The River Ebro was where the Spanish republic's fate was to be sealed.
July 28th 1938.
In the Ebro valley, the republic, now close to desperation,
launched its greatest offensive.
Much of the republican army was thrown into the battle.
A fight not just for ground, but supremely for time.
Juan Negrín, the prime minister, knew that
European war against Hitler was now close
If only the republic could hang on,
it might be rescued by the anti-fascist allies in that war.
The Ebro was the most costly battle of the civil war,
but for the republicans it came at the end of two years of
bitter, unsuccessful fighting.
Two years which had transformed republican hopes
into memories of failure.
Now failure was behind them.
The soldiers of the republic who crossed the river that day
were excited to be on the offensive again.
This was great, that we were crossing the Ebro
and going to the other side to have a go at them,
and push them back, and obviously we were hoping to
chase them altogether, on that front anyway.
This optimism defied the experience of two years of defeat.
Once again the popular army was attempting to match
the enemy in conventional warfare, which would lead to
a battle of attrition in which, the republic stood no chance.
The attack across the Ebro was probably doomed
... before it began.
The nationalists now held over two thirds of Spain.
They had split the republican zone into two.
Valencia was under threat. The all-out offensive
across the Ebro was meant to ward off this danger.
The idea came largely from Juan Negrín,
the enigmatic prime minister of the republic,
a right-wing socialist and a distinguished professor of medicine.
Negrín mirrored many of the contradictions of the republic.
He believed that the only way to fight the war
was to halt the revolution, and bring the army
under disciplined, central control,
with himself in command.
In this Negrín was closely supported by the communists
They were tough ... they took orders ultimately from Moscow.
Their vision of democracy was a world away from Negrín's
Yet he was committed to working with the communists
not least because the republic needed Soviet aid.
Negrín was a subtle, unreadable person.
No-one knew his real mind.
At the same moment that he was secretly initiating
peace feelers to Franco, he was also organising
the supreme offensive of the war.
At first the nationalists were taken by surprise.
The republican thrust drove them back in hasty retreat.
The hills overlooking the small town of Gandesa,
25 miles inside nationalist territory,
now became the new front line.
General Franco rushed forward reinforcements
pulled out of other battlefronts.
In huge prolonged battles, like this,
Franco's army had the advantage.
It was more mobile, and in the nationalist army,
orders were more efficiently communicated.
It benefited from German and Italian aid,
while the republic's foreign aid had diminished
with the renewed closure of the French border.
Determined not to yield another yard of ground,
Franco took personal command.
The Ebro attack was halted, and turned into
four months of slogging, static battle.
The largest and most savage conflict of the whole war.
Hill 666 was one of the republic's most advanced positions.
It became a focus of nationalist counter attacks.
Bill Bailey and other international brigaders were helping
Spanish republican troops to defend the hill.
There was one case where we prayed,
literally prayed, for darkness to come,
so we could at least get up and stretch our legs ... move around.
And the bastards when nighttime came
they threw more shells at us.
Then it was a question of watching blazing rockets
wasting in air as they would hit the mountainside
and throw tons of rock at you.
It wasn't so much the artillery hitting you, it was
thousands of splinters of rock, splashing all over the place.
I have to say that it was one of my most bitter experiences,
and I'll speak truthfully and say that there were many times
when I figured I would never get off this rock.
In the end, the republican troops were forced off Hill 666,
leaving its slopes littered with their dead.
Now began the retreat.
A retreat which was only to end, with the end of the war.
Enrique Lister was a republican core commander
at the Battle of the Ebro.
We found ourselves in a situation
where we couldn't give up any of our positions.
So it was a battle of attrition in which we were losing our best troops,
but we had no choice.
By now, there was no choice.
Once again the popular army had attempted to match the enemy
in regular combat ... and failed.
Just at it had at Brunete, Belchite, Teruel,
the popular army found it could not defeat the enemy
in conventional fighting for defended positions.
The republic had put down the revolution behind its own lines.
This meant the government also avoided revolutionary military tactics.
Guerrilla war, invented in Spain as a people's answer to regular armies,
was never seriously attempted in the civil war.
