutionary Youth, JRC) and explains how he was influenced by Marxist revolutionaries, pro-Independence activists in Spain, and political groups in Latin America. He relates his participation in the Assemblea de Catalunya (Assembly of Catalonia). In 1975, Agustí, his brother, and other members of the JRC were arrested and jailed under an anti-terrorist law. He describes his experiences at the police station on Via Laietana and his two-month imprisonment in the Modelo Prison in Barcelona. Agustí recalls Franco's death, which occurred while he was incarcerated. Upon being released, he resumed his political militancy in the JRC. Agustí narrates his involvement in the creation of Independentistes dels Països Catalans (Independence Supporters of the Catalan Countries). He comments on the transition from the Francoist regime to democracy and its relationship to Catalonia. Agustí discusses his work as a historian and director of the Museu d'História de Catalunya (Museum of the History of Catalonia).
Cite as: Alcoberro, Agustí. Testimony of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist Dictatorship. University of California, San Diego, 2010.
https://library.ucsd.edu/speccoll/scwmemory/about-eng.html
Pere Fortuny was just six years old in 1939 when he first visited the Fossar de la Pedrera in Montjuïc Cemetery. As the bereaved family entered the old quarry, a Civil Guard roughly searched his mother and siblings. The young boy came upon a rough wasteland surrounded by limestone cliffs, in the middle of which was a steep-sided pit, lined at the bottom with freshly dug earth. He’d been brought to say goodbye to his father who had been executed a few days before, one of the more than 1,700 victims killed by the Franco regime in Barcelona between 1939 and 1952.
After going into exile in France in February 1939, Josep Fortuny, the last Republican mayor of Mollet del Vallés, near Barcelona, had returned to Spain just a few weeks later, believing he had nothing to fear. He was immediately arrested, tortured and ended up imprisoned in La Modelo; despite numerous testimonies in his favor, he was court-martialed and shot on June 15, 1939.
Difficult to get to and visited by very few Barcelona residents, let alone tourists, the Fossar de la Pedrera (the Mass Grave of the Quarry) is a peaceful and strangely beautiful place, concealed from the rest of Montjuïc and the cemetery by cliffs formed by quarrying. It was initially established as a common grave for the poor sometime after the cemetery was founded in 1883 but became a place of infamy in 1939, for this is also the mass grave of the victims of Francoism in Barcelona. After years of campaigning by the families of the victims, spearheaded by Pere Fortuny, in 1985, the site was redesigned and dignified as a memorial and today functions as a space of memory for all sides of the anti-Francoist opposition, and is undoubtedly the most remarkable of such sites in Spain.
Contrary to popular belief in Barcelona, only eight people were actually shot by the Franco regime at Montjuïc Castle, although thousands were imprisoned in the fortress. In most cases, condemned prisoners were sent out in trucks in the early morning from La Modelo Prison, the castle and elsewhere to the Camp de la Bota (today’s Forum), the Franco regime’s preferred killing ground. This was the fate of Josep Fortuny. Their bodies, some 1,700 in all, were then brought back to Montjuïc, dumped and covered with quicklime to ensure they rotted as quickly as possible. Until 1977, the site also continued to function as a common grave and in all some 4,000 bodies are buried here, political victims or otherwise.
As you walk up into the Fossar, you pass through three rows of square concrete pillars. One of the first is chiselled with these words in Catalan:
“In this quarry graveyard rest those who were shot, in the Camp de la Bota and other places, by the Fascist forces from the year 1939. For many of them we will never know their names but our tribute is for all.”
The second two rows are engraved with the names of the victims: 1939 and 1940 have the largest role call. Executions tailed off after the Battle of Stalingrad, when Franco began to fear the Allies might win. A study has shown that more than 70 percent were married, most with young children, which may also explain why they did not try to leave before the fall of Barcelona. The death of the major wage-earner, which most of these men would have been, in "the Years of Hunger" of 1940 Spain would have been extremely difficult to overcome for most families, compounded by the fact that they would have also been tarnished and subject to an economic and social boycott as being "red" families. More than 90 percent were accused, amongst other crimes, paradoxically of "military rebellion" against the military rising led by Franco and other generals.
