The Spanish Holocaust (95 page)

The scheme was also necessary because the prison system was on the verge of collapse. In response to an international commission, in 1954 the Francoist Ministry of Justice admitted that there had been more than 270,719 prisoners in 1940. In fact, these figures referred only to those prisoners who had already been sentenced and there were at least another
100,000 awaiting trial. Nor did they refer to those working in ‘militarized penal colonies’. It was hardly surprising that the prisons received constant visits from priests preaching the ideas of Pérez del Pulgar.
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Sometimes the jobs offered were in primitive workshops established in the prisons themselves, producing clothing, furniture and many other kinds of goods, but more often they were for dangerous jobs in mines, digging railway tunnels and other public works for which the wages were scandalously low. Many prisoners accepted the appalling conditions in order to contribute in some small way to the maintenance of their wives and children and in the hope of being transferred to somewhere nearer their families. When the average daily wage for manual labour was 10 pesetas per day, the prisoners were rented out to private companies for 5 or 6. The government took half and the rest theoretically was paid to the prisoners. However, they did not receive all the money that they were due. One peseta was deducted for the prisoner’s exiguous rations, one was placed in a savings account which the prisoner could collect when he was eventually freed and the third, theoretically, was sent to the family. In fact, this latter was distributed, if at all, via the town council where the family lived and often was never handed over. Those under a death sentence were not allowed to participate in the scheme.
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In prisons, no newspapers were allowed, even though the only ones existing were those of the totally controlled Falange network, the Press of the Movement. The reason for the prohibition was not to prevent access to already heavily censored news but rather to oblige prisoners to buy the Patronato’s own weekly newssheet,
Redención
, which was written by imprisoned Republican journalists. The print run of
Redención
was well over one million copies. A copy cost the same as a commercial newspaper. In theory, no prisoner was obliged to buy it, but visits from family were often conditional on the prisoner being a subscriber to the paper, which placed an intolerable strain on the economies of families already on the verge of starvation.
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A British musician arrested on suspicion of espionage was told by the wardress who confiscated her belongings: ‘In here, nothing belongs to you except what you’ve eaten, and then not always, as you’re likely to throw up.’
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That woman’s suffering would be relatively mild. The scale of deprivation suffered by the defeated Republican women may be deduced from the fact that, by the third week of April 1939, the women’s prison at Ventas in Madrid, designed for five hundred inmates, had more than 3,500 and would eventually hold nearly 14,000. Cells designed for one prisoner held twelve or more. It was common for women to be
arrested in lieu of their missing menfolk. Some of the charges against them were self-evidently absurd, ranging from washing clothes or frying eggs for Republican soldiers to having been a cleaner in a Republican hospital.
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In addition to the horrors of overcrowding, disease and malnutrition, the suffering of women in the prisons had dimensions unknown in the male population. Many of the women arrested were pregnant or had very young children with them. Mothers of children older than three were not allowed to take them into the prison. Often they did not have family to care for them, since they too had been imprisoned, exiled or executed. These mothers suffered the anguish of knowing that their children were alone on the streets. Older women were forced to watch while their sons were tortured and sometimes murdered.
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Rape was a frequent occurrence during interrogation in police stations. Transfer to prisons and concentration camps was no guarantee of safety. At night, Falangists took young women away and raped them. Sometimes their breasts were branded with the Falangist symbol of the yoke and arrows. Many were impregnated by their captors. The executions of women sentenced to death who were pregnant were sometimes delayed until they had given birth and their children taken for adoption.
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Nevertheless, in the prison in Zamora, numerous pregnant women and nursing mothers were shot. On 11 October 1936, Amparo Barayón, the wife of Ramón J. Sender, was told that ‘reds had no right to feed children’ and her eight-month-old baby daughter Andrea was ripped from her arms and placed in a Catholic orphanage. Utterly distraught, Amparo was shot the next day.
