“The Spanish people will rise again as they have always risen before against tyranny. The dead do not need to rise. They are a part of the earth now and the earth can never be conquered. For the earth endureth forever. It will outlive all systems of tyranny. Those who have entered it honorably, and no men ever entered earth more honorably than those who died in Spain, already have achieved immortality.” — Ernest Hemingway
One elderly woman’s journey through history and time
The Spanish genocide that no Spaniard wants to talk about
Ascensión Mendieta was taking care of her one-year-old brother when she heard a loud knock on the door. Outside the family’s humble home in her native Sacedón, Spain, were two men: a neighbor of the village and one of dictator Francisco Franco’s men. When she opened the dark brown door, both walked, uninvited, into the living room as her father, Timoteo Mendieta, made his way down the stairs. “Put your hands up!” shouted Franco’s soldier to him.
Not many more words were spoken.
“I saw how they took him away,” my now 89-year-old grandmother laments. At the age of thirteen, this was the last time that she saw her father.
It has been 75 years since that day of April 1939 when my great-grandfather was handcuffed and taken to prison, first in Sacedón, and days later in Guadalajara, a nearby city. He had never killed anyone. But he was a leftist, the Spanish Civil War had just ended, and there was no room for those who rallied support for the antifascist political movement. Franco’s forces did not keep him alive much longer. On November 15, 1939, my great-grandfather and seventeen other men were shot dead in Guadalajara. He was one of the 822 Republicans executed in this city between 1939 and 1944. Tens of thousands of other unidentified victims lie somewhere alongside roads and unmarked tombs throughout the country.
My great-grandfather and the other seventeen bodies were buried one by one in a common grave. “I wonder if he was buried alive…What must he have thought leaving seven children without their father..? How did he fall..? Facing up or down?” my grandmother says.
On top of my great-grandfather’s remains lie sixteen bodies whose relatives have desperately sought to reclaim them for decades now. To this date, no one has succeeded. But, in an unexpected chain of events, my grandmother’s efforts are about to overturn the course of history.
Last winter she embarked on a journey that not many at her age would have dared. On her 88th birthday, she flew across the Atlantic Ocean to reclaim her family’s decades-long silenced voice and that of thousands of others’ in Spain. She landed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, along with my aunt, Chon Vargas, 54, and spoke before judge María Romilda Servini de Cubría, who lent her ears to my grandmother’s cause.
“I just want a bone of my father before I die,” she cried in court. “I want to bury it with me.”
Earlier this year, the Argentinean judge ordered the Spanish authorities to exhume the human remains of my great-grandfather — a decision that brought hope to thousands of Spaniards who are following in her footsteps. This decision marked a turning point in the history of Spain and of the Franco-era crimes, for it paved the legal way for many others to demand that the bodies of their loved ones also be recovered, something that the Spanish authorities are fighting against and fear deeply.
But my grandmother’s overseas trip was the culmination of a long journey to justice first launched in 2010 by Spaniard Darío Rivas, a 94 year-old resident of Argentina who fled his native Spain when he was a child. Decades later, as an adult, Rivas returned to his small village in Northern Spain and searched left and right for his father’s unmarked tomb. It was not until 2005 that he finally unearthed his father’s remains from a common grave and buried them in his family’s pantheon. But Rivas’s quest against the Franco-era crimes and human rights violations did not come to an end here. He went back to Argentina and became the lead plaintiff in a class action lawsuit that my grandmother later joined and which, invoking the ‘Universal Principle of Justice,’ aims to bring relief to the victims of Franco’s genocide. “He is a wonderful man,” she says of Rivas, whom she met in Buenos Aires in November 2013. Rivas only turned to Latin America to seek justice due to the Spanish authorities’ systematic refusal for relief and justice to thousands of victims on the basis that, under the 1977 Amnesty Law, no crime from that time can be put on trial or investigated.
Even today, Spain refuses to investigate one of the country’s darkest periods despite the UN’s repeated calls for the repealing of the law. Furthermore, when Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón, who prosecuted ruthless dictators like Chile’s Pinochet, attempted two years ago to open an investigation into the Franco-era human violations, political maneuvers were made to bar him for life. He now lives in Argentina.
The Spanish genocide must not be underestimated. Spain is second only to Cambodia in the number of people who have disappeared and whose remains have never been found. Whereas no one nowadays would allow Hitler and his allies to evade justice, Spain has entered the 21st century protecting the masterminds and perpetrators of the Spanish Holocaust: those who massacred thousands of Spaniards and left entire families without providers have enjoyed decades of freedom, privilege and impunity.
*****
Nothing appeared to be different that day. But the story would prove otherwise. The train still had to make two stops before arriving at the Madrid train station. About five minutes away from the end of the journey, plastic bags full of potatoes, eggs, legumes, and olive oil began flying through the train windows into the hands of my grandmother and her brothers, who were standing on the street as the train passed by. When the train made its final stop in Madrid and my great-grandmother, María Ibarra, got off, she was arrested by the police. She was accused of buying produce in villages in the outskirts of Madrid and selling it to families in the city without paying taxes.
