The celebration on June 6 of the 80th anniversary of the landings in Normandy revealed a problem of some significance: there are hardly any survivors of that decisive day that altered the course of the Second World War. Three days earlier, the BBC interviewed British veteran Cliff Dalton, once a member of the Second Battalion of the East Yorkshire Regiment, which he joined when he had just turned 18.
Dalton, born in Hull in 1906, posed for the report laden with medals and explained that his crossing to the other side of the English Channel was actually an act of youthful impatience: he got fed up with the “tedious” military training in the barracks. Southend, next to the Thames delta, and volunteered. The recruit, one of the few in the United Kingdom who remains lucid and healthy 80 years after fighting for his country on the French coast, had landed on the Norman beach of Gold Beach on August 10, 1944, two months after on D-Day. That is to say, it was part of a late shipment, not of the epic raid in which 130,000 British and American soldiers managed to establish a bridgehead in the territory controlled by the Third Reich.
In Spain, only around 16,000 people (0.03% of the population) are over 100 years old. This means that there are hardly any direct testimonies left of crucial events in the Spanish 20th century such as the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera (1923-1930) or the proclamation of the Second Republic (April 14, 1931). The last combatants of the Civil War are now a handful of centenarians increasingly prone to oblivion and, already in 2022, only three of the 45,000 soldiers who lent weapons in Soviet territory with the Blue Division remained.
Óscar Rodríguez Barreira, professor at the University of Almería and coordinator of the collective oral history project Francoism from the marginsexplains that the scarcity of testimonies begins to affect areas of research on our collective past, such as “the immediate post-war period, the first Franco regime and the long period of international isolation and economic autarky prior to the Stabilization Plan. [1959]”. In the words of Rodríguez, “in Spain we have a group of centenarians and nonagenarians who retain intimate memories of those events and who have never, or very rarely, been consulted about them.” It is, in his opinion, “a potential historiographical treasure that is gradually becoming extinct.”
As Rodríguez recalls, when interviewing a centenarian, “it is not so much about establishing empirical truths as about returning to history a fundamental human dimension: how the events were experienced, what perceptions existed at the time, what impact they had on their indirect witnesses or those who suffered its consequences.”
Fernando Hernández Holgado, professor at the Complutense University of Madrid and author of books such as militaristic thinking either Dying in Madrid (1939-1944), denounces “the relative lack of interest of academic institutions and centers in creating repositories of oral sources.” He highlights some “very valuable” initiatives, such as “the archive of interviews with elderly activists carried out by Comisiones Obreras or the extraordinary work of the Basque historians Miren Llona and Nerea Aresti.” He himself has contributed to the rescue of that distant memory in the process of extinction with the coordination of projects such as a series of interviews with inmates from Franco’s prisons in which his students have participated: “Talking with survivors is a true highway to knowledge. I have seen to what extent it can encourage and consolidate vocations as historians, because it shows young people that they are working with living material, with first-person experiences, and that intensity and emotional warmth are transmitted.” Hernández Holgado urges administrations to “combat this tendency towards the privatization of documentary archives by financing oral history projects, which are formidable antidotes against selective oblivion.”
Claudio Hernández Burgos, professor at the University of Granada and author of The Franco regime went to party. Festive rituals and popular culture during the dictatorship, adds: “We need a strategy to access that treasure that is the memories of the between 15,000 and 20,000 centenarians who live in Spain right now.” Among them, there will be at least, he says, “a few thousand with something substantial and insightful to share, and helping them do so should be an academic and political priority.” The long conversations with his grandfather turned him into a historian: “I think that’s the key. In addition to interrogating sources, we must, whenever possible, compare this bookish knowledge by listening to our elders.” Gathering oral sources is a “technical” exercise in which a rigorous methodology is used. But, in essence, Hernández Burgos explains, it is “an exercise in insightful and empathetic listening.”
Contrary to the “pact of silence to which the elites frequently invite us,” the professor assures that the majority of centenarian witnesses are “more than willing to speak, especially if you make it clear from the beginning that you want to listen to them because you consider that Their experiences deserve to be preserved from oblivion.”
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