As it had done before, the popular army fought with courage.
But once again, in a battle of attrition
it could not prevail against the superior weight
and professionalism of the nationalists.
Once again, the republican forces were hammered into retreat.
Behind them, they left vast quantities of precious equipment.
Failure in battle hardened Negrín's resolve to save the republic.
One strategy was negotiation.
The previous May he had published a moderate
13 point declaration for victory.
In reality, a hint that the war could be ended by mediation.
Horrified by the sum of death and destruction,
Negrín nonetheless remained determined that
a democratic Spain should emerge from the ruins.
His second strategy, pursued the same democratic aims.
If peace could not be negotiated,
he would fight on in the hope that a greater war
between democracy and fascism would explode in Europe.
A war which would engulf Spain's own conflict.
But Franco would have no compromise.
Total victory was within reach.
He wanted nothing less.
It was an ugly paradox for Negrín, that as he saw it,
only Hitler, Franco's ally, could save him.
For it was Germany's continued expansionism,
which he hoped would touch off war in Europe.
Then Negrín hoped that Britain and France would welcome
the Spanish republic as an ally.
In 1936, Hitler had occupied the Rhineland with troops.
In March 1938, the Germans marched into Austria.
Now in September 1938, it was Czechoslovakia's turn.
At Munich, the statesmen of Britain and France
met Hitler and Mussolini to see if the peace could be saved.
For the British and French governments,
non-intervention in Spain had been one way
of trying to postpone a conflict with Hitler.
In spite of the blatant foreign aid to both sides in the civil war
they were still clinging to this policy.
Now came the news of the democracies pact with Hitler.
Once again the western democracies had chosen
the path of appeasement.
While Neville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister,
told cheering Londoners that it was "peace in our time",
Negrín faced the truth. Time was against him.
When the Second World War came, it was to be too late
to save the Spanish republic.
Munich also lost the republic its only effective ally ... Stalin.
The Soviet leaders decided to change their whole strategy.
Munich destroyed Stalin's policy of building an anti-fascist alliance.
in which the western democracies would stand together with Russia
to block the expansion of Germany and Italy.
Now Stalin saw himself isolated.
To gain time, he was eventually to sign
the Nazi-Soviet pact with Hitler.
Now, as his anti-fascist alliance plan collapsed,
Stalin's support for the Spanish republic was abandoned.
Hitler must not be provoked
Soviet aid to Spain dwindled.
Hitler's policy towards Spain changed too,
but in the opposite direction.
Realizing nothing he did there would cause Britain and France to go to war,
he dramatically increased his aid,
now keen to end the Spanish war as quickly as possible.
There was a huge increase in German military aid to the nationalists.
Franco had sent an urgent request for more weapons
to clinch the Battle of the Ebro.
In return, he agreed to grant Germany
generous mining concessions in Spain,
and he promised to pay the costs of the German Condor Legion.
But Mussolini decided to reduce his aid to Franco.
He accepted the proposal of the non-intervention committee.
to withdraw foreign volunteers fighting in the civil war
10,000 Italians, nearly half the total in Spain,
now embarked for home.
Those who stayed continued fighting
with the nationalist army at the Ebro.
Negrín also agreed that the foreign volunteers
on the republican side should be withdrawn.
He was hoping that non-intervention by foreign powers
might at last become a reality.
The last grim stages of the Battle of the Ebro
were still being fought, when on October 29th,
the international brigaders took their farewell.
The people of Barcelona showed their gratitude
to these survivors of the 40,000 foreigners
who had left their homes to fight for the Spanish republic.
La Pasionaria spoke proudly to the crowds.
"These men reached our country as crusaders for freedom.
"They gave up everything, their country, home and fortune,
"fathers, mothers, wives, brothers, sisters and children.
"And they came and told us: 'We are here'
"'Your cause, Spain's cause, is ours.
"'It is the cause of all advanced and progressive mankind'."
The departure of foreigners hardly affected
the republic's fighting strength.
They had mattered in the first days through their discipline,
and their message of solidarity,
but they had not been militarily decisive.