For doing what’s popularly known as ‘estraperlo,’ she was sentenced to six months in jail and fined with 3000 pesetas — about three years worth of salary at the time. To pay off the fine, she sold a brown donkey to a wealthy woman in Sacedón and the little land that she owned. Day in and day out, she did all she could to feed her seven starving children. But in a country torn by a bloody war, her efforts proved barely enough.
“We would go for days without eating,” my grandmother tells me. “We would go to nearby families and ask for a piece of bread.”
With my great-grandfather under Franco’s arrest and my great-grandmother now in jail, life only got worse for my grandmother and her six brothers and sisters who, up until then, had struggled to survive through the worst of the devastating conflict and fed on occasional food stamps.
Her youngest brother, Fotus, suffered from rickets. A tough kid though, he eventually grew up to become a butcher and a meat and fish storeowner in Moratalaz, Madrid. Decades later, as a retiree, he sat amongst twenty-year-olds in a university classroom and graduated with a medical degree before terminal cancer took his life.
My grandmother is an avid reader. But she cannot write. She stopped going to school when the first bombs began dropping in her village. She was just a child. “As soon as we heard the sirens go off, we gathered the hens and ran to the village’s bomb shelter for protection,” she says. “But we were so naive…Had a bomb hit the shelter, we would have all died,” she adds as she shakes her head.
Against all odds, she survived through poverty, hunger and the bombs. But her soul never survived through her father’s assassination. In 1975, right after Franco died, her mother María ordered a plaque of stone with his name engraved and placed it over his tomb, leaving enough room for other widows to hang plaques with the names of their deceased spouses.
“Timoteo Mendieta died for democracy and freedom,” the plaque reads.
“My mother, for all she did for her children, deserves an altar,” my grandmother says.
At 89, my grandmother has short gray hair and fair skin. Even today, it is still possible to see in her wrinkles her once beautiful facial features. In her youthful years, her dark eyes and long hair won over the heart of many men. But it was my grandfather, Francisco Vargas, who put a ring on her finger and walked her down the aisle some 66 years ago.
“This is ‘papa,’” she says as her finger points to a framed black and white photo of my grandfather standing next to her on their wedding day.
My grandparents met while working in a textile factory in Madrid after the end of the Spanish Civil War. She was 23 and he was 30. With a humble upbringing, both did whatever they had to in order to make ends meet. In the midst of their struggle, she mastered the craft of sewing and weaving, fabricating beautiful leather and wool clothes that, even as an elderly woman, she continues to make for her family. My grandfather worked as a salesperson at the factory.
As a teenager, he was forced to put on a military uniform, was given a weapon and was sent to war. He was part of the so-called ‘La Quinta del Biberón,’ a group of 30,000 underage boys obligated to carry firearms and fight in a civil conflict. When the fascists claimed victory in 1939, he was held prisoner in a concentration camp, and along with thousands of other ‘leftists,’ was used as forced labor to rebuild the Bridge of Cangas de Onís, in Asturias, and to build, with their own bare hands, the infamous El Valle de los Caídos (The Valley of the Fallen), a monument in nearby Madrid that hides the remains of 40,000 people, and that judge Garzón unsuccessfully attempted to dig up.
After the end of the war, my grandfather spent more than eleven years under military indoctrination and oversight as well as imprisonment. “He was also in the Castle of Montjuic in Barcelona,” my father Francisco tells me. “Here your grandfather was reeducated ideologically and politically during World War II.”
My grandfather was a talented athlete with a knack for soccer and earned a place as a midfielder in the prisoners’ team. For playing soccer, the fascists prison guards gave him an extra ‘chusco,’ a piece of hard bread that he treasured dearly. He died before knowing of my passion for tennis and that I obtained a scholarship to the US.
Shortly after his 30th birthday, he got his freedom back and moved in with his parents in El Puente de Vallecas, a humble neighborhood in Madrid. Over the course of the years, he had to witness his family drama unfold. He lost his older brother in the war. His younger brother survived but lost one arm, one eye and three fingers after a detonator went off while he was playing as a child. My grandfather died in 1994. I was 13, the age of my grandmother when her father was perforated with bullets.
*****
Almost a year has gone by since my grandmother’s trip to Argentina at the end of 2013. In the past month, life has reminded her that her health is fragile. She suffered a mild heart attack and remained hospitalized for several days. When, in December 2014, news about Spain’s refusal to exhume her father finally arrived, her two daughters and her son Francisco, my father, decided not to tell her yet. The end of her days is nearing. But no one can ever say that she did not do all that she could.
“I feel relieved that I have done my best,” she says as she sighs.
Three years after joining the Argentinean class action lawsuit, my grandmother finds herself walking over a muddy path towards the tomb of her mother in Madrid’s public cemetery. It is December of 2014. The air is cold and the sky is gray. She wears a scarf to protect her throat. The sun has not come out for several days, and she has decided to cover her fragile body with a long camel coat. With a delicate gesture, she leans forward and lays a bouquet of red roses over her mother’s grave. Ever since her mother, María Ibarra, died, my grandmother comes here several times a year to revisit the past, to revisit her stolen childhood. And even with the shadow of death looming over her, she never loses hope.
“We are almost there,” she whispers over her mother’s tomb as her eyes fill with tears. “We are closer than ever to retrieving father.”
Published on December 23, 2014
