By Iñaki Martinez Azpiro |
Santiago de Chile (EFE) and they created blogs with photographs and texts kept for decades in trunks.
Carmen and Rafael García’s parents arrived in Chile in 1939 aboard the Winnipeg, the emblematic ship floated by Nobel Prize winner Pablo Neruda when he was Chilean ambassador to France.
They fled Europe after spending weeks in French concentration camps for Spanish refugees: they were not wanted in Spain or France.
The father, a member of the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE), crossed the Pyrenees as a soldier in the Republican army, as the Francoists advanced on the front.
The mother first escaped to Valencia and, later, traveled the Mediterranean coast to France, with a daughter who died from the inclemencies of the road. Both met again when they were chosen to travel in Winnipeg.
His story is just one example of the thousands of Spaniards who had to go abroad due to political persecution in Spain after the civil war (1936-1939) and the subsequent dictatorship of Francisco Franco, an ally of German and Italian fascism.
“Let’s tell everything you went through”
It is Saturday morning and dozens of old photographs, letters, ration cards and newspaper clippings rest in a room of the Spanish Cultural Center in Santiago (CCESantiago).
Some twenty descendants of Republican Spaniards -most of them born in Chile, but others who arrived as children- prepare for a cyanotype workshop, an ancient technique of monochrome photographic copying in blue tones.
On a sheet of colored cardboard, they will compose and order the history of their family over several sessions, using other craft techniques such as collage or binding.
“Our father is not here, but it’s like saying: ‘Look, dad, everything you did didn’t come to anything. We are going to explain everything you went through because I was silent, ”explains Rosario López, who participated with her sister Mercedes, both born in Chile, to EFE.
Historians estimate that more than 3,000 Spanish Republicans arrived in Chile after the war, not only on the Winnipeg, but on other ships that docked until the 1950s.
Learn not to repeat
The republican exile in Chile was organized mainly around the Spanish Republican Center, which functioned for decades as a meeting point, although there were also regional centers, such as the Catalan or Valencian casal.
“Our father was a political commissioner in the war and always fought in Valencia. Later he was imprisoned for four years, ”says López, while his sister embroiders fireworks with colored threads on an old photograph of some Valencian fallas.
“When he got out, he continued with political activity and they put him back in jail. In 1950, he fled to France and took a ship to Chile”, he adds.
The López sisters soaked up the traditions and gastronomy of this region in the southeast of Spain thanks to their father’s stories, but also in the country house, which with the pandemic ceased to have a physical headquarters but continues to function as an organization.
Spanish exile in Chile
Despite the different trajectories of each family, there is a constant among many of them: their parents remained silent and kept quiet about the horrors they suffered in the war.
“I think our dad didn’t want to remember. It was so painful for him to see so many companions die, to know that her daughter had died without even being able to hold her in her arms… her brother was also shot next to her. He said that he would never return to Spain until Franco left ”, Carmen García recalls to EFE.
Rafael, his brother, observes “with horror” as “sometimes history repeats itself, the same pains, the same threats.”
“I wish society’s knowledge could be spread among the youth to avoid going through pain like the ones our parents and many families who lost everything went through,” he concludes.
magnificent post, very informative. I ponder why the other
experts of this sector don’t understand this. You should
continue your writing. I am sure, you’ve a huge readers’ basse already!
Feel free to surf tto my web-site :: Enid
Thank you foor every other excellent post.
Where else mayy just anyone get that typle of information in such an ideal
approach of writing? I’ve a presentation subsequent week, and I’m
on the look for such information.
My webpage :: https://61c31183e3715.site123.me/