SPANISH FIGHTERS Spanish Fighters An Oral History of Civil War and Exile Neil MacMaster Lecturer in History University of East Anglia Palgrave Macmillan ISBN 978-1-349-21011-4 ISBN 978-1-349-21009-1 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-21009-1 © Neil MacMaster 1990 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1s t edition 1990 All rights reserved. For information, write: Scholarly and Reference Division, St. Martin's Press, Inc., 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 First published in the United States of America in 1990 ISBN 978-0-312-04738-2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data MacMaster, Neil, 1945- Spanish fighters: an oral history of civil war and exile I Neil MacMaster. p. cm. Interviews with David and Consuelo Granda. ISBN 978-0-312-04738-2 1. Spain-History-Civil War, 1936-1939-Refugees. 2. Spain History-Civil War, 1936-1939-Personal narratives. 3. Granda, David, 1914- . 4. Granda, Consuelo. 5. Asturias (Spain) Politics and government. 6. Spain-Politics and government-1931-1939. 7. Spain-Politics and government-1939-1975. 8. Refugees, Political--Spain-Asturias Biography. 9. Refugees, Political-France--Biography. 10. Oral history. I. Granda, David, 1914- II. Granda, Consuelo. III. Title. DP269.8.R3M34 1990 946.081-dc20 90-33781 CIP To the memory of Consuelo Granda 1922-90 Contents List of Plates ix Maps Asturias 7 The Itineraries of David and Consuelo Granda 117 Introduction 1 1 Village Life Before the Civil War - David 27 2 Storrnclouds gather, 1930-1936 - David 44 3 The War in Asturias - David 57 4 The Civil War in Asturias - Consuelo 77 5 The Fall of Asturias - David 89 6 Escape from Asturias - Consuelo 94 7 Catalonia in War - David 99 8 Exodus across the Pyrenees - Consuelo 106 9 Across the Pyrenees - David 112 10 Refugee Labour - Consuelo 116 11 The Concentration Camp of Septfonds - David 126 12 Aspres Concentration Camp - Consuelo 141 13 The Camps of the Holocaust - David 147 14 The Coming of the Liberation - Consuelo 161 15 The Coming of the Liberation - David 169 vii viii Contents 16 Life in Exile - Consuelo 180 17 Life in Exile - David 185 18 Homecoming - Consuelo 192 19 Homecoming - David 201 20 Uprooted - Consuelo 211 21 Uprooted - David 213 Notes 229 Index 244 List of Plates 1 The village school at Paladin, c.1925. 2 Republican militiamen laying siege to the Nationalist ~,.cces inside Oviedo during the early months of the Civil War. 3 David Granda in Gij6n, Christmas 1936, on a two-day leave from the 31st Anti-Fascist Regiment, the 'Maxim Gorky'. 4 Consuelo Granda, aged thirteen, just prior to the outbreak of the Civil War. 5 Consuelo's mother, Maria Contreras-Gutierrez, c.1935-36. 6 Spanish refugees, flanked by French mobile guards, crossing the border at Le Perthus, January 1939. 7 The rearguard of the Spanish Republican army crossing the frontier at Bourg Madame, February 1939. 8 Wounded soldiers and civilian refugees in a compound prior to their dispersal to the concentration camps. 9 David Granda in the concentration camp of Septfonds 1939. 10 Consuelo Granda with a group of Spanish refugee workers on a farm at Lus-Ia-Croix-Haute in the spring of 1939. 11 Consuelo Granda in Marseille, December 1945, shortly after the Liberation. 12 David Granda outside his parent's house at Paladin on his first return to Spain, August 1957. ix Introduction Until the 1970s, in spite of the many thousands of books and articles written about the Spanish Civil War, very little was directly known about the experience of the rank and file, the millions of common people who were caught up in one of the most bloody internecine conflicts of modem history. There are a number of explanations for this 'silence of the masses'. Within Spain during the long, bleak period of the Franco dictatorship it was extremely dangerous for any individual, especially of the left, to make any public statement about the events of 1936-9 or to 'tell the truth'. Nor, if they had been brave or foolhardy enough to have attempted this would they have found a publisher or escaped the rigours of state censorship and police repression. Official Francoist versions of the war, portrayed as a holy crusade against barbarous and bloodstained communist hordes, was too important to overall political control and systematic indoctrina tion via classrooms, newspapers, radio and television to tolerate any accounts that undermined the myths.1 For the working class within Spain during the thirty-six years of dictatorship silence was reinforced by other factors. They, more than any other class or group, were the victims of a terrible post-war 'white terror' during which some 200 000 people were summarly executed or murdered while at least twice that number were imprisoned.2 This, combined with a whole apparatus of surveillance and control by police and Falangists at local level, meant that the ability to find work and literally to survive in a period of appalling misery and hardship depended on toeing the line. Even the smallest villages had been tom asunder by the war and in the claustrophobic universe of the post-war pueblo the only way in which victims and perpetrators of the most savage brutality, murders, seizure of property and land, denuncia tions and reprisals could continue to live alongside each other was by drawing a total veil of silence over the past. Even a whisper threatened to pull the mask off events that were too terrible to contemplate, to revive passions that were too raw and dangerous: life must go on. Down to the 1970s there had been a literature of first-hand experience of the Civil War, most of it published abroad by Spanish Republicans in exile or by foreign journalists and members of the International Brigades.3 However, this was in most respects the 1 2 Introduction history or testimony of a political or literary elite, of Republican generals, ministers, professors and party leaders or of foreign poets, novelists and intellectuals, not of the Spanish 'under-mass'. Many of these writers had an axe to grind, personal and partisan positions to defend, and imposed strongly ideological interpretations on the events. During the seventies a number of developments enabled a new oral history to emerge. The death of Franco in November 1975 and the dramatic shift to an open, democratic society created the political conditions under which ordinary people could, for the first time, talk openly about their experience of the Civil War. The long passage of time appears to have healed some of the scars, and participants, both of the right and left, appeared to be able to face up to the most searing personal tragedies with a degree of equanimity and objectiv ity. At the same time these years saw the growth and increasing acceptance of oral history as a discipline in the United States and Britain and significantly it was Anglo-Saxon historians who first began to apply this new approach to recover the hitherto unrecorded experience of the Spanish working class.4 The leader in this field, Ronald Fraser, had already produced two oral histories in the declining years of Franco, In Hiding, The Life of Manuel Cortes (1972) and The Pueblo, A Mountain Village on the Costa del Sol (1973), but his major work was to be published in 1979, Blood of Spain, The Experience of Civil War 1936-1939.5 When this latter book appeared I had already begun the series of interviews of David and Consuelo Granda which form the substance of this volume, although the approach is rather different.6 Fraser, in his marvellous study, has limited his inquiry to the period of the Civil War itself as viewed through the eyes of some three hundred participants. This provides a rich, multiform picture but has the disadvantage of leaving out the 'before and after' and reinforces one of the distorting effects of the historiography which tends to segment and compartmentalise the Civil War, so that we have numerous books on either the causes of the war prior to 1936, or on the war itself, or on the post-war Franco dictatorship. One advantage of the biographical approach adopted here is that by taking a long time span, from the 1920s to the 1970s, the continuities and interrela tionships between these three phases are illustrated. Thus the Grandas' account begins with their upbringing and youth in the backward peasant society of Asturias, northern Spain, during the inter-war depression and the Second Republic and reveals the