One desolate November afternoon, I found myself visiting what had been the Krakow ghetto, with a low, drizzly and cold sky, with light like a black and white documentary. In the windows of travel agencies, summer-colored posters offered tours in air-conditioned buses that included a double program of a visit to the Auschwitz camp and ski sessions on nearby slopes. In what remained of the Jewish cemetery, rough upright tombstones of dark stone leaned among the grass and weeds. On some of them, or at the foot, there were commemorative stones left by visitors. When I went out to the square overlooking the cemetery, I found a large group of tourists, with an air that was somewhere between youthful and reminiscent of American retirees, and I paid attention to what the guide was explaining to them, standing on a stone bench, with great dramatic gestures. But he did not count the evacuation of the thousands of Jewish captives from the ghetto, on the way to extermination, clustered in that same square, in March 1943. He was describing the filming of the corresponding scenes in Schindler’s List.
A few days ago, at the ceremonies commemorating the landing in Normandy, among dignitaries and veterans, Steven Spielberg was also seen, and with him Tom Hanks, who, if they did not personally participate in that feat, have covered themselves in glory, and money, representing it in a fiction as spectacular and deceitful as Schindler’s List, and even more embedded in that credulous zone of the visual imagination in which cinema supplants reality and surpasses it in its effectiveness, and even in its verisimilitude. In the Spanish news programs, the poor real images of the landing, hurried, unfocused, fragmentary, have been interspersed without any warning, with those of Saving Private Ryanwhich are in color and much more photogenic.
Like Hollywood cinema, institutional memory is selective, preferring the heroic and the exemplary to the confusing, the ambiguous, the horror without motive and the suffering without redemption. In Normandy, flags fluttered in the sea wind and political leaders gave their speeches in front of decrepit veterans in wheelchairs, and there was never a lack of images of cemeteries with neat geometric extensions of white crosses on the grass. Cinema makes the dead vague and memory chooses those it considers worthy of remembrance. Accurate accounting is the task of History. It is very unlikely that the speeches on June 6th remembered the tens of thousands of civilians who died in the weeks and months after the landing, not because of the well-known barbarity of the German soldiers, but because of the massive bombings. and largely unjustified or simply erroneous American and British aviation over port cities, such as Le Havre and Caen, or over isolated towns of no military value. People took to the streets to cheer the planes that crossed the Channel and then ran to avoid dying under their bombs. In a test of the New York Review of Books, historians Ed Vulliamy and Pascal Vannier calculate that between June and September 1944, in what is supposed to be the glorious advance of the Allies, 18,000 French civilians died under the bombs of their liberators. In Le Havre, on the night of September 5, 9,790 tons of bombs fell. 85% of the buildings were destroyed. 5,781 civilians died, but only nine German soldiers.
After the war, all the dead were forgotten, and the survivors remained silent, or were not given credit when they spoke out. It was not decent to show resentment toward savior allies. And memory does not admit unpleasant accounts or gray areas between heroes and evildoers, executioners and victims. At least 420,000 civilians died during the indiscriminate bombing of German cities until the end of the war in areas that were completely devoid of military value, with the sole objective of sowing destruction and terror. And in the commemorations of the “Great Patriotic War” in Putin’s Russia there will never be a memory for the many thousands of German women raped during the Soviet soldiers’ advance towards Berlin.
In a country as prone as ours to erect memories that are incompatible with each other, we could do with a little attention to the fairness of the figures. I have spent some time gloomily immersed in a book that is both fascinating and thankless, Crossfireby Fernando del Rey and Manuel Álvarez Tardío (Gutenberg Galaxy), a study of political violence in Spain in the spring of 1936, between the February victory of the Popular Front and the July 17 uprising. In the official right-wing memory, the disorders and crimes of those turbulent months were the responsibility of a left dedicated to an imminent communist revolution: extreme right-wing violence, and the military coup, would have been the legitimate response to restore order and avoid a Soviet dictatorship; In the memory of the left, violence was a destabilizing strategy of the right and the extreme right: the left would have had no choice but to defend itself against the attacks, and the workers’ organizations responded to the military and fascist uprising with weapons in hand. , in defense of republican legality.
Álvarez Tardío and Fernando del Rey have preferred to leave aside the memorial testimonies prepared over the years, to focus on the primary sources, on what was happening at the time, what the newspapers told and concealed, what the leaders proclaimed. at rallies and in chilling parliamentary sessions; and above all in the numbers, recorded in reports and judicial files: how many attacks with firearms, with knives, with sticks; how many assaults on churches or political headquarters; how many shootings between gunmen from one extreme or another or between members of rival labor unions; in Madrid, in Barcelona, in provincial capitals, in remote towns, in any place where violence suddenly broke out that fed itself into spirals of revenge. Military men, monarchists and rich oligarchs like Juan March conspired openly against the Republic, but the parties and union organizations that should have defended it undermined it with irresponsibility and sectarianism, with verbal and physical violence that did not give a day’s respite during those few months. Between February 17 and June 16, 325 churches were burned totally or partially. Between February 17 and July 17, there were 484 deaths and 1,659 seriously injured in a total of 977 episodes of political violence. More than half of these incidents were initiated by left-wing militants, but the number of victims caused by Falangists and the like was somewhat higher: 541 seriously injured and 223 dead on the left; 381 seriously injured and 147 dead on the right, to all of which we must add the 21 dead and 91 injured caused by the forces of order, and the collateral or unidentified victims. A bloodbath that not even the most exalted could imagine what horror it would very soon lead to: what could, despite everything, not have happened, had it not been for the military coup and the help of Mussolini and Hitler to the rebels, and for the cold thirst for punishment and revenge that the victors maintained during a post-war period longer and darker than post-war Europe. Who can invent an edifying memory about that spring.
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