The names on the columns are organized by year and then in alphabetical order by first surname. Each name was a life, with a family and friends. One story is that of Carles Flix Morera, a European bantamweight champion from Gràcia. Flix formed part of a whole generation of brilliant Barcelona boxers at a time when the sport was king amongst the city’s working class. At the beginning of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936, Flix had his flashy motor car requisitioned by the militias much to his annoyance. He later became a bodyguard of Catalan president Lluís Companys, with whom he left Barcelona for the French frontier on the morning of January 24, 1939. Believing he had nothing to fear—he always said he’d never hit anybody outside the ring—he elected not to cross into France and instead returned to Barcelona in February of that year. Back in the city, hearing that the Francoist police were looking for him, he presented himself at the police station in Via Laietana, where he was brutally tortured, accused of being himself “a torturer of the SIM,” the notorious Republican secret police, and condemned to death. He was executed in the Camp de la Bota on March 2, 1939, at the age of 31. It seems inconceivable that a SIM agent would voluntarily return to Barcelona and hand himself over. The most likely explanation is that he was denounced by a local Falangist as revenge for Flix, a handsome Don Juan, having an affair with his wife. Such denunciations were rife during the 1940s in Spain as a way of settling personal scores.
As you enter the Fossar itself on your left, there is an understated tribute to those who died in the Holocaust, with small stone blocks bearing the names of ten camps, piled with stones, as Jewish custom dictates: Bergen-Belsen, Buchenwald, Belzec, Sobibor, Dachau, Auschwitz, Treblinka, Majdanek and Mauthausen; the latter being the camp where most Spaniards died. Facing this memorial is a monument to those who sacrificed themselves for freedom in Catalunya. Above this on a raised terrace is a monument in the form of a cypress to “the men and women of the CNT who died for the social revolution,” one of the very few memorials to anarchism in Barcelona.
Among those who were shot at Montjuïc Castle by the Franco regime was Lluis Companys, the last president of the Generalitat de Catalunya during the Civil War. Companys went into exile in February 1939, but was captured by the Gestapo and sent back to Spain. After a summary trial, he was executed on October 15, 1940. His body was to be dumped in the mass grave, but was rescued just in time by his sister who somehow, perhaps by bribery, managed to place it in a niche. Companys’ remains were moved to the Fossar in 1985, when it was dignified as a memorial garden, and placed in a tomb surrounded by an ornamental pond.
At the back end of the Fossar against the cliffs is a remarkable and moving array of memorial stones to foreign and Spanish Republicans, each of which tells its own story. The largest number are to men shot in the Camp de la Bota and buried here. There are also several tributes to Catalans who died at the front (Huesca, Ebro, Extremadura). One monument reminds us that more than 7,000 of the some 35,000 International Brigaders who fought for the Spanish Republic were Jewish. There are also individual monuments to the German and Austrian International Brigaders who were killed in Spain. There is a plaque dedicated to the Marquis, the guerrilla fighters, who died fighting against Franco from 1939 to 1955. A surprising one perhaps for non-Spaniards is the sculpture in homage to the Masons persecuted by Francoism.
According to staple Francoist propaganda, the Republican government was a Jewish-Communist-Masonic conspiracy: being a Freemason became a prescribed activity and many members were imprisoned or shot. Franco himself was paranoidly obsessed with the Masons, and regularly wrote anti-Masonic articles for the press under the pseudonym of Jakim Boor. He also proclaimed: “The whole secret of the campaigns unleashed against Spain can be explained in two words: masonry and communism...we have to extirpate these two evils from our land.” Dotted among these political tributes and memorials to the common dead, are sad crosses to unbaptized children, who were not allowed burial in the main cemetery, a reminder of Catholic practice under Franco.
The easiest way is to get to the cemetery by public transport is to take bus number 21 from Av. Paral·lel (every 20 minutes on weekdays and 30 on Sundays) starting in front of Teatre Victoria which drops you nicely at the cemetery gates. Access to Fossar de la Pedrera itself is only through the cemetery. Follow signs once you arrive or pick up a free plan from the cemetery offices at the main entrance.
More problematic is the journey back. For the bus, leave through the main entrance (where the bus dropped you) and make your way under the insalubrious bridge immediately facing you. Once out from the bridge, cross diagonally to the other side. The bus stop is 30 meters along the narrow pavement. Note, calling a taxi to pick you up from the cemetery can take as long as 30 minutes and so is an expensive option.
by Nick Lloyd
Originally published April 2013, updated July 9, 2022.
