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Article by Michael Portillo on Spain’s Historic Memory, for The Mail on Sunday, A few minutes’ journey from those Costa del Sol beaches where British sunworshippers stretch out their bodies in rows, there is a more macabre spectacle. At a cemetery in Málaga they are unearthing lines of corpses. Each of the skeletons is found face down and a rusted wire restraint hangs loosely around the wrist bones. Dragged from the local prison, these manacled prisoners were probably shot at the edge of the mass grave. At the moment of death they tumbled forward, laying down another stratum of human remains. In places the corpses lie seven deep, and they cover a wide area. Today they are being moved because the graveyard is to be re-developed. Had there not been a public outcry their officially-forgotten bones would simply have been bulldozed into hardcore beneath a new municipal park. There are 4,000 victims here in the city, but even so they form just a small fraction of those who, during Spain's civil war (of 1936-39) and for years after, were dispatched by firing squad or pistol in one of Europe's worst acts of revenge. Yet millions of British holidaymakers are wholly unaware of the carnage that occurred here, or of the tensions, poorly covered over, lurking beneath modern Spain's cheery surface. Tourists exploring the Moorish and Renaissance history of Granada have no idea that the stunning ravines that rise on every side were dumping grounds for thousands who were murdered on the roads by vigilante groups, cleansing the villages of their political opponents. I did not know either. I should have done, because the civil war is in my DNA. It was because of that war that my parents met. My father, Luis, was forced to flee the terror and pitched up in England. He suffered badly and felt despair at what had happened to Spain. But he survived the conflict and its aftermath, and to that extent he was one of the lucky ones. I have come to see these harrowing graves as part of a television investigation about how Spain should deal with the horrors of its twentieth century history. Many Spanish people fear that re-visiting the past will tear the country apart, undoing the healing of the last 30 years. It was a tragic miscalculation. He and three friends were seized and arbitrarily put to death. Today the families of two of those killed alongside him are seeking an exhumation of the grave site where the remains are presumed to lie. Lorca's family would prefer to avoid the media circus that would certainly engulf it. Federico, they say, has suffered enough violence without now turning up his bones and discovering the most gory details of what humiliation this homosexual genius may have experienced at the moment of his murder. The controversy over Lorca is a small part of the gulf that has opened - or re-opened - in Spain as politicians debate how best to deal with what they call "historic memory". The civil war began when the army rebelled against the democratically elected government on 18 July 1936. Francisco Franco, one of Spain’s youngest and most brilliant army generals, became leader of the uprising and later dictator of Spain, ruling until his death in 1975. On his passing Spain chose, as an act of national policy, to forget. In order to move forward, there would be no truth and reconciliation commissions, no trials for war crimes, just oblivion. It worked, apparently. Despite the atrocities of its past and the divisions between families and within families, Spain adopted collective amnesia; and moved on to become a rather successful democracy. Since the 1970s, moderate parties of the left and right have alternated in power under the benign eye of a constitutional monarch. King Juan Carlos himself symbolises the Spanish compromise. Brought up by Franco to be his heir, he then outraged the old guard by sweeping aside the general's despotic legacy in favour of elected governments. My earliest childhood memories include my Spanish father speaking to me anguishedly about the civil war, and of his hatred of Franco. His tone was shocking because he was otherwise the most loving and gentle of human beings. My three brothers and I were, literally, not allowed to kill a fly, because his respect for life was absolute. Yet loathing for Franco poured from him. He carried a debilitating wound, of the spirit not the body. His life had been devastated by the Spanish conflict. As a supporter of the government back in 1936 he had fought against the military rebels. In January 1939, as the government side was stumbling to defeat, he crossed the Pyrenees into exile. He had no idea then that he would end up in Britain, and I never heard exactly how it came about. He may have had an instinct for survival, because had he lingered in France he might, like many others, have perished in the concentration camps where refugees were held. Certainly, it must have seemed unlikely that he would ever set foot in Spain again. With a ghastly sort of symmetry, in that same January that my father plodded through the mountains to exile, his young brother - and