51 Spain
51.1 Civil War Reconciliation
Jones
José Celda – Pepe to his friends – was shot dead against a wall in the small Valencian town of Paterna at five in the afternoon on 14 September 1940. The 45-year-old farmer, whose body was buried in a mass grave, was one of the thousands of represaliados, or victims of reprisals, who were murdered by the Franco regime well after the end of the civil war in April 1939.
El abismo del olvido, a collaboration between the graphic artist Paco Roca and the journalist Rodrigo Terrasa, examines the atrocities and the generational agonies they inflicted, and continue to inflict, on the families of the dead.
As well as telling Celda’s story, the comic chronicles the tireless and solitary struggle that his daughter Pepica waged to fulfil her mother’s wishes for his bones to be found and reinterred with hers.
Pepica Celda, who was eight when her father was murdered, began her quest after the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero introduced its landmark 2007 historical memory law that was intended to bring a measure of justice and comfort to Franco’s victims. She made headlines a few years later for becoming the last person in Spain to secure a government subsidy for her search before the conservative People’s party (PP) took power in 2011 and ended the funding.
History, however, has taught them not to expect too much. “Take the place in Paterna where they shot José Celda and 2,000 other people,” Terrasa said. “There’s no plaque or memorial at all like you’d find in any other civilised European country. If you go there now, you might find a bunch of now-rotten republican wreaths that were left by a memorial association, but the rest is rubbish and bottles.”
The book ends with a picture of that refuse-strewn mass murder scene, and with a rhetorical question: “You can tell a lot about a society from the way it buries its dead. What would they say about ours?”