A woman walks the platform at the Toronto train station with her son’s photo. “Do you know him?” She asks the Canadian brigade members who return that day, defeated, but alive, from the Spanish Civil War. “My grandmother,” explains Andrew Johnson, “she lived to be 101, and she mourned him all her life.” Arthur Selim Johnson had died in Catalonia, in July 1938, just five months after arriving in Spain to fight. He was part of the group of 35,000 volunteers from 55 countries who, convinced that the fight against fascism was a common cause, decided to join the so-called International Brigades. The Department of Democratic Memory of the Generalitat of Catalonia now guards a DNA sample from his nephew in case they locate the grave in which he was buried. “I am very grateful to the Catalan Government because thanks to the work of historian Jordi Martí I have been able to know much more about my uncle’s latest movements and answer questions that I have asked myself all my life,” explains Johnson on the phone from Toronto.
The General Directorate of Democratic Memory of the Generalitat has just documented the names of 522 international brigade members, most of them Americans, Canadians – like Arthur Johnson – and British, who disappeared in Catalonia, especially during the Battle of the Ebro and the Republican retreat between March and April 1938. The research project is named after Alvah Bessie, an American brigadier who did manage to survive. “He was a writer and journalist,” says historian Jordi Martí Rueda, coordinator of the work, “and he was one of the first to be retaliated against in the Hollywood witch hunt. When he returned to his country he wrote men in combat, about his experience in the Civil War. He lost a friend in the Battle of the Ebro and in the sixties he returned to Spain to look for his grave. That is, he did, on a personal level, what we do today on an institutional level. Recently, we have discovered that the friend he was looking for died in the hospital in Catalonia.”
The investigation has been almost detective, following the trail of the battalions and tracing each file, each database and record to try to offer the families who are still searching for the missing brigade members data that will allow them to know what happened to them and, above all, where they may be buried. “My uncle is a mystery and a tragedy,” says Johnson. “We know that, after finishing high school, he had started learning languages on his own while he saved up to travel. He was interested in the world.” Before falling into a foreign war, he had time to get to know New York, Egypt, Belgium, Germany, Damascus… In the last letter from him that his family received he wrote: “When I left home I never thought I would end up in Spain and Now it seems there is no way out. “This will end soon.” He was 22 years old when he died in the Gandesa area.
“The brigade members fought in absolute inferior conditions,” explains Martí. “When they enlisted they were given a small physical and psychological examination, but they did not require any military knowledge. Most had never picked up a firearm. The myth was also created that they were intellectuals, because among them there were several writers, but 80% were working class. Very young people, in some cases father and son, came to Spain together. The average age was 25 years, so they did not have time to start their own family. Today we talk, above all, with nephews and great-nephews.” The genetic identification program of the Generalitat collects DNA samples from about 25 relatives of brigade members.
“My father was 12 years older than my uncle,” explains Johnson, 68. “At home we didn’t talk about it much because it was painful for my grandmother. I felt her pain. It was something that was always there, like a cloud.” On her account, she began to investigate. “When I was a teenager, I bought a book about the International Brigades and there was a photo of my uncle that confirmed that he had died near Gandesa. It was very exciting to see something of his. At 19, I traveled to Spain and visited the site where he was killed. He stepped on the ground and thought, ‘Maybe he’s buried here.’ It was July 1975 and Franco was still alive.”
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In some of the graves that have already been exhumed in Catalonia, experts found objects that indicate that some of these victims may be brigade members: a ring made in Birmingham, a coin from France… “As we did not have DNA samples with the “We have to compare them,” explains Alfons Aragoneses, general director of Democratic Memory of the Generalitat, “we have not been able to identify them until now, but we are in contact with consulates of different countries that have shown great interest in our study. The idea is to be able to identify remains that have already been exhumed or that we are going to exhume in order to rebury them with dignity. It is a very important moment of generational change, and we need to advance in the exhumation of the graves, satisfy the families’ right to the truth and collaborate so that this individual and family memory becomes collective and can be transmitted to the entire society. ”.
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The progress of the Generalitat to document the last steps in Catalonia of those 522 foreign volunteers, including two women, coincide with the dispute between the central Government and the Madrid City Council, in the hands of the PP, over the possibility of there being a pit with 450 brigade members in Montecarmelo, where the City Council intends to build a garbage canton. The Executive selected a specialized company to carry out tastings in the area and check if there are human remains there, but the City Council denied them permission to act, hired another company and has hidden the results of that survey for months. The discovery of the Generalitat that has brought half a dozen countries into contact also occurs in the midst of a battle between Administrations over plans to repeal regional memory laws. “This is not an issue of ideologies, it is a state policy and that is how the countries around us treat it,” Aragoneses counters. “An international human rights issue that affects the external image of Spain, a country that for a long time was associated with a black legend, the Inquisition, and that now has the opportunity to participate in a global consensus on memory,” he adds. .
The plans of the two-party PP and Vox have reached Toronto. “It horrifies me that this happens,” explains Johnson. “Knowing what happened, honoring those who died, those who sacrificed themselves or went into exile, is part of the democratic health of a country.”
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