godson - Justino was killed fighting for Franco. He must have been one of the last casualties on that side, fighting to block the government's final ill-fated offensive in Extremadura. Justino was one of five of my father's brothers who fought on the opposite side. Such divisions were not uncommon. The family was middle class which made them naturally suspicious of socialists and communists. But my father was a liberal intellectual, and a Catholic idealist who believed in man's essential goodness. When he was sent to the front he refused to carry a weapon for fear of killing one of his brothers. His political choice left him like a man bereaved. In England he was separated from his country and family. He forsook the best job in the world for him - teaching in the prestigious university of Salamanca, 150 miles from Madrid. It was founded before Cambridge and is at least as beautiful. In Britain Luis had to make a living anyway he could as a refugee in a country where he didn't speak the language. I believe that "leaving" his language was the greatest sorrow of all. He had an enormous vocabulary in his native tongue. He loved nothing more than conversation, except perhaps penning verses. I will always remember him drumming his fingers against his forehead, tapping out the rhythms of sonnets that were forming in his mind. In exile, having to speak mainly in a foreign language - which he did not master - left him frustrated, I think. People might mistake his inarticulacy in English for stupidity, and that was difficult for a man who was clever, and it must be admitted, proud. Of course my politics are different from his and I have tried to reach an objective view of Spain past and present. I've been influenced - a little - by uncles who fought for Franco. My friends in Spanish politics are mainly on the right, and they are worried that today's socialist Spanish government is using the issue of historic memory to polarise the Spanish people. It is fair enough to legislate to pull down the last remaining statues of the generalísimo, but promoting exhumations risks digging up the past, awakening old grievances. They see it as an opportunistic attempt to tar the modern right with the crimes of long-extinct fascists. They fear that a spark could set off the powder keg of Spain’s suppressed hatreds. So, when I set out to make the television documentary on this controversy, I was strongly of the view that sleeping dogs should rest undisturbed. Forgetfulness had served Spain well. I called on my cousin Ángel Luis, who lives in a historic village near Salamanca, in the house where his father and mine grew up. Ángel Luis is an archivist who has safeguarded invaluable records from our family’s past. He shows me photographs of my father in the 1920s. Luis was a superb dresser. He had met at school a boy who later became Spain’s most famous tailor. When he was starting out he gave Luis his best suits and asked him to be his walking advertisement. Then there are letters written from the front by my Uncle Justino. They are full of youthful bravado and confidence about the cause for which, if he but knew it, he is about to sacrifice his life. Then there are the letters of tribute from officers and men written after he received his fatal wound, reassuring my grandparents that he died gloriously for "The Movement". From Ángel Luis I discover, too, how close was my father's escape. He was on a break in Madrid when the coup was unleashed. He tried at once to make his way back to his home and job in Salamanca. He couldn't know that the city had fallen within hours of the uprising and the city's mayor and those thought to be leftists were being shot in the Plaza Mayor. Luis’s bus stopped en route at a café, and there he met a woman he knew, travelling in the opposite direction. She told him of the mayhem unfolding around his idyllic university, and so he turned back towards the capital. That chance encounter may have saved his life. But as Ángel Luis recounts those stories, he hesitates. Even now there are things that shouldn't be recalled, unless you are looking for trouble. I was soon to meet people whose fathers had been less lucky than mine. There are many alive today who remember the knock on the door in the night and the parents dragged away, never to be seen again. For seventy years those orphans have carried photographs of dead fathers and mothers, determined to gain some sort of closure, if not justice. These people move you to tears. They are traumatised by childhood horrors, and through seven decades fear has forced them to live silently with that grief. It has been their life mission to recover a parent's body. The slaughter was on a Biblical scale. Both sides were guilty. In the first year of civil war, fanatical government supporters shot policemen and priests. Maybe 55,000 fell victim to those lynch mobs. On the other side, between 130,000 and 200,000 were murdered or given death sentences by rudimentary courts, or shelled and bombed on roads as they fled from hostile forces. The civil war introduced Europe to the terror bombardment of civilians from the air. In April 1937, Franco's