“Do you miss your grandparents?” The question hung in the air on a rainy morning in Cádiz. It was made by Ignacio, 11 years old. The orange alert led to his school being closed and his mother took him and his brother to the first meeting on Historical Memory organized by the Provincial Council of Cádiz. Three women had been talking for an hour about their grandparents and, when the audience’s question time began, he dared to raise his hand. “Do you miss your grandparents?” she asked to the surprised look on her interlocutors’ faces. Two of them, Lola and Gloria, never knew their grandfather. He was executed after the Civil War. The other, Loreto, was able to meet him. He doesn’t miss it. His grandfather was the one who helped arrest and kill Lola and Gloria’s grandfather.
The journalist David Doña, organizer of this meeting, managed to bring together the granddaughters of a reprisal, Manuel Muñoz Martínez, and his repressor, Pedro Urraca. “It was almost a coincidence. We were presenting a documentary that the Provincial Council had made about Muñoz Martínez, and right afterward another one about Pedro Urraca was being shown. We realized that both stories were linked, and we thought it would be interesting to facilitate a meeting between their granddaughters.” And the setting for this meeting was Cádiz.
“She would have felt repaired”
One day in 2008, Loreto Urraca was reading the newspaper and was surprised to see her last name in a report. They talked about a Francoist police officer who dedicated himself to persecuting, harassing and detaining exiles from republican Spain in France. His name was Pedro Urraca. It was his grandfather. He then learned that, in coordination with the Nazi Gestapo, he participated in the arrest of the former president of the Catalan Generalitat Luis Companys, the former minister Julián Zugazagoitia, or a Chiclana deputy named Manuel Muñoz Martínez. Gloria and Lola’s grandfather Esteban Muñoz.
Unlike Loreto, the two sisters did know from their childhood about their grandfather’s story, thanks to their mother’s torn and painful testimony. “My grandfather was an impeccable, decorated military man, an intelligent man, with social concerns and a republican,” his granddaughter Lola recalled. Muñoz Martínez became a deputy elected for the province of Cádiz during the Second Republic and became one of Manuel Azaña’s trusted men. After the coup d’état, he managed to flee to France, but Urraca’s instigating work could have been fundamental for his location, extradition, imprisonment in Spain and, finally, his execution. “My mother was in the cell on the eve of the execution,” Gloria recalled.
Their mother, Manuel’s daughter, was another victim of that repression. Reform school girl, singled out, and with the tragedy of losing a father in that way. He never forgot all that. And this is how she passed it on to her daughters. “My mother had no resentment. I was in a lot of pain, yes. But never resentment. She never wanted the same thing to happen to those on the other side that happened to her,” Lola said emotionally. During this meeting, both of them only had their voices break twice. The two times they have remembered their mother and how important this meeting would have been for her. “She would have felt repaired. Sure”.
“This meeting should be repeated in institutes”
Also being able to speak with the families of her grandfather’s victims has been restorative for Loreto Urraca. After discovering everything that Pedro Urraca had done, she felt involved in his crimes. “My guts were churning, I felt ashamed.” That is why in 2013 he opened a website, www.pedrourraca.infoto transmit reports and lists of persecuted Republicans. He has also written a novel, ‘Among hyenas’; He has participated in a documentary about relatives of genocide victims, and is part of the collective ‘Historias disobedientes’, a movement born in Argentina.
“Being here with them, with Gloria and Lola, is healing and restorative,” said Loreto Urraca in this meeting organized by the Cádiz Provincial Council, which has also reflected on the difficulties of digging graves or the role of democratic memory education. “This meeting should be repeated in institutes,” historian Santiago Moreno suggested at the end of the day.
And this story about grandparents is what has moved a child, Ignacio, 11 years old, to raise his hand and ask that question. “Do you miss your grandparents?” The question has left Lola confused. “I couldn’t meet him,” he decided to say. But his sister Gloria has picked up the baton. “Of course we miss him. Because, if I had, I would have asked him a thousand questions. I would love to talk to him.”
Ignacio then looked at Loreto, who, moved, had to remember a painful moment again. “My grandfather was blind and one day he told me that he was going to dictate his memoirs to me. At the time I didn’t know what he had done, but I told him no, because I wasn’t interested in what an official of his time had done. Now that I know everything he did, I’m glad I said no,” he explained. He doesn’t regret or miss his grandfather. Telling him that he did not spare a story that would have hurt him more today.
After Ignacio’s question, Ana Julia Muñoz, daughter of Gloria, niece of Lola, great-granddaughter of Manuel, took the floor among the audience. “I am proud of you three. “I know what you have been through and I know how important this day is for you.” Those words have closed an act that has been sealed with a hug. A hug from three granddaughters.
#hug #granddaughters #reprisal #Francoist #repressor #conversation #repair #wounds
