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“Immediately, I am struck by the memory of my maternal great-grandfather, Victoriano López García, a native of Guadamur (Toledo), a good and simple person, a republican without exaltation or violence, who died in Ocaña prison, we believe that in 1941,” this writing continued. , 20 years ago. “He had the misfortune of raising up a family that others were responsible for annihilating: his son Paulino was executed in Toledo in 1941, and it is not known where he was buried; His son Gregorio suffered the same fate in the same city a year before, and is still missing; His son Esteban worked as a political prisoner in the construction of the Valley of the Fallen; Her daughter Remedios went into exile in France and managed to reunite with her husband, who had experienced several concentration camps in the neighboring country; Finally, his son Juan, my grandfather, was sentenced to death until 1946, the date on which he left prison, as did his wife, who raised the last of my uncles there. “With all that,” the letter to the director concluded, “I learned very well at home the meaning of the word ‘Spain’, and until I arrived at school I did not find out what the word ‘resentment’ meant. ‘. “I don’t know how to explain it well, but I think that today, at least today, there is a little more justice.”
A few days ago, in one of its usual searches on Google in the hope of finding threads that lead to the families of the victims of Franco’s repression in the monastery of Celanova (Ourense), converted into a prison during the war, the Memory Committee History of the region came across this letter. But a lapse in digitizing the text—from times when paper still reigned in the press—had made a document dated in Toledo that, in reality, had a signature, anonymous. The Committee asked the newspaper in Galicia for help. The message spread through several departments and in the newspaper archive, in the Madrid editorial office, the author’s name finally appeared: Victoriano López García’s great-grandson was Luis Miguel Soto López.
The easiest thing was to try calling the Guadamur City Council, with 1,802 residents. He could have lost track of the family and it didn’t work, but it worked. A municipal secretary was added to the chain of good will as the last link, and in a few hours the owner of those heartfelt lines, a professor in Toledo, telephoned the newspaper, still not knowing why.
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“Well yes… but… Was it that long ago?”
―In the letter he said that they believe that his great-grandfather died in Ocaña.
“It’s something we assume.”
-Well, the Historical Memory Committee of the Celanova Region has found some documents and believes that they are from Victoriano, and if so, his great-grandfather died in Galicia, in prison, of “natural death” shortly after arriving. The name, the place of origin, the dates coincide. There is a lot of information that can help us know if it is him… such as that he was a day laborer, 76 years old, widowed, father of seven children… We are going to send it to you.
“I felt cold,” Miguel admitted, still not knowing what to say. A few hours later, with the PDFs of the yellowed papers in his email, Victoriano López’s great-grandson excitedly confirmed the relationship. His grandfather had been buried since December 16, 1941 in the San Breixo cemetery in Celanova, the same place where some 90 victims of Franco’s repression were buried without identifying headstones. He had been transferred from Toledo only a month and a half before, and according to the record, the cause of his death, so far from his family, on the afternoon of the 15th in the prison infirmary, was “senescence.” . More than 82 years have passed until the family has been notified of that death.
“I know that, to discover the truth, I have to read between the lines,” Miguel Soto now writes. When the papers say “reduced to prison on March 28, 1939,” in reality “it means that, hours after Franco’s troops entered the town,” located on the very border of the two Spain in struggle, “after three years of war, they grabbed an elderly widower and sent him from prison to prison until they left him to die in an infirmary.” “That they imposed a sentence of 12 years and one day of minor confinement”—for a “crime of aiding the rebellion,” as stated in the file recently found by the Celanova Committee in the Provincial Historical Archive of Ourense—“he wants to say that there was nothing against him, but he was where he didn’t have to be,” reflects Victoriano’s great-grandson.
“Until today I only had his signature from my great-grandfather and the memories transmitted by my mother,” concludes Miguel Soto, who explains that she always “used to avoid” the “topic” of the Civil War, “not so much out of fear but out of pain.” . Now, due to the file initiated in Toledo and that he traveled to Celanova to stay when Victoriano was transferred at the end of ’41, “I also have his fingerprint on an infamous document, a date and a piece of land to take flowers to.” “I am somewhat relieved that [el Comité] He told me that he made the journey with two prisoners also from the town, so they could have given themselves some consolation those days, I don’t know,” Miguel Soto concludes. Indeed, the documentation has allowed the memorialist group to verify that Magdaleno and Mariano Sánchez, Guadameño residents who survived that prison, also traveled during the transfer from Toledo (in the premises of the monastery founded by San Rosendo in the 9th century and the part that the institute occupies today). ) where their daily ration was increasingly reduced.
