99% Invisible - 408- Valley of the Fallen

Episode Date: July 29, 2020

About an hour northwest of Madrid, an enormous stone crucifix rises 500 feet out of a rocky mountaintop. It’s so big you can see it from miles away. Beneath the cross, there’s a sprawling Benedictine monastery and a basilica carved out of the mountain. This place is called The Valley of the Fallen. And it’s likely the most controversial monument in Spain. The Valley is synonymous with Francisco Franco, the general who ruled Spain from the end of its bloody civil war in 1939 until his death in 1975. When Franco died, he became the Valley’s most notorious inhabitant, until he was removed in 2019. Currently there are tens of thousands of other bodies still trapped in the basilica beneath where Franco used to lie. Many were victims of Franco’s security forces, murdered during the height of the civil war, and for years, their families have been trying to get them out. Valley of the Fallen Buy The 99% Invisible City, our first book!

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. About an hour northwest of Madrid, an enormous stone crucifix rises 500 feet out of a rocky mountaintop. It's so big you can see it from miles away. Beneath the cross, there's a sprawling Benedictine monastery and a basilica carved out of the mountain. This place is called the Valley of the Fallen,

and it's likely the most controversial monument in Spain. The valley is synonymous with Francisco Franco, the general who ruled Spain from the end of its bloody civil war in 1939, until his death in 1975. That's reporter Jennifer Omani. When Franco died, he became the valley's most notorious inhabitant. His body was buried under a huge stone slab. But as the decades passed after his death, anger about the monument grew.

People began to push for the removal of Franco's body. They argued there was no place in a democracy for a monument exulting a man who had tortured and killed thousands of Spaniards in the name of fascism. And then, in October of 2019. Now the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died 44 years ago. Today his remains were moved from the valley of the fallen. Franco's body was disinterred, his coffin packed into a helicopter and then flown to a graveyard

on the outskirts of the city to be re-buried. Despite all his torturing and murdering, Franco still has fans in Spain. Some see him as the emblem of a traditional Spanish Catholic life, and some actually like his fascist ideology and would like to see it make a comeback. And so when his body was removed, hundreds of his supporters gathered at the new cemetery to wheel swastikers and Franco era flags and to perform the fascist salute in his honor. In fact, I lived 19 years under Franco and Spain was a wonderful country. Now it's a shit.

One of the protesters told me that she lived for 19 years under Franco, and that Spain was a marvelous country back then. She said that dictators' spirit would always be in the valley and in her heart. Even if you're not familiar with Franco, this story might sound familiar to you. You got your fascists, you got your anti-fascists, and there's this monument honoring a very bad man from the past that people are arguing about. But this story is different because the valley of the fallen isn't just a monument. It is also a mass grave.

There are tens of thousands of other bodies still trapped in the Basilica beneath where Franco used to lie. Many were ordinary civilians killed by Franco's security forces during the height of the Civil War. And for years, their families have been trying to get them out. The story of the Valley of the Fallen can be traced all the way back to the mid-1930s, when Spain found itself torn into different political directions. The Republic, Aninia Bonita, the beautiful girl. Joyful demonstrations throughout Spain

agreed to the proclamation of the Republic. In 1936, the country was a new democracy, just a few years removed from monarchy when a group of left-wing anti-clarical republicans won the elections. This horrified the right-wing Catholics in the country. That included Francisco Franco, a general in the Spanish army. After the election, Franco banded together with other right-wing military leaders to carry out a coup. They believed they were on a divine crusade.

What began as a military coup that had almost three years of civil war? The right-wingers gradually seized control of Spain. Their death squads rounded up suspected leftists and then paraded them through villages and shot them. For both sides, political opponents became enemies to be hunted down and killed. This is purification on La Peña, her grandfather Manuel and great uncle Antonio were among Franco's victims.