By now the brigades were mostly manned by Spaniards.
Most volunteers went home,
only brigaders from fascist countries had no home to go to.
But the war went on.
By mid November, Franco had reconquered
the ground he had lost to the republic in the first two days
of the Ebro offensive.
Just before Christmas 1938,
the nationalists crossed the Ebro into Catalonia
The fresh aid from Germany had arrived
and was proving decisive.
The nationalist advance was now meeting little resistance.
By mid-January 1939, Tarragona had fallen.
By the end of January, Franco was nearing Barcelona.
The only party utterly united
in determination to fight on were the communists.
They used much needed warplanes to shower leaflets on Barcelona
urging the population to continue the struggle.
But Negrín was playing a double game.
Outwardly he went along with the communists ... he had little choice.
In secret he pursued his search for a negotiated peace.
But the whole political fabric of the republic
was beginning to fall apart around Negrín.
Many resented his apparent sympathy with the hard communist line.
The anarchist, whose dreams of revolution were dead,
were still fighting, but they were fighting
for a republic they didn't believe in.
So were the Catalan nationalists, whose treasured autonomy,
had been eroded by the government's centralist line.
The republic was no longer what it had been.
The power of the Catalan government had been wiped out by Negrín,
to such an extent, that at one point, I began to ask myself
if I was doing the right thing to continue taking part in the fighting at all.
While the communists were trying to boast of public morale,
others used their most brutal means to destroy it.
For months now, Barcelona had been the target of bombing raids.
The previous March, Italian bombers had battered the city
in waves that kept coming for 48 hours.
The port and the city centre had been particularly badly damaged.
The air attacks had continued ever since,
but those March raids stayed in Barcelona's memory
as the most terrifying.
If I tell you that more than half of Barcelona
fled to shelter in the hills and woods around Barcelona,
you'll understand what the bombings were like.
I was assigned to the casualty post in the Carrer de Sepúlveda,
and whenever there was a raid, which was about every three hours,
we were told where to go to pick up those not seriously wounded.
Sometimes, while we were doing this, we were caught
by the next bombing, so we had to start all over again.
A lot of people from the Red Cross, plus a lot of those whose cars
had been commandeered for this, were killed in those attacks.
The bombing of Barcelona came after the air-raids on
Madrid, Durango, and Guernica.
But the bombing of Barcelona went on for months.
Aimed at cowing the civilian population
by its destructive power, it generated a sullen hatred.
Since the republican zone had been cut in two,
there were fewer refugees coming into Barcelona.
Those who did traveled on north as fast as possible.
But they had all told the same story.
A story of what took place when the nationalists had
captured and occupied their villages and towns.
A story of death and persecution.
The closer the nationalists got to Barcelona,
the more these stories terrified the population.
By January 24th, the nationalists were less than 5 miles away.
In Barcelona, people realised that all was lost,
in spite some talk of setting up a line of resistance.
No one believed it because they really just wanted the whole thing to be over.
You'd hear people say: "It doesn't matter how it ends,
"only let it end soon."
I heard that quite often in my neighbourhood.
"I doesn't matter how it ends, only let it end soon."
The Catalans joined the refugee torrent.
Many struggled up the high mountain passes of the Pyrenees.
France meant safety.
They traveled by day and night.
Barcelona, on the morning of January 26th.
From all sides the nationalist forces moved in.
The tanks rumbled down the Diagonal.
The infantry marched down the slopes above the city.
A few communists tried to build barricades.
They soon gave up.
The fascist soldiers were already coming down the hillside.
It was a very sunny day in Barcelona.
One of those very radiant days, and the bayonets of their rifles
glinted menacingly in the sunlight.
That vision was terrifying, but the truth is they didn't scare us.
But we knew we had to run.
We ran and ran as fast as we could.
We left the cobblestones by the side of the tramlines.
Of those who stayed, many now welcomed
the nationalist columns led by General Yagüe.
For them it was a joyous moment, ... the hour of rescue.
The end of a revolutionary nightmare.
