What would we write if we knew our words were last? In 1936, hundreds of prisoners were confronted with this almost impossible-to-answer question. “I am being taken away from you to take me to the world of the forgotten forever”, were the words chosen by Cipriano Berrozpe to say goodbye to his wife from the prison of La Industrielle de Logroño. Dozens of letters like this one were compiled by Jesús Vicente Aguirre for his book “Write me to the earth” and which the writer himself presented this weekend during the 13th edition of the Cross-border Meetings of Memory historical, democratic and anti-fascist which took place organized this weekend in the capital of Rioja with the participation of nearly thirty memorial associations.
This question, what we wrote, is precisely the premise of the book which brings together the letters of 39 reprisals from Rioja. Jesús Vicente Aguirre, writer and one of the main representatives of protest and social singing in La Rioja, has been studying the civil war and repression in La Rioja for more than 25 years. For his latest book, he visited dozens of homes who shared with him these letters, this intimate memory, these last words that they received from their murdered parents, grandparents, uncles.
“Four letters to tell you that they have sentenced me to death. I’m calm because I confessed and I’m going to die. “I am leaving for the next world with the clear conscience of not having harmed anyone,” were the last words of José Antonio Ozcoz, 21 years old. “Don’t give our children a stepfather. Educate them, it’s the best legacy you can leave them,” reads one of a prisoner’s letters to his pregnant girlfriend, in which he speculates that in one of the bags every night it would be his turn to be assassinated.
But not everyone knew that they were writing to their families for the last time. Among the lines that its author read during the conference, hope is also felt. “It already seems that they are going out into the streets to see if God wants it to be our turn one day,” wrote Gaspar Martínez, originally from San Román de Cameros. “I never wrote to you, mom, because I thought they were going to take me away right away,” wrote Emilio Pérez Pellejero in the last letter he wrote home, a day before being shot, and in which he inquired about his brother Aurelio without knowing that he had been murdered a month before.
Although every personal story is different, “every story is a universal story,” said Jesús Vicente during his lecture; many of them share ideas. Questions and instructions about working the fields are frequent: “With how many grape pickers did the harvest, there were few grapes,” he wrote to his wife Félix Asensio, from Fuenmayor, or “Collect the potatoes to plant the beans,” he said. Román Hervias, from Nájera. “And the women had to take over the work of their husbands,” remembers the author of “Write me to the earth”.
There are also expressions that are repeated and that Jesús Vicente Aguirre himself analyzed in his work. “From what you tell me” is perhaps the most repeated beginning to mark this link between the letters received from the family, even if these, the letters sent to the prisoners, have barely been preserved. In the letters that the author read during the Cross-Border Meetings, he repeated “This way, everyone is fine”, “Many memories to anyone who asks me. We are all fine” or “Four letters to tell you we are fine”, they assume that the rest of the classmates are fine, nothing could be further from the truth, perhaps they did it to reassure their families or to convey hope to them.
Many of these lines were written from the prison installed at the School of Arts and Crafts in Logroño, La Industrial, which housed 1,200 prisoners. It is the only one that remains of the three prisons of Logroño, Beti Jai and the provincial prison were the other two and, precisely, the La Barranca association demanded during the Transborder Meetings the declaration of the building where the School of Design Design. located in La Rioja, the ESDIR, as a memory space under the protection of the Democratic Memory Law. “May it serve as a tribute to those who were imprisoned here and in particular to those who were taken to die murdered at night and by treachery,” said Chuchi Cámara at the opening of the meetings in the meeting room. the ESDIR Assembly.
“This morning we were at their side, we saw them,” said Jesús Vicente Aguirre in reference to this inauguration about the authors of numerous letters collected. There, in La Industrial, Cipriano Berrozpe wrote the most read letter on Franco’s repression in La Rioja: “And nothing more, dear wife and dear children, they are taking away from you what I love most in the world to send to the other, that of those who are forgotten forever. Goodbye everyone, remember me a little.
“The good thing,” Aguirre noted, “is that we haven’t forgotten him.”
Sunset at La Barranca
The Cross-Border Meetings of Historical, Democratic and Antifascist Memory were organized this weekend for the first time in Logroño by the La Barranca association under the title “Dignity and Memory(s)”. This is a series of conferences, working groups, round tables and visits which take place each year alternating between France and Spain.
One of the most anticipated events of the program was the visit to La Barranca. Saturday was the first time that many victims of Franco’s repression and fighters for the preservation of historical memory were found in what is in La Rioja the symbol of repression but also of the fight for the memory of women black people, who were also honored this Saturday with an exhibition of their photos through the three tombs of La Barranca.
José Schmitt Gómez is a member of Caminar, the group of French memorial associations that promoted the Rencontres Transfrontalières, in which he participated for the first time this weekend. Grandson and nephew of Spaniards buried in mass graves in Santander and Burgos, being at La Barranca moved him. Without being able to avoid tears, he says that he is taking steps to recover his Spanish nationality, “my children remind me that I am an internationalist, yes, however, these colors – he says, grabbing the congress pendant with the republican flag – are not the colors of a country, they are the colors of an idea.
In the background, poems and verses by Federico García Lorca or Lucía Sánchez Saornil are set to music and sung by Elena Aranoa, and José Schmidt Gómez does justice to the Spaniards who fought in the French Resistance: “France does not was not liberated, the Spaniards fought against fascism believing that they would then help them free themselves from the tyranny and repression of Franco, but this lasted for another 40 years. In a climate where the importance of historical memory is called into question, he claims the value of associations which come together “and find strategies against the lies and hoaxes that arrive”.
For Nicolás Sesma, the author of “Ni una, ni grande ni libre: la dictadura franquista”, presented at the Meetings, it was also the first time at La Barranca: “It was quite impressive to know the courage of these women and what they obtained by way of memory and remembrance. For Sesma, presenting his work in front of so many memorial associations means “that we find meaning in the work, that it is not only academic work, but that it has an impact on society”. “The book is based on the idea that the dictatorship was not only the responsibility of one person, but of a series of social actors and that we must be aware of this in order not to repeat ourselves,” underlines this historian. .
As night began to fall on La Barranca, emotion was felt among the songs, poems, photos of the Women in Black and those present. The president of the host association, Ricardo Blanco, was present; Even if a recent knee operation prevented her from participating in the negotiations, the unity of so many people for the same cause could not be missing: “May the struggle not be as lonely as it has been for our Women in Black. Their weapons were their union and their mourning,” he said. And at the end, when night was already falling on the memorial, everyone sang loudly, as if wishing that what Labordeta sang would come true: “There will be a day when everyone, looking up , will see a land that brings freedom.”
