Bill in Spanish Parliament Aims to End "Amnesia" About Civil War Victims
Marcos Ana does not remember everything about his 23 years in prison during Franco’s dictatorship.
Marcos Ana was jailed for 23 years during Franco’s rule.
But the 87-year-old poet remembers the electric shocks and brutal whippings that left his body covered in sores; the hunger that compelled him to eat grass sprouting between the stones of the prison patio; his crumpled mother, clinging to the shins of a prison guard, begging mercy for her bloodied and beaten son....
Mr. Ana, who won international renown for the poems he wrote in prison, was spared two death sentences and was released from prison in 1961. “Amnesty is one thing, but amnesia is another,” he said.
Mr. Ana’s wish may be realized, at least partly, on Wednesday when Parliament debates a law aimed at honoring victims of the civil war and of Franco’s repressive rule. The “law of historical memory” would declare illegitimate the military tribunals that condemned people like Mr. Ana and would create state funds to finance the process of exhuming mass graves that contain thousands of victims from both sides.
It would ban public symbols that commemorate Franco and his allies and turn the Valley of the Fallen, a massive mausoleum where the former dictator is buried, into a monument to all the war dead.
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Marcos Ana was jailed for 23 years during Franco’s rule.
But the 87-year-old poet remembers the electric shocks and brutal whippings that left his body covered in sores; the hunger that compelled him to eat grass sprouting between the stones of the prison patio; his crumpled mother, clinging to the shins of a prison guard, begging mercy for her bloodied and beaten son....
Mr. Ana, who won international renown for the poems he wrote in prison, was spared two death sentences and was released from prison in 1961. “Amnesty is one thing, but amnesia is another,” he said.
Mr. Ana’s wish may be realized, at least partly, on Wednesday when Parliament debates a law aimed at honoring victims of the civil war and of Franco’s repressive rule. The “law of historical memory” would declare illegitimate the military tribunals that condemned people like Mr. Ana and would create state funds to finance the process of exhuming mass graves that contain thousands of victims from both sides.
It would ban public symbols that commemorate Franco and his allies and turn the Valley of the Fallen, a massive mausoleum where the former dictator is buried, into a monument to all the war dead.