When I met her, she showed me photos of them as handsome young men back in the 1930s. Manuel worked as a village vet, caring for the animals of local farmers. His brother Antonio was an iron worker. Both men had supported the leftist who won the elections, and both had joined a union, making them targets for the right-wing nationalists. Manuel was working in the field one day in July 1936 when a group of Franco's men rolled up in a truck. They grabbed Purific Atheons' grandfather and the other workers and took them to a nearby

jail. Her grandfather was killed and left in a ditch. Her great uncle was murdered a few months later. Over the years, words spread through the village that the ravine where manwell was killed was filling up with bodies, but it would take a long time for the family to find out exactly what had happened. And they weren't the only ones left without answers, something similar was playing out for families across the country.

The Spanish Civil War, like any other, unleashed the passions of centuries of hatred. The killing was unrestrained. By 1939, the Civil War was over, and Spain was in ruins. At least 400,000 people had died. Half of them were civilians who faced torture, assassination, and the unexplained disappearances of their family members. A network of mass graves now scarred the Spanish landscape.

Some contained thousands of bodies. It's estimated that Spain still has 114,000 missing people dating back to that time. But Franco wasn't interested in what happened to the bodies of his enemies, at least not at first. He was too busy consolidating his power. As the great superpowers of the world took up sides in World War II, he decided not to fight, focusing his energies on fully crushing his

opposition at home. In an official declaration, Generalissimo Francisco Franco states that his government will not join the German Italian-Japanese alliance against communism. But he says that he will extrope communism in Spain. The country now had a single political party and protest was effectively banned. Franco became known as El Caldillo, the supreme leader. And in a very savvy move, he continued to cultivate the backing of the Catholic Church. Franco was not a particularly religious man, but he adopted the idea very cleverly that his war efforts was a religious crusade.

This is Paul Preston. He's one of the leading scholars of the Spanish Civil War and of Franco's regime. And this guaranteed him the support of the Catholic Church internationally. Which meant Franco could operate with relative impunity. He went about taking away many of the rights that Spaniards had gained during the 1930s. Women, for example, lost the right to divorce their husbands and have abortions and they could no longer work outside the home without permission. Men, on the other hand, could kill their wives for adultery.

The government banned regional languages like Basque and Catalan. The Catholic Church ruled over every aspect of most Spaniards lives. The ideas of francoism have been pumped out from church pulpits. They're being pumped out in schools, the people who in principle would not have supported Franco were basically forced either to accept these ideas or go into what we call inner exile, in other words, to go into a world of silence.

And now that Franco had gained absolute power over the country, he wanted a monument to immortalize his great triumph. It is to be for him what the pyramids were to the Pharaohs. Franco commissioned the valley of the fallen in 1940. The building, he said, would rival the grandeur of ancient monuments. And then because he was Franco, he went about building the monument in the most fascist way possible, relying on the forced labour of his political prisoners. The three camps were controlled by the brigade of the civil guards. We were counted every three hours to make sure that nobody has escaped.

This is Nicolas Sanchez, Albert Noff. Back in the 1940s, he was a college student in Madrid, and he got involved in anti-Franco organizing. After getting caught handing out pro-democracy pamphlets, Nicolas was sentenced to work at the Valley of the Fallen. We had to sleep in the barracks, and well, at seven o'clock, we were supposed to be working. Because of Nicolasolas' University education,

he was put to work in the office, suffering papers around for prison officials and filling in endless forms. But as he walked to and from his barracks each day, he saw men carving rock on pitiful rations of food and working with dynamite without protection. Very harsh work and obviously there were some people that were killed. The construction of the Valley of the Fallen took an enormous human toll.

An estimated 40,000 prisoners worked on the project, some died from exhaustion. Others, in hell, pulverized granite and were killed by lung diseases many years later. Franco had initially conceived of the valley of the fallen as a gravesite, much less a mass grave, but it would become one thanks to Franco's twisted response to pressure from one of Spain's main allies. The Americans relied on Spain as one of their European partners during the Cold War. And when they heard about Franco's plans for the Valley of the Fallen, they started to get nervous. The monument was shaping up to be pretty confrontational and divisive.

