“My grandfather did not stop looking for his father.” It is told by Joana Vital, the granddaughter of Manuel Vital, the well-known driver of bus line 47 in Barcelona, whose battle to bring urban transport to his neighborhood in 1978, in Torre Baró, has been made into a film. But that one, the one that describes Marcel Barrena’s filmwas not the only fight that Vital undertook.
The other begins in the autumn of 1936, in the middle of the Civil War, in Valencia de Alcántara (Cáceres). Diego Vital, an accountant at the town hall, was murdered by Franco’s troops, like many other people in the town. His eldest son was Manuel Vital, then only a teenager, who at 13 years old “acquired a very great responsibility because he had to lead the family,” explains his granddaughter.
“My grandfather talked about what happened because it was very important to him, it gave him a lot of strength and dignity to carry out other things in his life, like the kidnapping of 1947,” says Joana, who emphasizes that “leitmotifthe driving force” of his grandfather’s life was thinking that one day he could find his father.
Diego Vital’s body was thrown into the depths of the Terría mine along with fifty men. But then no one knew. The families of those who were retaliated against, also punished, were subjected to silence and no one dared to speak. There were only rumors, like in so many other towns in Extremadura, where it is estimated that 13,500 people suffered from Franco’s repression.
“A great mosaic” of bones
A few years later, the family dispersed throughout Spain and only the mother remained in Valencia de Alcántara. Manuel Vital arrived in Barcelona in 1948 carrying the regret of not knowing where his father’s body was, and with his watch, an object loaded with symbolism in the film. Her granddaughter affirms that she formed her own family in Barcelona but “never forgot her roots,” so when the Extremadura Historical Memory Association was created “she began to contribute money.”
However, Vital died in 2010 and was not until 2017 when the Provincial Council of Cáceres and the University of Extremadura began the work in the Terría mine, after overcoming the initial refusal of the owners of the property to allow the technicians to enter. In January 2018, the bodies of fifty men were found 26 meters deep, covered by ten meters of water.
The identification work has taken many years, complicated by the state of the remains after so much time in contact with the water. “They formed a large mosaic,” which had to be documented “bone by bone,” according to the professor at the University of Extremadura, Julián Chaves, director of the exhumation process.
A dozen bodies, unidentified
The Results were presented last Friday, 88 years after the murders carried out by the Franco regime in Valencia de Alcántara. Among them were the remains of Diego Vital, Manuel Vital’s father, identified thanks to the DNA provided by another of his sons, who was also unable to learn “very exciting” news for the family, “but life has wanted that at some point moment they will meet and it has been this year: on the one hand, the film about my grandfather and, on the other, the discovery of my great-grandfather’s remains has been made public,” says Joana Vital.
Among the bodies that have been found in the mine is also that of Amado Viera Amores, republican mayor of Valencia de Alcántara. His daughter, Conchita Viera, has just turned 91 years old and is a symbol of historical memory in Extremadura. But of the fifty bodies found in Terría, there are 12 that to this day remain without names or surnames.
For the family of the driver of bus 47, a chapter in their story closes, but “it is very hard and a great shame that in your own country, after a civil war, this happens. It is difficult for us to clean historical memory.”
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