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From 1937 to 1941, the Franciscan Capuchin friar Gumersindo de Estella served as a chaplain at the prison of Torrero in Zaragoza. In September 1937, he recalled the execution of three young women whose crime had been an attempt to reach the Republican zone. He was appalled not least by their anguished cries when their one-year-old daughters had been dragged from them by the guards. On another occasion in May 1938, he appealed for the execution of a twenty-one-year-old to be halted on the grounds that she was pregnant. The judge replied indignantly: ‘Wait seven months for every woman who was to be executed? You know that is just not possible!’
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Savage beatings were administered, often to pregnant women, but torture was often more refined. Among the tortures were electric shocks delivered to nipples, genitals and ears. In addition to the pain and humiliation of all of these tortures, the application of electric shocks to the ears caused profound mental problems and headaches that lasted for years
afterwards. Many young girls among those arrested were submitted to beatings, torture and sexual harassment. Women in their seventies and eighties were also subject to mistreatment. The mother of Juana Doña was unable to use her hands for two months because of electrical torture.
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Women were sentenced to death and imprisonment for the crime of military rebellion, yet they were given the status not of political prisoners but of common criminals.
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On 5 August 1939 in Madrid, fifty-six prisoners were executed including a fourteen-year-old boy and thirteen women, seven of whom were under the age of twenty-one. They came to be known as the Trece Rosas, thirteen roses whose fate symbolized the cruelty of the Franco regime. They were members of the United Socialist Youth, the JSU. Their capture in the spring of 1939 had been facilitated because the Casado Junta had seized JSU membership lists then left them for the Francoists. The excuse for the executions was a non-existent plot to murder Franco. In reality, it was an act of revenge for the murder on 27 July of a Civil Guard, Major Isaac Gabaldón, his eighteen-year-old daughter and their driver by members of the resistance. Unknown to the car-hijackers who killed him, Gabaldón was head of the Freemasonry and Communism Archive gathered by Marcelino de Ulibarri. Those shot on 5 August were already in prison when the murders took place. The consequent international scandal saw the death penalties imposed on three women in a later trial commuted to lengthy prison sentences, although twenty-seven men were executed on 9 September.
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Another victim of the Casado coup was a woman who had just given birth when her husband, arrested and left in prison by Casado’s forces, was condemned to death. Evicted from her home, she lived on the streets with her baby daughter, sleeping in doorways and on the steps of the Metro. When a lawyer told her that her husband’s sentence could be commuted if she paid a bribe of 10,000 pesetas, she became a thief and ended up in prison with her baby daughter.
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An example of the brutality inflicted on women was the case of a mother who, when the police came to arrest her, called to her son who was crying. On hearing that his name was Lenin, they picked him up by the legs and killed him by smashing his head against a wall.
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Once in jail, the conditions for nursing mothers were horrendous. With no facilities to wash themselves or their children’s clothes, they were forced to live in filth and fight a daily battle against rats. In the prison of Ventas, the water to the bathrooms and toilets was cut off. For every two hundred women, there was only one toilet which had to be
flushed with dirty water that had been used for cleaning the floors and was then collected in big tins. Paz Azati, a Communist from Valencia, recounted that ‘every day on the floor of the Ventas infirmary you would see the corpses of fifteen to twenty children dead from meningitis’. The Communist Julia Manzanal had just given birth to a daughter when she was arrested in Madrid in the spring of 1939. Manzanal’s death sentence was commuted to thirty years in prison. Ten months later, her baby died of meningitis.
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While some women suffered the agony of seeing their babies die, others had them torn from their arms.
