"They come to your house. They take your husband. They return to your house. This time they come for you. They take you to prison. You are accompanied by your daughter, who has no one to stay with. They shoot your husband. The nuns inform you. You wonder what will become of you, pregnant, with a girl. You are hungry. Your daughter is hungry. You are about to give birth. The sentence arrives: 20 years for supporting the rebellion. Your son is born. Your son dies. They take him away. You don't know Where. You won't be able to bring her flowers. Your daughter is hungry. She's sick with whooping cough, typhus. Your daughter dies. You don't know where.
It is an excerpt from Country in ruins, buried stories of Franco's Spain (1939-1975), from the Crítica publishing house. Its author, archaeologist Alfredo González Ruibal, 2024 National Essay Award, compiles almost two decades of excavations in mass graves, trenches, concentration camps and shanties, that is, conversations with hundreds of objects that, 70 or 80 years later, continued talking about their owners: who they were, how they lived and how they died. During the preparation of the volume, of almost 400 pages, he discovered a dark family past that has a lot to do with the unusual dedication of the book: “To my mother-in-law, María Mayorgas.”
“It is impossible to understand Francoism,” explains González Ruibal, “without taking into account two cuts on the ground: the trenches and the mass graves. The first is the epic of the war that would act as a source of legitimacy for the regime for 40 years. The second, the trace of the extermination that neutralized the opposition to Franco and allowed him to reign over the peace of the cemeteries.”
The archaeologist delves into the large clandestine burial sites, such as the one in Malaga, where there were up to six levels of corpses — “the depth of the graves reveals that the Franco authorities were very clear that they planned to murder many people and for a long time” — and where many years later the remains of 322 children under 10 years old, children of prisoners, were rescued. “16 neonates appeared in one of the graves, creatures that died at birth or shortly after. Nothing surprising considering the broken health of their mothers and the unhealthiness of the prison. The bodies of the children were placed in the profiles of the common graves, which were filled with the corpses of those shot. "The small deceased were very useful to cover gaps," recalls the author, citing the research of historian Francisco Espinosa. In Paterna (Valencia) more than 2,200 people were buried and there are graves so deep that they pierced the water table and the permanent humidity at the bottom caused the corpses to saponify, that is, the body fat was transformed into a substance similar to soap and the clothing that the victims were wearing was preserved: blood-stained shirts, bandages beatings, esparto ligaments on the wrists. In some of these exhumations, bottles were found along with the human remains that included a small piece of paper with the name of the victim: “I am Manuel Lluesma Masià (Moncada). Executed on 12-29-1942 at 7:30 in the morning. I leave children." The undertaker, Leoncio Badía, placed them next to the bodies thinking that the families could recover them in the future, although surely that future came much later than he imagined. In 2019, Badía received, posthumously, the High Distinction of the Generalitat Valenciana. Today he has a statue in his honor in the Paterna cemetery.
The book also visits individual burial sites, such as that of Villaverde del Ducado (Guadalajara), “exceptional in many ways,” explains González Ruibal, archaeologist at the Institute of Heritage Sciences of the CSIC. The daughter of a local resident contacted the archaeologist in 2019 to explain that the town wanted to bury with dignity an unknown victim who had been buried outside the cemetery, next to the wall, during the war. Nobody knew who he was. The neighbors said that they had buried him in a very shallow ditch and that, shortly after, “a foot or boot of the dead man ended up sticking out or was dug up by the dogs” and a shepherd who used to pass by there ordered his son to “place some stones to prevent the animals from extracting the remains.” Since 1937, women from the town had placed flowers at the unmarked grave, caring for the nameless deceased. The exhumation confirmed that the victim was very young, around 21 years old. Next to the remains were religious medals that someone had slipped into the burial. “We not only document a war crime,” explains González Ruibal, “but an act of humanity: that of the people who cared for that unknown dead man for 80 years as if he were a family member.”
A perfume bottle in a trench
González Ruibal also excavated the last trench of the Civil War, in the university city of Madrid. “Through the garbage left by the soldiers we know how they lived, how they died and how they killed.” Eighty years later, the archaeological work allowed us to get an idea of the combatants' menu and confirm, for example, that the rebel side was fed much better - "2,627 animal bones show a varied diet rich in proteins" - than the republican side - "the remains of animals are practically non-existent. The famine was decisive in sinking the morale of the troops" -. “Grenades, bullets and inkwells are omnipresent elements.” Weapons to defend or attack and pens to inform their loved ones that they were still alive. An ink factory of the time advertised itself precisely like this: “Samas always wins.” An unusual object appeared during the excavation of a trench in Guadalajara: a bottle of feminine perfume. “It has an old, art deco design, and when you opened it, it still smelled,” González Ruibal recalls. “Surely, the wife or girlfriend of some soldier gave it to him as a souvenir so he could take it to the battle front.”
Human burrows
Archaeological work has also made it possible to document living conditions after the war, portray Franco's cruelty towards the losing side and dismantle some myths. González Ruibal remembers in the book that in the 1940s, the San Martín cemetery in Madrid, which had been abandoned for decades, was occupied by people who had nowhere to live and settled in the niches.
The archaeologist describes some of the former concentration camps he has excavated as “human burrows” where inmates slept in crowded spaces where they could not even stand up and wrapped their feet in sacks because they lacked shoes. In many of the corpses recovered in those fields, traces of tuberculosis and cachexia, extreme malnutrition, can be seen. “My wife's paternal grandfather remembered with rage that he had to exchange the watch that his father had given him for a loaf of bread.” In the excavation in the penal detachments of the Valley of the Fallen, today called Cuelgamuros, traps for hunting birds or rabbits were found, a sign of the hunger suffered by the prisoners who worked on its construction, as well as footwear made with tire rubber. “In a context of maximum hardship,” he explains, “stripped of everything by the Regime, their freedom, economic means... the prisoners and their families were forced to create a world with waste: they invented everything from footwear to kitchen utensils.”
The excess of deaths due to starvation or epidemics is between 1939 and 1942, recalls the researcher, at a minimum of 200,000. There was also hunger outside the prisons and this was recorded in the ruins of Franco's regime, among the rubble of the shanties measuring 10 by 12 useful meters built in a single night to house grandparents, parents and children under the same corrugated iron roof. During the sixties, 400,000 families, the author recalls, lived in self-built substandard housing on the outskirts of large cities, like the one seen in the film The 47. In the excavation of these old housing estates of misery, marbles and yo-yos appeared, along with rat bones. "Political violence is better known, but not so much the social suffering, that abject poverty in which so many people lived. All those older ladies who are 1.50 and seem endearing to us, are 1.50 because they suffered malnutrition as girls."
The trail of a photograph
María Mayorgas, González Ruibal's mother-in-law, daughter of the defeated side, could not brush her teeth until she arrived in Madrid. The archaeologist wanted her to be the first to read his book. When he began to write it, he knew that his paternal grandfather had become rich after the war by building ports and airports. The mother had died in 1951, at the age of 39, leaving four orphans. "What never occurred to me was that my own grandfather could have helped leave other orphans in the world. I had to wait 40 years to find out."
