My grandfather, whom I did not meet, fought and lost the Spanish Civil War. He was a teacher before the war and lived undocumented ever after, working with his hands here and there, and moving from one province to another whenever he felt unsafe. Thus my uncle, my aunt and my father were all born in distant parts of the Country. After WWII ended and Franco survived Hitler and Mussolini, many men and women like him lost all hope. His job lost, his place in society lost, his home taken away and his identity erased, he died a drunk in his mid fifties. A late casualty of a cruel war where the heroes lost, forsaken by the world.
Nothing much is done here to remember them, the country is not yet ready, it seems, the scars still pink. However, Franco's disgusting slave-built shrine still stands and holds his remains in honor.
I was in Normandy this September. I went alone and spent a week there. I wanted to see the places, walk them, think, and pay my respects. Visiting the cemeteries was intense and, to me, surprisingly hurtful. So many. British cemeteries were harder for the simple reason they write the ages on the gravestones. So young. So many teens.
People in Spain lived what the rest of western Europe would have lived if Hitler had won, and things in Spain would have been worse, and may still be, so I am sincerely grateful, couldn't be other way, but I often wonder how things would have been for my grandfather and his family if the Allies had not stopped at the Pyrenees...
We do not have a day here for the veterans that lost, and I have honestly never given it a second thought. My father also died young and I was still too young myself for certain conversations. Besides, our worries in Spain are of a more basic need, like taking our dead out of the ditches and giving them proper burial, and in that we have trouble (not me personally).
So here it goes to all of them, to the heroes that lost, to the forgotten, to the ones whose history was overwritten. May them too one day be honored as they deserve.
