Special Report: Guernica/Gernika
Anyone who has been following me on these journeys will know that I usually gather a few places, and a few experiences, together in one post. But yesterday I went to this small Basque town and was so moved that I felt the need to attempt to immediately sum up some of the feelings that I had there.
Most of you will recognize the name. For those who don’t, or whose memory may be hazy on the details, it is the place that has come to distill for many, all the horrors of war. Throughout world history, civilians have been targeted, of course. However, the destruction of Guernica — Gernika, in the Basque Language — heralded a new type of warfare that has become all too familiar — the terror bombing of a non-military target in an attempt to break the will of a people. This was also a trial run of tactics for the Germans, whose Condor Legion of pilots had come, in 1936, to aid Franco and the Fascists in their war against the Spanish Republic. The tactics first practised here would be used again and again a few years later in their Blitzkriegs — in Poland, Belgium, France, and Russia. Anywhere the Swastika sought to fly.
Gernika is in so many ways the heart of the Basque country. Their ancient assemblies met there in a system that predates the British Parliament. Leaders swore under the famous oak tree to uphold essential human rights and defend them on behalf of the people. Most Basques saw the destruction of those rights in fascism and chose to oppose it.
Though Gernika was on the way to the city of Bilbao (the object of Franco’s offensive that April 26, 1937), the small town, crowded with people attending its Monday market, had no military value. Yet for the reasons mentioned above, Franco and his allies chose to obliterate it — and hone their skills for the wider conflict to come. Waves of bombers began it, dropping high explosives and incendiaries to create a firestorm. Fighters and fighter bombers followed, strafing the ground with machine guns, killing anyone who tried to flee the inferno. Over a thousand died by bomb, fire, in collapsing buildings, 85% of which were destroyed. Men, women, children, old and young. Barely a soldier among them.
It is a tale of cruelty and horror, oft-repeated in the years that followed. It is a more personal tale for me as a novelist in that, Billy Coke, the protagonist of my new novel, “Someday I’ll Find You” (out next year), is in Gernika that day. I hadn’t been before I wrote the book, alas. But I appear to have gotten most of the horrific details right, gleaned from the amazing reports I read from some very brave men and women.
The story was contentious from the start. Rather than gloating about their terrible success, the fascists tried to deny what they’d done. Claimed instead that it was what today is called a ‘false flag’ operation — that the ‘Reds’ had destroyed their town and murdered their own people in order to blame their enemy. Fortunately, reporters like the redoubtable George Speer visited immediately and got the truth out there. Then in the same year, Picasso immortalized the event and summed up for many the horror of this new form of total war with his extraordinary, epic canvas, Guernica. (See above)
An hour’s train ride from Bilbao, the town I visited defied all my expectations. I wanted to explore the history of that day, of course, and Gernika showed it to me wonderfully, both the events — in sites like the air raid shelters — and in the spirit of the people who experienced it, shown in their writings and recordings. And yet it is clear that the inhabitants don’t dwell on it as the only defining thing that has ever happened there. As the video in that same air shelter states, they are, “people who have set their sights on the future, without forgetting their past.”
They have created something wonderful in the Museo Pax — the Peace Museum. Its name states its purpose: not only to memorialize the past, though it depicts the terrible events of that day very well. No, this museum’s purpose is far greater: to seek meaning from the event in order to help prevent such events from being repeated as well as seeking to achieve something from them, an ultimate prize — reconciliation. Never forgetting the horrors, nor all the horrors that wars bring, but trying to understand them and finally, if forgiveness is sought, to forgive. Forgiveness! That idea is at the heart of all its exhibits and puts the atrocity in the context of the world. Striving for the ideal of reconciliation. Of peace as a right in life, the right every human should be able to take for granted.
The exhibits are a wonderful meld — I was handed an English translation of the words beside every panel, every artifact. It did not merely translate them but gave the core of that ultimate message too — peace as an inalienable right. An example: a quote from the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948):
“Everyone has the right to life, liberty and the security of person.”
There was also the quite astonishing “House of the Woman of the Town”. You enter it, the door closes behind you, and you sit in her living room as she recounts her life as it had been, how war has changed it, depicts her suffering, her fears for self and family… and then you are there as she experiences the raid itself. You hear the sirens. The lights go out. Walls tumble. The town burns.
I must emphasize that this is not crass or hokey in any way. It is totally immersive. The actress recounting the tale does so beautifully (you press the button for your own language as you enter). The effects give you a tiny glimpse into what was a horrific reality for so many. Then you step out into more displays, walking on a glass floor above the rubble, reading the experiences of real people caught up in real events. Towards the end there is a film that takes Gernika, and what happened there, out into the wide world, focusing again on that quest for peace and reconciliation. Examples are given where that vital work was successful — Ireland, South Africa, Guatemala, and Berlin. It gives hope — that humans can go beyond hate, beyond dreams of vengeance, and achieve this.
The last part of the museum had a special exhibition focusing on Women and Children — even more than men, the innocent victims of war. In moving panels that ranged from Gernika through World War Two and the evacuations, separations, widowing, orphaning of hundreds of thousands, the point was made. The Holocaust was one focus, photographs of all those children who were denied their rights, even to death.
I left shaken, profoundly moved, thinking of where this was still happening all over the world. Especially, of course today, in Ukraine. Saw again the faces of the children I’d seen in the exhibits, repeated as Putin’s bombs fall in terror attacks and destroy their homes, forcing them to flee. Each day there, another small Gernika. Someone’s son murdered. Someone’s daughter orphaned.
Lost to thoughts, close to tears, as I went to leave, I did what we so automatically do these days: squirted some disinfectant gel on my hands. I was rubbing them as the doors opened and I stepped out.
Right in front of me was a little boy. One of fifty or more children whose laughter rose as they chased through the square beyond, none older than four. Dark-eyed, dark-haired, the boy faced me and gleefully mimed my hand rub, mocking me, saying something I didn’t catch. Then he came up to stand beside me, placed one hand on my hip. Joined, wordless, for a few moments, together we watched the children play. I saw a teacher smile at us — and then he ran off to join his friends.
I watched them form into little crocodiles, take each other’s hands, skip off. I thought of the photos in the museum, the faces of the children I’d seen, many of whom never got the chance again to play in the sunshine. In Gernika then, in Kherson today. As I got out my pen, to try and put some of my jumbled thoughts into words, I remembered the key message from the museum. The vital need for everyone to strive for each individual’s inalienable human rights.
For peace. For reconciliation.