The name of Victoriano was, after that of Telesforo García Garrido, another Toledo native (from Alcañizo) who also died in the infirmary of the Celanova chain on September 7, 1941, the last one incorporated by the Committee to a list (which starts from another previous one by researcher Domingos Rodríguez Teijeiro) which today has 88 victims of repression in the region. When we heard about them, the iron piece with the names that they had ordered to be placed in the cemetery (as soon as the Government completes the pending procedure to declare it a Place of Memory) was already finished, but “there was room for them,” he explains. a member of the collective. Of all these victims, the Committee, for now, has only managed to locate a dozen families.
“One sweater, two shirts, three underwear”
Now there is hope that the news of the discovery of Victoriano’s family will also lead to Telesforo García’s family being located. Labrador, married to Sinforosa Polo and father of a three-year-old child when he entered the Burgos Prison on February 28, 1940, sentenced to 30 years. This Toledo native died 19 months later in the same infirmary as Victoriano, but at only 27 years of age. The doctor certified “septic endocarditis” as the cause. According to his prison file, he left “a sweater, two pairs of socks, two shirts, three underwear, a pair of shoes, a pair of pants, a towel, two handkerchiefs and 25 pesetas.” His belongings were given to another prisoner, Tomás Ramírez Zorrilla, a resident of Aldeanueva de Barbarroya, about 30 kilometers from Alcañizo, who was released on parole four days after the death, so that he could return them to the widow. Telesforo had been called up on July 27, 1936, at the age of 22, and was part of the Fifth Regiment, according to military archives. It was the penultimate name rescued from oblivion by the Committee. The last one was Victoriano, who immediately found his family.
“Internal and external bleeding”
The names Victoriano and Telesforo appeared because the accounting of the burial work was preserved, but the graves are not located, in a cemetery like that of San Breixo, which has changed a lot since then with the construction of rows of niches. The Committee believes that there would be more basis to work from if the parish of San Rosendo de Celanova provided its burial record book. Theoretically, in the cemetery there are bones of republicans from Castilla y León, Castilla-La Mancha, Madrid, Andalusia, Extremadura, Aragón, Asturias and different Galician municipalities. At the end of 2022, a specific area was excavated to recover the remains of seven prisoners, almost all Asturian, who had been intercepted, like many others, when they were trying to escape to France on boats when the Asturian front fell in October 1937. They ended up being shot in Celanova in 1939 by members of the Moroccan Falange Flag, temporarily in charge of the prison, and before their burial the doctor certified “internal and external hemorrhage” for all of them.
That intervention in the grave—led by several experts in Democratic Memory such as the historian Lourenzo Fernández Prieto, professor at the University of Santiago, and the forensic anthropologist from the Institute of Legal Medicine of Galicia Fernando Serrulla—was part of the Quadrennial Plan for Graves of the Government. In addition to extracting DNA from the bones and delivering the remains of their ancestors to two families who claimed it, it served to verify that there were more unknown burial sites around them and gave rise to a book (Historical investigation, exhumation and analysis of the remains of the Celanova grave) published by the Ministry of Democratic Memory.
Within the same plan, the team appointed by the steamer ‘Dómine’). Serrulla explains that it was about “locating the grave,” not about undertaking the exhumations. They found bones, a skull with autopsy marks, a military boot and a Mauser rifle sheath from the Civil War. But, once again, the work comes up against a profound renovation of the cemetery and the construction of niche buildings in the 60s where it is believed, due to “many data”, that the remains may be located. The forensic anthropologist has taken several recovered bones to his laboratory at the Verín Hospital (Ourense), in which he hopes to find signs of violence. “We have little doubt,” he comments, that it is there, “under the niches,” “where the grave” of those embarked is.
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