The Americans hoped Franco would dial it back a bit, to make it a place that memorialized all the country's war dead, not just the Catholic crusaders. And so Franco declared the Valley of the Fallen to be a place of reconciliation, a place where the dead, for both sides of the Civil War, would be laid to rest. But then, once again,

Franco went about making that happen in the most fascist way possible. Well, so Franco and I, well, we're going to do this as a reconciliation. What do you think about the opinion? That's the way possible. What if he got the idea? Says that Franco ordered his people to bring him bodies from mass graves and cemeteries all over Spain. They dug the bodies up without permission and jumbled them together in boxes.

Then they drove them to the valley, where they were re-buried in the crypt near the Basilica. Finally completed, the valley opened to the public in 1959. Nearly two decades later, when Franco finally died of heart failure, he too was buried at the valley of La Falaune. He was laid to rest in a grand basilica above the bodies of the Spaniards he had tortured, killed, and then re-barried in a mass grave, where their families couldn't find them. And with Franco gone, Spain suddenly confronted a new future without El Galio.

Well, look, when Franco died, we were very happy to get rid of him. We were expecting that, and we had the freeze of full of champagne. The three years between Franco's death and the signing of a new constitution became known as the transition. The country moved from fascist dictatorship to multi-party democracy. And starting in the late 1970s, Spain finally got to do what the US, Britain and France had done more than a decade before. They got to have fun.

A new revolutionary movement sprang up in Madrid and became known as La Movida, Madelineia. La Movida has consumed Madrid, transforming the capital into Europe's new, moveable feast. Suddenly, Spaniards could drink, dance, have sex outside of marriage, and make music about it. The transition seemed to have ushered in a new Spain, but the elation felt after Franco's death was temporary. It's only after several years that you realize that new democracy hasn't solved all the problems that were brought by the dictatorship. For one thing, there were reminders of the dictatorship everywhere. There were statues of Franco and his collaborators in central plaza all over the country.

His name was on street signs. And of course, the Valley of the Fallen served as a colossal reminder. How can you have a democracy and at the same time have a huge monument to the glory of the dictatorship built by political prisoners? But perhaps the biggest hurdle to fully addressing what had happened to the country under Franco was an agreement that became known as the pacto de la olvido, the pact of forgetting. It is simply an oblivion, an amnesty for everyone. Agreed to by everyone.

At the heart of the pact of forgetting was legal forgiveness for all Franco-era crimes. It was a deal agreed to by parties on the right and the left. It was a massive compromise. The whole process of transition to democracy was a transaction. It was a deal. It was a negotiation. Paul Preston again. Moderation, compromise, sacrifice was the only chance

of getting even a glimmer of democracy. So that's the context. The left agreed to the pact because they wanted their political prisoners freed and their political parties legalized. They wanted to be able to live in this new democracy without fear of being tortured or murdered. But it's time went on, they had to grapple with the fact that the amnesty applied to people on the right to. To, because we believe that good that someone from the East was a party for little

that was left in political companies. Falsal Canalis was a left-wing activist back in the late 70s when the pact of forgetting went into effect. He knew back then that his father had disappeared during the Civil War when Falsal was just two years old, and he says that instead of making sure people on the left wouldn't be persecuted for their political views, the Amnesty Law was primarily used making sure people on the left wouldn't be persecuted for their political views, the Amnesty Law was primarily used to shield those on the right who'd killed civilians. Fausto says when he realized what had happened, he put his head in his hands, he felt he'd

been tricked. The pact created a culture of silence around the atrocities of Spain's past. It suppressed conversations about the killing of civilians during the Civil War and the long years of repression that followed. The pact basically said, let's just not talk about what happened. Let's move forward instead. And as for the Valley of the Fallen, it became something like a shrine to Franco. Fascists would visit it from all over Europe to pay their respects and would mark his death with