ally, Hitler, used the Basque town of Guernica as a testing ground. Two thousand died in an afternoon. The massacre prompted Picasso to paint his masterpiece of protest, and the attack persuaded the British government to admit 4,000 refugee children, from Bilbao and the rest of Northern Spain, whose parents were desperate to put them beyond reach of the Luftwaffe. Some of those kids ended up in Oxfordshire near where Cora, my Scottish mother, was at university reading Spanish. She visited them to practise the language: a trip to Spain during the civil war was clearly not an option! When my father arrived in Britain he too visited the Basque children's Oxfordshire sanctuary, and that's how my parents met. Many of the 55,000 liquidated by leftist partisans were re-buried when the civil war had ended, some being given elaborate funerals. They were unlucky victims of mob violence. But on Franco's side, murder was an instrument of official policy. He boasted that he wanted to conquer Spain "centimetre by centimetre", in order to eliminate all those who did not support his coup. The killings continued into the 1950s, long after he had won the civil war. The dead on the losing side haven't been given funerals. They have been ignored. They lie still where they fell, in valleys, in fields, in national parks. You may, unwittingly, have stepped across their bones, as I must have done, while enjoying the Spanish scenery. So I begin to realise that forgetfulness has been achieved at the cost of fairness. If your father had died fighting for Franco, even if you had no identified grave to visit, you could pay respects at the Valley of the Fallen, that giant cross and basilica forged from the Guadarrama mountains near Madrid. The monument, which doubles as Franco's mausoleum, was built with slave labour by prisoners from the defeated side, so can hardly be regarded as a national memorial to all who died. I am also now beginning to see that the issue of historic memory is not really about exhumation at all. I have some experience of exhumation because of work I have done with the former Yugoslavia. There, because the conflict is relatively recent, returning human remains to families for burial can help the process of healing and reconciliation. But after a period of time - I feel - the clamour to open old graves merely prolongs the agony and postpones the moment when people can move on. In Spain's case the horrors are now so long ago that exhumation seems pointless in all but exceptional cases. Even those who think they know where a father's body lies could easily be mistaken. For that matter, Lorca may not lie where people believe. Truly, I hope they do not find him. Yet Lorca and a few others are the most promising cases for identification. In most cases it would be impossible. There are no records. People were loaded onto lorries to be slain in distant killing fields, or they were pulverised by artillery as they raced for safety. So, it is clear to me that exhumation could be appropriate only in a tiny minority of cases. Spain has no need to be put through the trauma of turning up huge numbers of corpses, which would inevitably lead to renewed accusations and bitterness. However, that is not the end of the argument. If digging up bodies is generally not the answer, should not at least the places where they lie be recognised, even sanctified in some way? Shouldn't tourists know that the pretty hillsides that they photograph are also the last resting place of men, women and boys executed during Franco's reign of terror? Is there not a duty to enable children and grandchildren to visit grave sites that are recognised, delineated and protected, and to let them read with pride the names of the dead carved into a monument? As an outsider in Spain I must be careful about proposing glib solutions. Spaniards that I trust are really anxious that this issue will dissolve the glue that feebly holds the country together. There are divisions of ideology, wealth, class, religion, ethnicity and language that were present long before the civil war and that have not disappeared since. But that said, I now feel that forgetfulness is no longer enough. It had its moment, when Spain's democracy was still in the incubator. Eventually there comes a time when the institutions of a constitutional state must be robust enough to face the truths of history. The process needs political leadership, and maybe that is lacking. For now, the right feels that it is suffering a new injustice. The issue of historic memory is being used irresponsibly, they say, as a political weapon. It is probably too much to ask, but Spain needs politicians and public on either side to accept that blame for past atrocities is widely spread. Horrendous acts of barbarism were committed. The time to investigate and to punish has gone. But the time quietly to respect the dead has come. Spain's history is a deeply painful memory for many families. But a mature democracy must be strong enough to acknowledge its past. That, I feel, is the sort of Spain that my father hoped for.
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