Acknowledging the past

Today was a lovely walk through the forests of Monte de Oca. Back in the 11th century it was a forest inhabited by bandits, and probably wolves, but Saint Juan, a local practical type (subsequently canonised) sorted out the path and any bridges needed through the forest and over the (smallish) mountains. It started out quite foggy as we went uphill, and then as the day wore on the fog lifted and it turned out very lovely.

The sobering part, though was at the top of the hill, where there was a monument to 300 people who had been murdered and buried in mass graves there in 1936, at the height of the Spanish Civil War. They had been republicans (the losing side to General Franco’s Nationalists), which meant that the monument was only built in 2013, after their bodies were exhumed and identified in 2011.

Acknowledging history like that is hard. All those people who died were probably local, killed by other locals, and their friends and families (the murderers and the murdered) had to live together with that knowledge, but without talking about it, for the long years of the Franco dictatorship (which finished with his death in 1975).

Nearly 90 years later, it seems as if Spanish people can talk about that terrible history, even if it is still hard, but easier to some degree now that almost everyone who was there who has died.

if you are interested, I found the book Ghosts of Spain to be a really interesting read about the modern response to this terrible history, and the movie The Teacher who promised the Sea, is a heartbreaking and wonderful story of someone who might have been buried in that mass grave.

One day, Australians might manage to do the same for our frontier wars between aboriginal people and those who killed them and took their land. Acknowledgement of the terrible things that happened must make a difference to how you manage to move forward as a society.