flowers every year. Franco was remembered even as the pact insured that his crimes were slowly forgotten and erased. For people like Purific Atheon, the pact just didn't work. It was impossible to move forward without knowing exactly what had happened to her relatives. As time went on, her family and many others began to resist the taboo against speaking up. They began to talk about what they've been through. The whole tradition was a dream that didn't take the democracy, but it was true that

it was a dream. Porifica Fion says that during the 1980s, discussions that had long been kept quiet started to come out into the open. And even if people didn't want to listen, at least it was no longer unthinkable for families of victims to make their grievances known. And as families began to talk more about what happened to them, they also started to organize around an important goal. They wanted to find the bodies of their missing family members that had ended up in the mass

graves around the country. And they weren't going to wait for the government to give them permission. They began hiring forensic specialists and archaeologists to help them find and dig up the bodies themselves. The tea. Miguel and Hel, Kapape, works for an organization called Arrico. It carries out private exchumations for families who want to find their murdered relatives. As Miguel showed me around the headquarters, I noticed a wall of boxes and asked what they contained. He told me that inside were skeletons, some broken into pieces by torture

and the years spent underground, now waiting to be washed and identified. I asked him how families typically react to seeing these broken bodies emerge from the ground, after waiting for answers for so long. It's all, he says. Especially when they've spent years trying to learn where their loved ones were buried. Having a real funeral makes a huge difference to people. For a long time, the work of people like Miguel happened below the radar and without support from the state, but then in 2007, a new law went into effect that gave a boost to these

efforts to uncover the crimes of the past. The new law was called the Historical Memory Law, and it broke the pact of forgetting. For the first time, victims of Franco era crimes received official recognition. The law called for the removal of Francoist symbols from public places, and lots of new money flowed to the exclamation efforts happening at mass grave sites across the country. Borifica Fionlapena and her family seized their chance. They contacted Eduardo Ramp, a human rights lawyer, who was helping to investigate crimes

dating back to the Franco era. Eduardo started looking into the case of Purification's grandfather and great uncle. He learned, the Purifications relatives were not in a mass grave near the town where they'd been killed. Instead, they were among the bodies that had been moved to the Valley of the Fallen before it opened in 1959. They'd been jumbled together in boxes with other remains and then transferred into the crypts of the Basilica. When reburied, their names had not been written down. And Purifications not been written down. And Purifica Thion's family wasn't the only one hearing this. All told around 33,000

bodies had been reburied at the monument. We were more or less, more or less, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, a new, in 2011, the government asked a panel of experts to consider the future of the valley of the fallen. The panel recommended that Franco's body be removed from the valley. A small victory for those who long said that the valley was a monument to fascism. With Franco's body moved to another cemetery, at least the fascist pilgrimageists would stop. But the panel also said that identifying and removing the tens of thousands of other bodies was not practical.

Purification was once again denied the chance she'd hoped for. It's been so many years, she says. She laments the fact that her father is 95 years old and has lost his memory. He'll never know what happened to his own father. And this is true for thousands of Spaniards. Of all those buried in the valley, 21,000 could be identified. The other 12,000 people remain nameless. The only thing known is where their bodies came from in Spain, offering a small sliver of hope for families still searching for their loved ones.

The efforts to address Spain's fascist past remain patchwork, not just at the valley of the fallen, but across the country. There are still Franco-era statues and street signs, and recently, more insidious reminders of the dictatorship have been re-emerging in the country, a new far-right party known as Vox, one actually claim to be fascist, but their policies align with what Franco represented. They want a border war with Morocco. They want to take away the power held by Spain's regions in favour of national unity. They would deport all undocumented migrants and they're totally opposed to agenda violence law that would tackle Spain's shamefully high levels of domestic violence. Their rapid rise has been driven by Instagram memes and YouTube videos.

