Spain: Twenty Years After
Sender, Ramon
The civil war in Spain ended twenty years ago. That's what people say. Practical and realistic men view war as a sport. When a public game is over the people cheer the winner. Those present in...
...ARE THEY STILL ALIVE...
...For example, that we Spaniards love America...
...Today's confusion...
...What things can we call to mind that are not too heroic, too generous, too just...
...Many of them lived in camps from 1939 to 1945 or worked in forced labor battalions...
...I am one...
...When a public game is over the people cheer the winner...
...It is nothing very heroic but quite eloquent...
...THE SPANISH PEOPLE were right—do you remember?—but it is dangerous to he too right...
...The heroism of the Spanish people fighting unarmed against the three best equipped armies of Europe and holding out for three years is sublime, but the sublime annoys normal people who like to cultivate their inner Iife on the basis of relative virtues...
...LET US SAY, then, something very simple and pleasant and easy to understand...
...All this has vanished from the belligerent countries of Europe, but in Spain street fighting continues and not between reds and blues, or Moors and Chris (Continued on page 216) SPAIN: TWENTY YEARS AFTER (Continued from page 106) tians, but between liberal university students and totalitarian Falangists...
...The Spanish Fascists are realists and know it...
...The sublime is particularly tiresome to the so-called intellectuals...
...It is the basis of everything in man's personality...
...Chairman— James T. Farrell...
...Some of us, however, must try tp refresh the memory of forgetful colleagues...
...Seventeen years ago, 500,000 Spaniards were driven across the Pyrenees by Franco's conquering armies, backed by Hitler and Mussolini...
...So are the colleagues who edit this review...
...They have publicly declared—and in this they concur with the Russians --that Americans are stupid...
...One of these Spaniards who loves America and who, like twenty-five million Spaniards inside Spain as well as others outside, had trusted America, has this to say: "There is hatred, discontent and confusion...
...Today there are still 160,000 Spaniards living in France, unwilling to go back to fascist Spain...
...Not enough years have passed to let us forget...
...But the sublime is poor as a rhetorical device...
...Life is life and the days are slipping by...
...Those listening to the broadcast turn off the radio...
...With dead and wounded...
...Memory is important...
...This makes fifteen million more people whose memory is fresh...
...Can any less than thirty citizens who share his moral interests be attributed to each of them...
...The match came to an end in 1939 and all the burning problems of that war period are not only unsolved but have increased...
...They are right...
...But it leaves us deeply perplexed to see that when the Fascist government suspends civil liberties, the tanks given by the United States to the Franco government roll down the streets threateningly...
...I am an old man, a peasant and an Andalusian...
...Therefore their jails are still full of political prisoners and there is rationing, civilian, military and ecclesiastical censorship, back market and terror...
...The battle is not over, but it is not so spectacular as before...
...We are not going to bother our colleagues with new allusions to the violence of 1936-39...
...All told, about twenty persons in some way concerned with each victim...
...And those reading the newspaper reports turn the page...
...That is to say, newspaper headlines no longer feature it...
...There are also executions at twilight, at dawn...
...Our Honorary Chairmen are Pablo Casals and General Lazaro Cardenas...
...Your old clothes will be welcome, too...
...It was a people defending its freedoms...
...Each one of these dead had relatives, friends, some woman who loved him...
...Your contribution is tax deductible...
...It is all so obvious...
...And they all go off for a good sound sleep...
...But this is unnecessary...
...In this I agree with those who believe that the affair has lost actuality...
...They still bear their factory trade-marks and the serial numbers of the American army...
...That's what people say...
...Born in 1881, a farmer in Spain, day laborer in France, he now receives less than $10 a month plus 6 kilos of bread to live on...
...We will be disarmed before today's confusion and, above all, tomorrow's peril...
...Most Spaniards love America...
...Will you help Antonio A. or one of his compatriots, by sending us a contribution...
...The only thing that we can do—avoiding the tiresomeness of justice, heroism or generosity on a sublime level—is to repeat what some Spanish liberals who, in 1937, were throwing grenades at the Nazis instead of pebbles at sailors, write us from Madrid...
...A gramophone recording of Flamenco music is very nice occasionally but, after all, Garcia Lorca's hones are in the earth...
...A poem is a poem and a song is a song, but Spanish republicans are dying in Russian concentration camps and Spanish prisons...
...There are some who think it madness to risk and lose seventy thousand lives in four weeks on the banks of the Ebro only to defend political liberties...
...They are free now but thousands are old, disabled, sick and in need of your help...
...The attitude of the Spaniards was just, but it, is bad taste to insist upon justice when it is so overwhelmingly real...
...Some of our sponsors are Albert Camus, Salvador de Madariaga, A. J. Muste, Reinhold Niebuhr, lgnazio Silone, Norman Thomas, George Woodcock, Charles Zimmerman...
...A man named Jose Maria Peman who calls himself a poet and has been president of the Royal Spanish Academy has written—I have the press clipping before me—that the presence of American sailors in Spain is unimportant and that if necessary— pardon the triviality of the quotation—they can shoot off their little white caps with children's slingshots...
...We would have to choose memories that do not exasperate prudence, nor offend common sense, nor try generosity of conscience, and especially those that do not reveal an extravagant concern with justice...
...One of our refugees, Antonio A. wrote us recently: "All my old bones ache and am unable to work...
...This makes twenty million human beings in Spain with burning, alert memory...
...For the sublime irks people...
...The people wonder how this is possible...
...If we are forgetful we will be erratic, rambling, lost...
...The Spanish Fascists, however, are laughing at America...
...Although on second thought, from such madness has come every good thing that life has to offer today in the world...
...If we continue in this direction we can pile up striking evidence...
...Treasurer—Margaret De Silver...
...When we speak about the Spanish Civil War refugees whom we are helping, people almost always ask: "Are they still alive...
...In that defense cities were destroyed (nine thousand civilian dead in Guernica in one hour) and battles lost (seventy thousand dead in four weeks along the Ebro) . In the end one million dead to bury...
...FORGOTTEN HEROES...
...Those present in the stadium go home...
...Without counting organized political groups...
...It is our only means of establishing standards, appraising facts and planning our future...
...But this was something more than a sporting match...
...Are they still in camps...
...Besides the twenty million Spaniards in Spain who recall the past there are five hundred thousand emigres, each with his own personal sphere of influence...
...This is something a little more fundamental and grave...
...But we do not succeed in finding, as so many other writers seem to do, a satisfactory synthesis of the Spanish war on the plane of fatalistic conformity, or even (giving each thing its proper value) on that of artistic emotion...
...Some of us intellectuals are still losing sleep, not because of the memory of the civil war, but because of the presence of that civil war in the world both in and out of Spain...
...Every day the situation is more tense and more secretly or openly violent...
...We too wonder...
Vol. 3 • April 1956 • No. 2
