When I read many years The death of hope , the testimony of the excellent book War of Spain of which he is author and journalist libertarian writer Eduardo de Guzman (1908-1991) I remember the incidents followed the second part was particularly moved. Guzman narrates the last days of March 1939 in the port of Alicante, where thousands of Republicans, once missed the chance to escape by boat of the Franco regime, were arrested and interned in the concentration camp of Los Almendros by rebel troops. The emotion of this reading comes from one of my most deeply rooted childhood nightmares, by the way also another evacuation, this consummate itself, which took place on the quays of Musel of Gijon in the fall of 1937. My children paid dearly indiscretion me aware of those events to hear more clandestine talks for adults, because the fun afternoons spent fishing in the harbor at night usually followed afterwords dream full of anxieties. Nothing seemed more unfortunate to imagine hundreds of children and adolescents, which will then be called Children of War in Mexico or Moscow, separating from their parents with tears and hugs, while the flames of the fuel tanks of the city, bombed by Franco's army, lent these dramatic scenes of ghostly background morning.
remained ahead so much war and was still feasible to put a date not too far back to a family reunion, which eventually would take too long or never performed. Inmates confined in Almendros had no expectations that the captivity or death, because the war had ended with his defeat. Suffered from all the evidence was recreated in the novel Campo de los Almendros , written by Max Aub and not a few critics as one of the best, if not the best of those published in exile (Mexico, 1968 .) Elaborating on the days of despair and panic experienced in the port of Alicante, which gives reference Guzmán testimonial in his book, complete with magnificent Aub prose unfortunate perspective that points to the last page The death of hope when the journalist and anarchist writer describes the suicide of those who can not or will not overcome the sorrow and disappointment the defeat: " A moment of silent contemplation. Then we walked slowly toward the exit. Camino mechanically, without even seeing where floor. Before me I see the soldiers that lie ahead. I think the illusions vanished, the example of those who fell in the long run. Someone whispered to me: 'Soon will envy the dead. "Seat without words. It is the first of April 1939. The war is over! ."
almost five years ago that the Alicante Civic Commission for the Recovery of Historical Memory has referred to the city council, ruled by the Popular Party, the request to erect a memorial to remember the tragic end of the war and those who suffered repression under Franco in the concentration camp and other facilities of the city on such tough conditions, according to the poet Marcos Ana, encourage prisoners to eat flowers and tender stems of the extreme precariousness food and water. In November 2004 established the municipal commission for that the matter was under study. Two years later, in view of such a commission that showed no sign of activity, applicants claimed a parcel of public land in Los Almendros to locate the appropriate memorial there. Even received a grant from central government to this effect, the subsidy expired in March without the demand of the Civic Commission was attended by the City.
On 3 February, coinciding with 70 years for the brutal mousetrap that about 14,000 people accounted for the port of Alicante, many of them significant in the struggle for the legitimate and constitutional arrangements of the Second Republic, the Commission Civic of that city presented a manifesto at the Ateneo de Madrid for repairing an old injustice, make a story manipulated fight against forgetting, ultimately repay a moral debt that English democracy is still in Spain who advocated a tolerant, peaceful , cultured and caring .
can not understand in today's Spain that while the Prince of Asturias Foundation awards a prize Oviedo harmony to the Holocaust Museum a couple of years or La Jonquera opens a museum in memory of the English placed in the concentration camp of Argelès, the mayor of Alicante continue deferring into the monument called Los Almendros. Of course, neither can understand the existing law of historical memory, another mayor's Party, the latter of Salamanca , keep Francisco Franco as mayor after the city, with his effigy carved in stone on the baroque arches of the Plaza Mayor, and refuses to rehabilitate Unamuno as a Republican councilman. What these people wounded speaks when it comes to memory that reopens?. The only injuries in a democracy that claims are to continue paying awards to those who fought and forgotten its defenders. Wound is to consider that in the Field of Almendros was planted a year ago a flowering almond tree, in the absence of the memorial claimed, and the next day appeared uprooted with the signing of a swastika banner of barbarism.
FELIX POPULATION
writer and journalist for the Documentation Center of Historical Memory
Published in the newspaper published on Sunday 22 February 2009
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