Free to practice their religion openly for the first time in nearly three years,
they praised God and Franco for victory.
Some of the Catalan middle class were much less certain.
Long tired of the war, they must now have feared the future.
Often liberals, they had no sympathy for Franco's regime
and knew very well, he had none for Catalan autonomy.
And the prospect was bleak for communists, anarchists
and socialists, still in Barcelona.
The revenge killings were about to begin.
Near the French frontier at the fortress of Figueras,
Negrín called a secret meeting of the Cortes.
Held at night in the subterranean vaults,
this was the last session of the republican Cortes on Spanish soil.
One of the few foreigners present
was the British journalist, Willie Forrest.
Negrín got up first to speak,
and started by reading from a prepared text.
But as he proceeded he threw his script aside,
and started walking up and down,
and fire came into his voice.
Negrín announced that the 13 points of
the governments program were being cut to 3.
It was the last point, which now mattered most.
Franco must give a cast-iron guarantee
that after the war, there would be no reprisals
by the victors against the vanquished.
The victors were now sweeping northwards towards the French border.
One week after Negrín left Figueras, they took the town.
They were a mere 20 miles away from the frontier.
For the republicans, it was no longer retreat ... but flight.
Negrín and his ministers left Spain.
After them poured the remnants of the republican army in Catalonia,
packed together with half a million refugees.
5,000 human beings crossed the border every hour.
On the other side lay only the misery, hunger and overcrowding
of French internment camps.
The nationalists reached the last border post ... and closed it.
Catalonia had fallen.
For these people, the war was over.
But Madrid and more than a quarter of Spain was still republican.
Negrín was still prime minister.
He knew he must go back to Spain to save
what could be saved by war or compromise.
But Franco had no intention of accepting
Negrín's latest peace initiative.
He wanted only unconditional surrender.
March 1939.
Moroccan tribesmen, the Moors, were among the nationalist troops
who had been besieging Madrid for over two years.
The Moorish trenches had become almost a North African village.
To the east they could see the rooftops of Madrid.
In the city itself, nationalist supporters
had for 2½ years been trying to live unnoticed.
Enrique Miret Magdalena had taken refuge
in the Paraguayan embassy.
During those two and a bit years we always spoke in whispers
and kept the blinds drawn so nobody would know how many people
were inside the one flat. There were between 50 and 60 of us.
For the Madrid population, republicans and secret nationalists alike,
hunger was now the worst torment.
Even vegetable roots became a precious form of food.
People stood all day in queues ready to buy anything,
which arrived in the denuded shops.
Hunger, and sheer exhaustion of wartime life,
were sapping the will to fight on.
Negrín, the prime minister, had flown back to Spain.
Surrounding himself by communists, whom he promoted
to a series of vital military commands.
he established himself near Alicante.
In what was left of the republic, there were still four armies
adding up to half a million men.
The army commander in Madrid, Colonel Casado,
believed that Negrín's reliance on the communists
was a major stumbling block to winning peace concessions.
He had put out his own peace feelers to the nationalists.
Now to back this he launched, what was in effect,
a coup d'état in Madrid.
Negrín and his colleagues were at dinner near Alicante
when they heard Casado attacking them over the radio.
Willie Forrest was there.
There was a telephone in the dining room and Negrín went over to it,
and asked to be put through to Casado.
He had to hang up for a minute and wait,
then the phone rang, Negrín went over,
... it was Casado on the line.
"What's going on", was the first words I heard Negrín say.
I couldn't hear, of course, Casado's replies.
but from what Negrín said afterwards, it was quite clear.
because what was being said was: "You've rebelled!"
"Against whom, may I ask?
"Against me!
"Then consider yourself relieved of your command".
And with that Negrín slammed down the telephone.
Turning to him ministers, he asked them to
follow him upstairs for another cabinet meeting.
It was to be a crucial night for prime minister Negrín.
A night that settled his fate, and the fate of the republic.
Clearly Negrín's political position was collapsing.
The communist leaders decided not to organise
resistance to the Casado coup.
Whether this reflected Stalin's current disinterest in Spain,
and whether this clinched Negrín's decision to flee,
remain open questions.
