The voice of the vanquished

For the 40 years of its existence, prisoners on death row, orphans, widows, exiles, the starving and the desperate all wrote thousands of letters to La Pirenaica, the radio station that provided the sole voice for those on the losing side of the Civil War. Many of the messages were lost, intercepted or for some other reason never reached the clandestine station, which was founded in Moscow in 1941. But more than 15,500, from around 33 countries, ended up at the Spanish Communist Party’s Historical Archive (AHPCE).

Many passed by them without realizing their value. “Nobody pays it much attention, but you might be interested in seeing this,” the archivist told writer Rosario Fontova, who had come to the AHPCE in search of something else entirely: letters written by inmates of Barcelona’s Modelo jail for a book about the prison.

“I realized straight away that they were valuable,” she recalls. “Writing to La Pirenaica was for many years the only form of anti-Francoist militancy available to two generations of Spaniards, for whom everything was closed off – access to education, work… – simply because they were reds.”

Fontova called Armand Balsebre, professor of communication at Barcelona Autónoma University, and together, working every day over five months, they took 38,000 photographs of the letters.

“Writing to La Pirenaica was for many years the only form of anti-Francoist militancy available to Spaniards”

They have now brought together their findings in a book, Las cartas de la Pirenaica. Memoria del antifranquismo (or, La Pirenaica letters: memories of anti-Francoism), a project made possible with some of the last funds awarded through Spain’s historical memory law, which the Rajoy government has all but revoked, having withdrawn the funding that made it possible.

“In these pages to La Pirenaica, the victims spoke about what, out of fear, they didn’t tell their own children,” Balsabre explains. The 15,500 letters put the Francoist genocide, among other subjects, on the record for the first time. Below is a selection of those letters, in which the vanquished share their pain, fear, frustration and desire for freedom.

“The world would shudder.” On January 24, 1964, a “Catholic worker from Zumárraga” in Gipuzkoa sent a particularly striking letter – both because of what it said and of what it predicted. It is an open letter addressed to the abbot at the Valley of the Fallen, Justo Pérez de Urbel, former religious advisor to the woman’s section of the Falange, in which he anticipates the movement by the grandchildren of those who had been shot to recover the remains of their relatives that emerged in 2000, 36 years after he wrote his lines. “I have seen how they killed men and women who did not correspond to the model that you formed on roads, mountains and in doorways,” he writes. “I have family members buried on the slopes of a mountain. They shot them and left them in the sun […]. I kiss that ground that covers the remains of my father and 11 more men and I pray for all those who, as they did, refused them even a place in a cemetery. If the day comes when statistics are drawn up of these crimes and how they were committed, the world would shudder. It will traverse every province and ask widows where their husbands are buried; and orphans where their fathers are buried, and fathers, their sons.”

“They continued shooting in cold blood for two years.” Many La Pirenaica listeners’ letters pointed out the locations of the graves into which their family members had been thrown. In 1963, one man, who signed his letter “Malagueño 41,” wrote from France: “They made 70 men kneel down, unjustly shot them against the walls of the San Rafael cemetery […] and continued shooting in cold blood and without trial for two years, among them minors. Their one crime was being loyal to the Republic.” The remains of almost 3,000 people have been found in the San Rafael cemetery in Málaga, the largest collection of mass graves in Spain.

“I never seen anything but fear in my home.” “For almost as long as I can remember, I have never seen in my home anything but fear that the Civil Guard might come at any moment,” wrote one Asturian refugee living in Germany. His father was let out of prison at the age of 65, but left deaf as a result of the beatings he suffered. “He didn’t know us, neither did we know him. I don’t want my children to grow up with the terror that my mother felt.”

“I am writing with gloves on.” Many listeners wrote about the fear they felt at putting pen to paper. “I ask you to forgive my handwriting, done with the aim of avoiding possible identification through my identity card [which carries a fingerprint]. Even though they would have to compare it with every identity card in Spain, I believe them capable of everything. And I am writing with gloves on,” explained X-J-1 from Barcelona. Some letters were written in five different types of handwriting and others in invisible ink.

“Forgive my grammar.” “When I was 11, I stopped going to school,” wrote N. R. P. in 1963 in a letter riddled with errors. “Forgive my grammar,” the writer adds in a postscript. Many of the letters to La Pirenaica were full of mistakes, showing that many of its listeners had hardly been able to attend school as a result of the Civil War. The broadcaster also carried out educational work and popularized, among others, the then-banned poetry of Miguel Hernández and Federico García Lorca.