[lbo-talk] "70 Years Later, Guernica Still Holds Secrets"

[B.]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070422/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/guernica_remembered;_ylt=AqA41qaCyaEwO7k8gQAz2S8DW7oF

70 years later, Guernica holds secrets

By PAUL HAVEN, Associated Press Writer
2 hours, 1 minute ago

Itziar Arzanegi can still hear the roar of the German
warplane overhead, and see the old woman shaking her
fists at the foreigners destroying her town. She
remembers the look of horror on the woman's face as
the plane swooped low, opened fire and cut her down.

It has been nearly 70 years since German and Italian
fighter planes backing the fascist forces of Gen.
Francisco Franco in the Spanish Civil War leveled this
historic Basque town on April 26, 1937.

Myths and misinformation have shrouded the bombing
from the outset, starting with the death toll, which
historians have been gradually revising downward for
decades. But Guernica has come to be seen as a
foretaste of the aerial blitzes of World War II,
immortalized in Pablo Picasso's "Guernica," one of the
most iconic paintings of the 20th century.

But while the images of destruction are etched
indelibly in the world's consciousness — and in the
minds of a dwindling number of survivors — the 70th
anniversary is causing barely a ripple in Spain
itself. Little is planned to mark the event on a
national level, and no major Spanish politicians are
expected to attend a Mass, concert and wreath-laying
ceremony for the dead in Guernica's town cemetery.

It is symptomatic of a country that has never come to
grips with its Civil War past. Spain has become a
cultural and economic powerhouse in recent years, but
critics say its success has been built — quite
literally — over the ruins of its greatest disaster.

"In Spain, we have changed on the outside — we've
built new highways, shopping centers and successful
multinational companies — but to change people's
mentality on the inside has proven much more
difficult," said Emilio Silva, president of an
organization that leads efforts to exhume the bodies
of civilians killed by Franco's forces in the 1936-9
war. Half a million people are believed to have died
on all sides.

Silva said that many in the generation that lived
through the war and Franco's victory learned that the
best way to survive under the dictatorship was not to
talk about it. Those who oversaw the country's
transition to democracy following Franco's death in
1975 believed reconciliation meant burying the past.

But the grandchildren and great-grandchildren of the
war generation are starting to demand more openness,
he said, adding: "A country without memory has no
meaning at all."

Survivors of the Guernica bombing, their faces lined
by age, say forgetting has never been an option for
them.

Arzanegi was just 11 years old when the bombs started
to fall. She fled to a pine grove on a hill above town
and watched the inferno below. She and other villagers
hid in the brush as the planes screamed overhead,
until one woman could contain her anger no longer. She
jumped out and started to scream at the sky, just as a
plane was coming into view.

"There are many things we live through in our lives,
and some of the details we forget, but that
bombardment I cannot forget, not even for a single
day," said Arzanegi. "As long as I live, the sight of
that plane dropping down and machine-gunning that
woman will be with me. It was so cruel, so
unimaginable."

Only about 200 survivors are known to be alive today,
according to Remembering Guernica, a non-governmental
peace group based in the town. But the stories they
tell of that day in their childhood are captivating
and terrifying in their detail.

Luis Iriondo, 84, says he was separated from his
family and hid in a bomb shelter in the center of
town.

"There was no light, no ventilation, and there were so
many people pressed together that it was impossible to
breathe. I was frightened that a bomb would hit us and
I would be buried alive," he said. In the end, he
decided to take his chances on the streets: "Better to
be machine-gunned than buried alive."

Pedro Balino was at the train station with a friend
when he heard the sirens cry and saw the first plane
fly overhead. The pair fled to the hills above town
and watched the bombing from there. When it was over,
he came down to find his family.

"After the bombing we came down from the hills, and at
the entrance to Guernica we found eight or 10 guys who
were dead or dying. One was missing his face, the
other had no arm," said Balino. "Some of them I knew.
They were young people, maybe 15 or 16 years old."

Why was a small, nonmilitary town picked for
destruction?

The most popular theory is that it was sacred to the
Basques, who had rejected Franco's overtures to join
him and whose independent streak was detested by the
Spanish general. Here Spanish kings would travel to
stand under an oak tree and vow to respect an ancient
code giving the Basques special rights.

The tree was not targeted and stood in one of the few
places in town that survived the bombing. It finally
succumbed to disease in 2005, replaced by a sapling
from the original tree's acorn that stands today.

Today Guernica is a town of 15,000 nestled in a lush
valley at the southern tip of an estuary that opens
into the Bay of Biscay.

Franco denied any German or Italian planes were in
Spain at the time of the attack, and claimed the
Basques had destroyed the town themselves. When his
troops took the town a few days after the bombing,
they immediately set out to conceal all traces of the
air attack, removing bullets and the casings of the
incendiary and fragmentation bombs.

The town was rebuilt as quickly as possible — with
drab new buildings rising on top of the ruins of the
old. Residents say public works projects frequently
uncover bones.

Though thousands of witnesses saw the attack, the
dictator took his denial of responsibility with him to
the grave.

But there were myths on all sides, said Jose Angel
Etxaniz, a historian linked to the town's museum who
has spent nearly 20 years studying the bombardment.
Chief among those myths was the belief that Guernica
was the first and deadliest air assault on a civilian
population in the Spanish Civil War.

On both counts, it was not.

After Hitler's Condor Division planes and Italian
allies unleashed their payloads, reducing the town of
mostly wooden houses to smoldering embers, the fleeing
Basque government announced that 1,245 people had
died, and that more than 800 had been injured.

But those numbers were mere guesswork. In the world's
collective consciousness, Guernica became synonymous
with the tens of thousands killed in subsequent
bombings elsewhere.

The attack began when a single plane appeared on the
horizon at about 3:30 p.m., dropping six bombs. In the
10 to 12 minutes before the first wave of bombers
arrived, many of the 8,000 to 10,000 people in town at
the time managed to flee into fields or bomb shelters.

Etxaniz said his team have meticulously pored over
church and cemetery records and have been able to
document 120 deaths from the bombing.

Nor was it the first time modern weaponry was used
against a civilian population — German planes had
unleashed a similar assault against the Basque town of
Durango just three weeks earlier, killing 300 people.

But Guernica captured attention because of dramatic
dispatches by foreign correspondents, chief among them
George Steer of the London Times, who wrote of walls
of flames visible for miles around.

"In the form of its execution and the scale of the
destruction it wrought, no less than in the selection
of its objective, the raid on Guernica is unparalleled
in military history," he reported.

It was these accounts in the foreign press that caught
the attention of Picasso, who was living in Paris at
the time, Etxaniz said. Otherwise, the artist might
well have picked a different subject for his signature
painting.

Many believe Guernica was a dry run for Adolf Hitler's
invasion of Poland and the start of World War II two
years later. Soon a world that had never known urban
savagery from the air would witness the horror falling
on London, Warsaw, Berlin, Hiroshima.

Yet Guernica, whatever its final death toll, retains
the power to shock, and its survivors say they hope
their ordeal can still serve to warn the world away
from war. Many have been active in opposing Spanish
involvement in Iraq, and speaking out about other
conflicts.

"What are the lessons of Guernica?" asked Balino, now
86, hunching his shoulders and resting his elbow on
his knee as he considered the question. "Only that it
should never happen again. That it should never be
allowed to happen again."