The Spanish Civil War (1936 - 1939)

That’s the horror of civil wars, for example my father was saved from being shot to death, he was going to be killed at ‘la Rebassada’ in the mountains of ‘Collcerola’ which is where they took people to be put to death by the firing squad. At the moment he was taken, my family called the midwife – you know what a midwife is, right? The woman who helps give birth. An she, who has a fully fledged [?] woman, went down to the neighborhood where they took my father, the cheap houses of Horta, and said to them: “If you kill Ferran” that’s my father’s name “your wives will give birth alone.” And she saved his life, because they had already taking him. My point is, just my family and look at how many things happened.

In the civil war, there’s an important phenomenon that are the international brigades. Why does this happen? The international brigade has a double reason. It’s that ‘Proletarians of the world join’, help us fight against fascism. People from the United States, from Cuba, from Germany, from England, from very different countries come here to give support to the republic. One of the reasons is ideologic. They see that Franco’s movement is in line with fascism and Nazism, and that a radical right-wing movement needs to be confronted, in that sense they are a bit visionary. There’s a part of adventurers. There’s also the strong reaction when the allies declare that they won’t intervene in the Spanish civil war. People say, “if our countries won’t intervene, we will go there”. Here comes fantastic people like George Orwell who, besides having written 1984, writes a fantastic book that not many know called “Homage to Catalonia”, and it’s his experience there. Here also comes Ernest Hemmingway to fire some bullets. Here comes too a character as sinister and strange as a Cuban named Rolando Masferrer, who ends up being a mobster that is murdered in Miami with a bomb. Many kind of people come, but the great majority, besides some adventure seekers, are people who believe in a universal cause of justice and equality and think that we are fooling ourselves if we think that the fascist and Nazi issue is a Spanish thing. They see, I think with great foresight, that this is an international issue and needs to be faced. Many of them, of these international brigades, come also from Yugoslavia, Russia, many countries. There are still association of this kind. For example, regarding the Lincoln column, I think that the archive is in New York. Some of them generate, it’s thousands of people who come here to the civil war. Some of them are writers that, maybe aren’t in the front line as much as Orwell and Hemmingway, but they leave written some very memorable pages about the war. Many young fighters, acknowledged photographers. Bobby Cappa runs around here taking photographs too. There’s an extraordinary mixture with a common element, a great conviction that there’s an universal fight against fascism and there’s also the ideologic feeling of universal fraternity. It’s an interesting phenomenon, there’s much written about the international brigades. The problem is that, many of them weren’t military, they didn’t know how to fight. They had great losses, it’s cannon fodder that goes to the front line without the needed preparation. But it was an important support, if you want even real besides the symbolic, to the cause of the republic.

When the war was over, my father was on the losing side. My father was from the republican army, he was a volunteer in the republican army when he was 16 or 17. When the war was over they go to France. The defeated army leaves to France. Then there they are given the choice of staying in France or going back to Spain. If they go back to Spain, since they were the losing army, they were in concentration camps. My father was taken from the French border in a ‘borreguero’ train to Galicia. In ‘La Guardia’ [lit. The Guard], it was a concentration camp. He was there for a time until they were able to prove that he had committed no violent crimes. Then he was fred to go back with my grandmother, who back then was alone. But yeah, many ended up in concentration camps.

One of the anecdotes I can tell you about because it happened to my family is during one of the Italian bombings over Barcelona in 1938, they intended to bomb the electricity plant which is in Paral·lel, where the three chimneys are, which are there still They didn’t touch them, luckily, but on the other hand, they reached a part of the population and their houses… A tram which ran at that moment in Paral·lel, in which my wife’s father was, a siren started to ring in the tram, everyone ran out of it towards somewhere to protect themselves from the bombing but the driver, who was driving the tram, told my future father-in-law ‘do not move, lay down the floor as I do’ They both laid down the floor and the bombing reached them but they didn’t die Everyone else from the tram… died It hurted his eye, and he lost it, and his leg was affected too, they had to open it in half… but they were the only two who saved their lifes Because of that, my future mother-in-law, who at that time was carrying twins was told ‘your husband has been attacked in a bombing’ and she went to all the hospitals looking for him Thinking he was dead he had a seven months premature birth because of… the bombing That is, in a way, this specific bombing affected to my wife, Maria Rius, a Catalan illustrator who is very well-known She has a lot of published books, and well, let’s hope she can enjoy that all her life. 

My mom was very young, My mother was born in December,1936. In 1938, one of the worst bombings took place. My grandmother lived in la Sagrera back then. Dying from exhaustion, she said: “Look, if they have to kill us, let them kill us. I’m done.” Two things happened: a bomb fell near their house and a window passed by my mother’s face. They didn’t shelter, and that’s what saved their lives. That day, a lot of people went to a shelter that wasn’t ready. The stairs were made of mud. They were struck by a flood and the stairs melted. People tried to escape, but they all drowned. My father told me that every now and then, the Italian air force bombed the city. Because of this, his neighbor installed a machine gun and knocked down some Italian’s airplanes. I don’t buy it/I don’t believe a word. My father shelter himself underground, in Mercat Nou metro station. It was near their place. The bombings were so common that it came to a point were they didn’t know whether the air force was done or just waiting for reinforcements. It was horrible. I can talk about the post-war. My father lived next to Sants’ train station. He told me how optimistic people were. They’d see the volunteers that went to Aragó’s front, off.(or “they’d say goodbye to the volunteers that went to Aragó’s front”??)My father told me how stinky the atmosphere was(or “how funny they smelled”?) because of the gangrened flesh. The wounded persons were laying on the floor. He [my father] always compares this scene with one from Gone with the Wind. You can’t imagine how many people committed suicide once the War was over. Everytime they [my grandfather and my father] saw someone folding his blazer next to the railways… They would rush out as fast as they could to stop the person. They [the victims] would usually put their heads on the railways, take off their ties and well, you know the rest. There are more histories, but it’s better not to tell them.

The bombing of Barcelona during the war wasn’t talked about often. My parents didn’t talk much about it because they were conservatives. They did hide, but during Franco’s regime you didn’t talk neither about the bombing of Barcelona by Mussolini and the Italians nor about the bombing of Guernica by the Germans and the Nazis. It wasn’t talked about much, but you find out. The moment they bombed here in Barcelona, there were many people who wanted to escape by ship, they later went towards Valencia and took the chance to bomb. The first experiment was Guernica, in the Basque country. It was the first bombing of a civilian population by the military air force, they killed everyone. Here they did a bit that and people got really scared. But here they already had some refuges ready, that can be visited, and people would hide there. It was quite intense, yeah.