At three in the morning, Willie Forrest watched
as Negrín and his government filed out of their last meeting.
Well that, as I said, was the end.
We didn't need to be told of the government's decision to quit.
We saw the ministerial bags being packed.
We saw Señor ???, the police chief,
going through his dossiers and tearing up papers.
And we knew that Cisneros, the airforce chief,
had gone off in great haste to an airfield,
Monóvar, about 20 miles from where we were,
to organise a couple of planes for the government's escape.
As Negrín left Spain for the last time,
chaotic shooting broke out inside Madrid.
Casado's supporters fought communist units
who did not know, or couldn't believe, that their leaders
had decided not to resist the Casado coup.
Once again, the republic was tearing itself apart.
For two weeks, Casado attempted to negotiate an honourable peace.
His efforts were to prove as vain as Negrín's.
Franco broke off contact with him.
Casado now had no choice.
He ordered the republican armies to raise the white flag and surrender.
The nationalists in the end, never had to fight to capture Madrid.
Unopposed, they walked in.
I woke up and I heard shouts, and I thought somebody's gone mad.
Now we're going to be in real trouble, just when the war is about to finish.
Then I came out and I heard shouts. Viva España!, Viva España!
and I said: "What are you shouting for, you've all gone crazy".
They replied: "No, no, Madrid has been liberated.
"The war is over."
Then we all jumped from the balcony into the street.
I took my brother with me and we went out to see
what was happening in the streets.
I reckon that even some of those who'd taken part
in the events of 14th April 1931,
were now the ones who climbed onto lorries.
I think they were more or less the same people,
or at least, there were just as many of them
and they were equally enthusiastic.
As Franco's soldiers trudged into the streets of Madrid,
Falange supporters poured out of hiding.
Republicans, trying to escape from nationalist vengeance,
headed for the port of Alicante on the southeastern coast,
chosen as the main evacuation point.
On March 28th, as Madrid fell, this British ship left Alicante.
On board were some 500 republicans,
... mostly leading figures.
Left behind were about 20,000 refugees,
who were swarming into the harbour area,
hoping desperately for ships to rescue them.
For these three survivors, Narciso Julian, Eduardo de Guzman
and his sister in law, Encarnacion Bueno
what followed is an indelible memory.
We were looking out towards the horizon.
We could see a few lights.
Some people were saying they were ours,
that they were getting nearer.
This was the worst torture at the harbour.
The torment of hope, thinking you were going to be saved,
when there was no salvation possible.
I remember every single moment.
Each was more terrible than the one before.
Every minute that passed without the boats arriving
made me believe less and less in boats ... in anything.
My son was saying: "You'll see mum, we'll get away.
But when the hours passed, and no boats came near,
I stopped believing in anything.
By March 30th, Italian troops had occupied
the fortress overlooking the harbour.
The republicans, crowded along this quay,
... were at their mercy.
The last boats had gone.
Now there was no hope, ... only fear.
I was sitting there, my son next to me, we were talking.
We knew already that the boats were not coming.
Along came a man, about 40, strong, good looking.
A man who looked in really good health, ... he came quite close to me.
I didn't realise what was happening ... I heard a shot.
He had shot himself, and fallen down right there.
I totally lost my calm then. My son was saying:
"Don't be frightened mother, don't be scared".
You'll see a lot more of this here, but don't be frightened.
Of course I was scared stiff. I don't know what I thought.
Perhaps that they would bring out machine guns and finish us all off.
Nationalist troops moved into Alicante to reinforce the Italians.
The helpless masses in the harbour knew they would be
rounded up the following day.
For the anarchists amongst them,
one question remained to be settled in the last hours of liberty.
We spent the whole night discussing what we should do
from a revolutionary viewpoint without giving ourselves
any false illusions about escaping death.
But, what was the best thing for the cause we'd all defended.
Should we give ourselves up, or kill ourselves?
This was the last minute dilemma,
what we were debating that last night.
These were the two points of view.
Emile said, this was a comrade called Mario Emile,
He said: "I'm not sparing them any crimes.
