Magdalena Gorrell Jaen
The Spanish Civil War that began 17 July 1936 with Franco’s military coup, didnot end with the defeat of the supporters of the legal government 1 April 1939.From the moment the first shot was fired, the military insurgents embarked on awave of massacre, torture and repression against half of the Spanish populationthat was terrorized, helpless for 40 years, until Franco’s death in 1975. Asidefrom a brief lifting of the forced lid of silence in the 1950s, the rest of the worldremains ignorant of the genocide that, closely modelled on Hitler’s methodsin Nazi Germany, led to the post-war slaughter of tens of thousands by firingsquad or extra-legal methods buried, unidentified, by the hundreds in massgraves, many of which are only now being uncovered.Damnatio Memoriae, supported by dozens of eye-witness interviews, addressesthis dark period in great detail as it sheds light on the repression that destroyedthe lives of hundreds of thousands of dissenting men and women imprisonedfor many years in more than 180 concentration camps, countless prisons andslave labour workers battalions where many died from torture, starvation anddisease. Today, the surviving relatives of this half of the Spanish population,especially children who were taken from their parents to be re-educated, areattempting to identify the remains of the lost members of their families, givethem some dignity in death, and obtain some closure to their pain.