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After the war, the sequestration of the children of Republican prisoners, not just of those executed, became systematic. Twelve thousand children were taken to religious or state institutions where they were brainwashed. After one woman’s husband was shot in front of her and her small daughter, she was arrested and the child taken to a Catholic orphanage. The mother wrote regularly until one day her daughter replied saying, ‘Don’t write to me any more about papa. I know he was a criminal. I am taking the veil.’ Many children were taken from their mothers, put into religious orphanages and brainwashed into denouncing their fathers as assassins. Amparo Barayón’s daughter Andrea became a nun. Pilar Fidalgo noted that orphans were obliged ‘to sing the songs of the murderers of their father; to wear the uniform of those who have executed him, and to curse the dead and to blaspheme his memory.’
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In the book signed by the chaplain of the prison in Barcelona, Father Martín Torrent (in reality ghost-written by a near-destitute Luis Lucia), great pride is expressed in the fact that seven thousand indigent children of prisoners found starving on the streets had been taken to religious orphanages. Father Torrent expressed even greater satisfaction that some of them had decided to join the priesthood.
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Children were stolen from their mothers in several prisons, most notoriously in Saturrarán in the Basque Country and in the prison for nursing mothers in Madrid. More than one hundred women and over fifty children died of illness in Saturrarán, which was run under the harsh direction of María Aranzazu, known to the prisoners as ‘the white panther’. In Madrid, the brutal regime in the improvised prison for nursing mothers was run by María Topete Fernández, a wealthy woman who had herself been imprisoned in the Republican zone. She assuaged her own resentments in the treatment of the mothers and their children. The principal food they received was a thin gruel containing bugs and maggots. If the children regurgitated it, María Topete made them eat their vomit. Separated from them for much of the daytime and at night,
the women lived in constant terror of their children being taken from them. Once the children were three years old they could be removed and many were forcibly seized from their mothers. By 1943, more than 10,000 were in religious orphanages.
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The justification for this policy was provided by the head of the psychiatric services of the rebel army, Major Antonio Vallejo Nágera.

Obsessed with the need for racial cleanliness, Vallejo had written a book in 1934 arguing in favour of the castration of psychopaths.
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As a member of the army medical corps, he had served in Morocco and spent time in Germany during the First World War visiting prison camps. He also met the German psychiatrists Ernst Kretschmer, Julius Schwalbe and Hans Walter Gruhle, whose work influenced him profoundly. During the Civil War, he was made head of the Psychiatric Services of the rebel army. In August 1938, he requested permission from Franco to set up the Laboratory of Psychological Investigations. Two weeks later, he was authorized to do so. His purpose was to pathologize left-wing ideas. The results of his research gave the delighted military high command ‘scientific’ arguments to justify their views on the sub-human nature of their adversaries and he was promoted to colonel.
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Vallejo’s quest for the environmental factors that fostered ‘the red gene’ and the links between Marxism and mental deficiency took the form of psychological tests carried out on prisoners already physically exhausted and mentally anguished. His team consisted of two physicians, a criminologist and two German scientific advisers. His subjects were captured members of the International Brigades in San Pedro de Cardeña and fifty Republican women prisoners in Málaga, thirty of whom were awaiting execution. In the latter case, starting from the premise that they were degenerate and thus prone to Marxist criminality, he explained ‘female revolutionary criminality’ by reference to the animal nature of the female psyche and the ‘marked sadistic nature’ unleashed when political circumstances allowed females to ‘satisfy their latent sexual appetites’.
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Vallejo’s theories were used to justify the sequestration of Republican children and were gathered in a book entitled
The Eugenics of Spanishness and the Regeneration of the Race
’.
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More environmental than biological, his eugenic racism postulated that a race was constituted by a series of cultural values. In Spain, these values, the prerequisites of national health, were hierarchical, military and patriotic. Everything that the Republic and the left stood for was inimical to them and therefore had to be eradicated. Obsessed with what he called ‘the transcendent task of
the cleansing of our race’, his model was the Inquisition, which had protected Spain from poisonous doctrines in the past. He advocated ‘a modernized Inquisition, with a different focus, other ends, means and organization but an Inquisition nonetheless’.
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The health of the race required that children be separated from their ‘red’ mothers.