"If they want me dead, they'll have to kill me."
Nobody on the quayside slept that night.
Through the darkness of March 31st,
this macabre debate was argued to its conclusion.
Many agreed with Guzman's friend to stay alive
and let the enemy take the ultimate guilt.
But others made suicide pacts.
Eduardo de Guzman recalls the last two to die.
After that last discussion when we were about to leave,
the took each other by the hand, and saying:
"This is our last protest against fascism",
they raised their pistols to each others heads and shot each other.
As we were leaving the port, somebody said:
"We'll soon be envying the dead".
And I thought: "No, we'd better start envying them now".
Few today remember, that Alicante port
was the place of the republic's last agony.
Nearly three years after the army insurrection, the war was over.
The guns fell silent.
The church bells began to ring.
Over the radio a nationalist announcer
delivers Franco's final war communique.
April 2nd 1939, the day after the war's official end,
... was Palm Sunday.
In Madrid, Generalissimo Franco went to lay a sword of victory
in the church of Santa Barbara.
It was the first of many triumphal occasions
in which Franco and Spain celebrated the nationalist victory.
What would Spain be like under Franco?
The fighting was over, but the so-called
national crusade had a long way to run.
Spain was to be transformed, but into an image of the past.
After the turmoil of the republic, the Spain of history
was to be resurrected, ruled once more by
the church, the oligarchy, the great landowners.
There was to be a fatherland, at once new, and ancient.
A nation united, obedient, purged of evil.
Franco decreed, retroactively,
that all who had opposed the nationalists would be answerable.
Even prewar political opponents were not to be spared.
He saw the main threat in the working class,
once triumphant, now prostrate.
Here the purge must be most harsh.
It began at once, among the new hoards of his captives.
Nobody suspected of republican sympathies was safe.
Concentration camps all over Spain were swamped
by hundreds of thousand of prisoners.
The captives from the harbour at Alicante were brought here,
to this barren place, which was then
the concentration camp of Albatera.
It is said that Franco personally ordered that
there should be no photographs of the camp.
When it had served its purpose, every trace of it was cleared away.
All that remains today is an old hut used by the guards,
and a path once trodden by 30,000 arriving prisoners.
But the camp can never be cleared from the memories
of those who survived Albatera.
The repression began right from the start.
We were never considered human beings.
That's the way it was under Franco.
We were always considered as things, never as human beings.
Albatera was not just an internment camp.
It was also a camp where people awaited selection for execution.
Through the gate, which used to stand here,
... the visitors arrived.
These were the moments of terror, for these visitors
were members of the Falange, who came to identify their enemies.
They were looking for people from their towns, or anyone else of note.
Anyone who had been a volunteer, fought in the republican army.
Or anyone who had been mayor or any other official
in any republican town in Spain.
And they picked these people out right there and then.
This one, this one, this one.
and without more ado just ticked them of.
They took them away to their respective villages.
Most of the time, these prisoners never reached their destination.
What usually happened was that we heard the shots from here,
and that was the end of it.
There were also executions within the camp.
The prisoners were forced to watch them.
I remember the first executions.
I'd been locked up in the punishment area.
There were three lads they shot.
They lined us up at machine gun point, and one of the lads, a commissar, said to everyone
"Keep calm comrades, don't make a move. They'll use it as an excuse to kill us all.
And they shot him right there in front of us.
Nobody knows how many of the 30,000
who went into Albatera perished,
by execution, or just callous neglect.
Most people know what the Nazi extermination camps were like.
They've seen films of them.
I think the Albatera camp was, in many ways,
like those extermination camps,
except it was less systematic.
Everything here was less organised.
In the concentration camps, persecution was still haphazard,
but soon the policy of systematic repression began.
The prison population increased by over 200,000 people
There were token trials, rapid sentences, executions.
The terror lasted at this pitch for more than four years,
longer than the war itself.
Many like Narciso Julian and Eduardo de Guzman
suffered for much longer.
Both were sentenced to death
Eduardo de Guzman spent nine years in prison.
