One day in 1939, a Spanish father wrote to his three small sons to ask them to behave themselves while he was away. “My dear boys, Pepe, little Félix and little Vicente, I’m in a beautiful castle with lots of turrets,” wrote Vicente González García-Carrizo.
“At night, little princesses come out into the courtyard. They’re very beautiful. When I sleep, Mummy comes to me dressed as a beautiful fairy with her hair hanging loose. She tells me about everything you do. It makes me so happy when I hear that you’ve been good and worked hard. And I cry so much when I hear you’ve made her cross.”
García-Carrizo, the Republican mayor of the town of San Lorenzo de el Escorial, wrote the note on cigarette paper from his cell in Cuéllar castle near Segovia, which had been turned into a political prison following Franco’s victory in the Spanish civil war in April that year.
On 16 November, García-Carrizo sent another note from another prison in which he said goodbye to his wife and children and asked his brother-in-law to stop by the jail in a couple of days’ time to pick up his suitcase and his blankets. The following day, he was shot dead against a Madrid cemetery wall at the age of 39.
Between 1939 and 1944, García-Carrizo and 2,935 other represaliados – victims of reprisals – were murdered in the capital after being convicted by military courts. Eight decades on, some of the final letters the men and women wrote to their loved ones have been collected in a new book called Las cartas de la memoria (The Memory Letters).
The book, the product of 20 years of painstaking collaborative work by the Memoria y Libertad association, also allows the victims’ families the belated opportunity to write back to their dead to share their memories, their news, and, above all, their love.
The project began 20 years ago when Tomás Montero Aparicio, who edited the collection, began looking into the death of his grandfather, a trade unionist who was shot against the wall of Madrid’s Cementerio del Este in June 1939. In 2005, Montero posted an online list of all those who had been shot in the capital to encourage their descendants to share whatever information they had.
“It just grew from there,” he says. “We shared documents and discussed how to use archives, so it all took a long time. The initial idea was for it to be a kind of healing and reparation for the families themselves.”
The inspiration for the reply letters came from a 2003 book called Dear Eugenio, in which the Spanish communist, feminist and writer Juana Doña answered the last letters she received from her husband, Eugenio Mesón, who was shot at the age of 24 in July 1941.
In his last letter to his wife, Mesón wrote: “Be safe in the knowledge that I die thinking of you, of our dear little boy and of the party flag, which will very soon be held aloft in victory … Take flowers to the mass grave where our bodies – the only part of us they can shoot – will fall. If you get there in time, will you give me a kiss, even if I’m cold? That thought lifts my spirits and I feel jollier now.”
Doña herself only escaped a death sentence years later after her family and a staunchly leftwing visiting Argentinian comic managed to persuade Argentina’s first lady, Eva Perón, to intercede on Doña’s behalf with Franco and his wife. Their entreaties succeeded and the sentence was commuted to 30 years and a day in prison.
One of the aims of the book, which is also available as a free PDF, was to dispel the Francoist myth that the represaliados were monsters who had been eliminated for the good of Spain.
“The legend was always that the people who Franco shot were devils with horns and tails, but this is proof of what they were really like,” says Montero.
What surprised him most about the families’ replies – apart from the often unbearable poignancy – was their tone.
“If you read most of the letters, there’s no hatred, no rancour and no revenge; it’s just people writing about how much they would like to have known their father, grandfather or mother,” he says. “I got very emotional, but as the person pulling it all together, I had to put up a retaining wall. So many of the stories were so awful that it would have been impossible otherwise. You can’t carry it all round with you all day.”
Montero wrote two letters to his grandfather, Tomás Montero Labrandero. In the second, he explains how the internet has enabled him and his fellow volunteers to come together and share their family histories.
“Today, Grandfather Tomás, I can say that I’ve come to know myself better by looking for you … Myself, my friends and my family want to say thank you. Thank you so much for everything. But I think I know that, besides the carnations – which I’ll lay at the cemetery wall whatever happens – you’d prefer it if I carried on fighting for the noble and just ideas you defended, and, above all, if I carried on gathering vegetables from the land they didn’t manage to snatch away from you.”
José López Camarillas, the director of L’Encobert, the book’s publisher, says the relatives’ letters also provide an insight into the lives of those who were left behind.
“We see the women who were the wives and daughters of the victims,” he says. “They had to keep the families together and get on with life in very difficult circumstances. They weren’t just widows; they were the widows of reds. They weren’t just orphans; they were the orphans of reds. They had to deal with that throughout the dictatorship.”
López Camarillas says he hopes the book has helped relatives of the murdered to “speak about what they’ve kept inside for so long – and given them a chance to speak to their loved ones”. But, he adds, it also has a more widespread and ever-topical aim – “to warn people of the dangers that intolerance and ideological discrimination brings”.
The enduring, inescapable message, however, is one of love.
Before he died a few years ago, Vicente González García-Carrizo’s son Pepe wrote to the father he saw for the last time when he was nine years old.
“I’ve tried to ensure that everything I’ve done would have made you proud of me,” he wrote. “You were the last mayor of the Republic. I was a councillor during the early return of democracy. Your son, who has never forgotten how he lost his guiding star in the fatal early morning of 17 November 1939, sends you his love. PS. I hope this letter finds you, wherever you are.”