A recent election spot showed the party's leader Santiago Abascal striding through a Castilian landscape and talking about honor and national pride and about refusing to live among traders. Vox puts on a fence which attract a lot of young people who have never voted before, and many of them don't even know who Franco is. In a lot of ways, the pact of forgetting actually worked. Recent history isn't taught in Spanish schools, which means that young people are more susceptible to Vox's appeal. They don't understand the party's connection to Spain's bloody history.

Faustal canales, the left-wing activist, says his own father is believed to be in the valley of the fallen, but every attempt to get him out has been blocked. After living with the pain of his father's murder, his entire life, Faustal has watched Fox's rise with increasing alarm. Spanish is the country of memory.

It was forgotten. All this drama that happened, all this genocide. He says Spain is the country of amnesia. So much tragedy, a genocide has been forgotten. After Franco's body was removed from the valley, Vox accused the government of using the exhumation to score political points ahead of an election, drowning out the calls from families to take their own loved ones out of the monument. Meanwhile, pro-Franco protesters gathered at the valley and sang Spain's old national

anthem, which is peppered with fascist lyrics. The anthem was retired after Franco died, in favour of a wordless melody you just not not along to. But now they're singing the lyrics again. Opinion is now divided on what the future of the valley should be. The government has been spending a lot of money to keeping in good shape the monument. Stop it. Not that I'm more. Once all the bodies are out, Nikolus would leave nature to take its course. Just let the monument fall down. The only problem is that nature works, but it works very slowly.

Borificación says the most important thing is to get the rest of the bodies out of the valley, not just frankers. I want everyone to have a certain kind of life. She says, what I want is for every family with murdered victims in the valley of the fallen or thrown in ditches. I want them to dig up all of these people buried all over Spain,

because Spain is a mass grave. My idea would be to exume them all and for them to be given back to their families and dignified with burials and cemeteries where they should be. The story of what really happened should be known and taught in schools so that everyone knows the real history of what happened. In 2016, a judge ordered an exhumation of Porofa Castellón's family members. It was the first and only time that it happened in Spain. But it still hasn't been carried out. Porofa Castellón and Faustal were told that, with Franco's body gone, this might be the

year. And while they're not getting their hopes up, it's true that in Spain, the dead have a way of surprising living. Coming up after the break, Nicolas Sanchez Albernos, the student who was sentenced to work at the Valley of the Fallen, well, he eventually escaped. And the story of how that happened is pretty wild. Stay with us.

So as a reminder, Nikolas Sanchez-Albernaus was the student who was imprisoned at the Valley of the Fallen for a few months during its construction. He didn't do hard labor, he worked in an office job there, but it was an awful place, and a lot of prisoners tried to escape. It's estimated there are 50 attempted escapes between 1940 and 1959. But the only two escapes that succeeded were those of my friend and myself, the rest were cops.

And how Nicholas did it is a pretty crazy story. So we wanted to bring back Jennifer O'Monnie to tell us a bit more. And so Jennifer, tell us what happened with this escape. So to begin with, there were a few things that made escaping from the valley of the fallen difficult. The valley wasn't actually really heavily guarded, but it was set very deep in a forest. And if anybody managed to walk out, they get picked up as soon as they got to the nearest road. And if anybody managed to walk out, they get picked up as soon as they got to the nearest road. And in Spain at that time, the roads were really heavily policed, and Spaniards needed

special permission to just to travel around their own country. So if an escape prisoner even made it out to the road, there was little chance they'd be able to make it any further because of all the guards. It would be very difficult. So Nicolas understood that context, and he reached out to a good friend of his, an architect who drafted him some fake travel permits. And the next thing Nicolas did was write a letter to some of his friends who were exiled in Paris. And he asked them if they could help him get out of the valley. And those friends just happened to be connected

to Norman Meila. Norman Meila, the author? Like, I mean, was he was he already famous at this point? Yeah, this was just before his debut novel came out. So he wasn't quite famous yet, but he was just on the cusp of it. And he was one of a number of writers and artists from the US who'd got very interested in the anti-fascist movement in Europe. Fascism goes back to our infancy and our childhood where we were always told how to live. We'll tell do this, don't do that. No, no.