He and Narciso Julian, like many others,
waited to be executed for over a year never knowing
if the next day was to be their last.
Narciso Julian was to spend 25 years in prison.
This part of the prison yard at ???
still holds special memories for him.
In 1945 he met his daughter there.
In 1965, twenty year later,
he met his granddaughter in the same spot.
But for nationalist families,
the suppression of all dissent meant unity.
Tomas Garicano Goñi, later one of Franco's ministers,
found a solid logic in Franco's persecutions.
The repression was aimed at preventing any possible reaction
from any communist or socialist still at liberty in Spain,
or living abroad in exile, in case they returned to Spain
to turn the situation on its heals and take power again.
As the corpse of José Antonio Primo de Rivera
was carried from Alicante to Madrid,
republican supporters in villages along the road were shot,
without even the hearing the 15th century Inquisition
had given its victims.
Franco was hammering Spain into a political monolith,
... without opposition.
The Falange which had stood for a revolutionary fascism,
had already been integrated into an ultra-conservative one-party state.
But the dead José Antonio, charismatic leader of the Falange,
executed by the republicans,
was now appointed patron saint, and martyr, of the new Spain.
Francisco Franco, El Caudillo,
could safely share the leadership of Spain with a dead man,
who could not contradict the myth imposed on him.
All other political movements were forbidden.
Regional autonomy, and diversity, were obliterated.
Such was Franco's version of national unity,
and many, in the Spanish middle class, greeted it with rapture.
There was an extraordinary boom in processions.
Holy Week processions, and processions for just about every saint.
They were packed with people marching along.
There was a revival of all this sort of thing that had disappeared under the republic.
These things seemed important to us then.
They gave us the impression of recovering something we had lost.
The religious values, patriotic values, the values of order.
All these were restored.
There was an absence of freedom, but logically,
those of us that had well-ordered lives,
those of us who were professionals,
and saw things from the personal viewpoint only,
we felt very much at ease ... and happy.
In this ruined Spain, the first years of peace
were even harder, in their way, than the war.
The country lost hundreds of thousands of refugees
who were forced to remain in exile.
And in Spain, to the physical destruction were added
famine, mass unemployment, impoverishment.
Many thousands died of starvation,
thousands more were shot,
for there was no magnanimity in Franco,
no gift of reconciliation.
And nationalists everywhere, at every level, became infected
with their leader's lust for revenge.
What happened in Mas de las Matas happened throughout Spain.
The Moliner family had worked this plot of land for many years.
Juan Moliner was a young man in 1938.
He and his family were socialists.
When the nationalists swept into Aragon,
they had fled with other refugees towards Valencia.
When the war finished, Franco said
we shouldn't be afraid to return to our villages.
Of course, since we weren't guilty of anything, we came back.
When we arrived here they arrested us.
They wouldn't even let us out of jail.
Moliner's father was imprisoned by the local Falange,
who now controlled Mas de las Matas.
Juan was never to see his father again.
Forty years later, the memory of his death still pains him.
Of course I remember.
Those were very critical moments.
Crucial moments.
I wouldn't wish that on anyone.
And on top of it all, one has to live with those people
knowing that they had killed him.
But you had to go on living with them, without saying a word.
After every civil war, hatred is the real survivor.
Stifled behind closed doors.
Hidden in neighbours who avert their faces on the village street.
The poison trickles down the years.
So it was in Spain where almost every family had a hatred to nurse.
Yet, as time passed, locked minds began timidly to open again.
As my children grew up, they used to chide me
because I'd been a Franco supporter.
"Mum, how on earth could you support Franco?"
"I think that he saved us." "How can you say that."
Then they began bringing me books, and books, and more books.
and I started to realise that it had been terrible.
That there had been as many monstrosities on this side,
as there had been on the other side.
Because I already knew about the other side.
And I didn't know what had happened here.
So, gradually you evolve, and you realise that
there is neither good nor evil as they used to tell you.
That you can think for yourself.
That something you do not like, someone else may think is fine.
That you are in no position to judge others.
That someone can think one way, while you think another,
and he could be just as good a person as you.
That is what my children taught me.