Yes, you may do that. No, you may not do that. That's a very Norman Mayler take on fascism. No. So how did he get connected to Nicholas's friend? Well, according to Nicholas, apparently, Mahler was on holiday in France, and he'd had a chance encounter with his friends. Mahler mentioned he'd be going back to the US quite soon

that he'd bought a car, and he was trying to get rid of it before he left. And our friend said, well, we need your car. And he said, well, I give it to you, but I also will give you my sister to drive. So that would be Mela's sister, Barbara, who had also been in France. And she was also interested in the anti-fascist movement, and she began corresponding with Nicolas Vaya, his friends. They wrote letters back and forth,

and eventually they agreed on a date and time when she'd come to the valley in Norman Mela's car, driven by one of Nicolas's friends to take him away. And that sounds like kind of surprisingly easy. Yeah, so the fact that Barbara was an American and the fact they were in a car, in a strange way, it meant they aroused much less suspicion. That seems to be kind of like the benefits of being an American. That situation.

Yeah, well, at this time, almost any foreigner really had a certain amount of privilege in that respect. So on the appointed date, Nicolas and a friend of his from university, who's also jailed for pro-democracy activities, snuck out of his barracks and found Barbara waiting for them with their mutual friends. They were just parked there in front of the monument. There was just like sitting outside,

they beep a couple of times and they come running out. Yeah, according to how he tells it, Nicolas and the fellow prisoner hopped into the car and then Barbara drove them to Northeastern Spain and dropped them at the border with France. Then there was a hard part. Nicolas had to hike with his friend through the Pyrenees mountains for three days,

walking only at night and hiding out or sleeping during the day to avoid police. They were trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. And finally, on the third day, they saw a road sign written in French. It was written in French and we felt an all-the-fresh man with a long mustache that we began to talk with him and he said, oh, no, you're safe, you're in France. And so was it typical for people fleeing Franco Spain to go into France seeking safety? I mean, like, were there lots of people hiking

to the Pyrenees, just as Nicolas did? Well, Nicolas was following a route established by hundreds of thousands of political refugees, actually. When the Republican forces lost their last battle to Franco's nationalist army in 1939. So at that time, men, women and children made their way into France through the mountains. But by the time Nicolas made that journey, it was a lot less common. I mean, Spain wasn't a totally closed country like North Korea, but he was a fugitive, so it was

a bit different for him. And so what did Nicolas do once he got into France? Well, as any of us would, I guess, he got in touch with his family and his father, a diplomat who was in exile for his own safety, told him to come to Argentina, so Nicolas flew out and reunited with his family there and he wouldn't return to Spain until Franco's death. No, that's a cool story.

Alright, thanks so much Jennifer, I appreciate it. Thanks a lot Roman. 99% Invisible Was Produced This Week by Jennifer Ommani and edited by Senior Producer Delaney Hall. Mixed by Bryson Barnes. Music by Sean Riel. Kurt Colstet is the digital director of the rest of the team. Is Vivian Le,

Chris Baroube, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald, Katie Mingle, Abby Madon, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Roe, which is now distributed in multiple locations around North America, but in our hearts will always be. In beautiful, downtown, Oakland, California. We are a proud member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative listener supported 100% artist-owned podcasts in the world. Find them all at radiotopia.fm.

You can tweet at me at Roman Mars in the show at 99pi or a current Instagram and read it too. You can find out how to pre-order the 99% invisible book that we announced last week at 99pi.org slash book and for all your other 99pi needs, look no further than 99pi.org. needs. you