MICHAEL PORTILLO: How the Spanish Civil War tore my family apart - and still haunts Spain

By Michael Portillo
Last updated at 12:44 AM on 08th November 2009

Seventy years ago, Michael Portillo's father Luis fled the terror of the Spanish Civil War - a conflict which tore his family apart - and found sanctuary in Britain. Now his son has returned to the scenes of some of the war's worst atrocities for a new TV documentary. Here, he argues that Spain's attempts to resolve its grim past by exhuming mass graves will bring only misery and danger.

A few minutes' journey from the Costa del Sol beaches where British sun-worshippers stretch out their bodies in rows, there is a more macabre spectacle. At a cemetery in Malaga they are unearthing lines of corpses. Each skeleton is found face-down and a rusted wire restraint hangs loosely around the wrist bones.

Remembering: Michael Portillo his father's grave in Madrigal, Spain

These manacled prisoners were probably shot at the edge of the mass grave and tumbled forward. In places, the corpses lie seven deep. Today they are being moved because the graveyard is to be redeveloped. Had there not been a public outcry, their forgotten bones would simply have been bulldozed into hardcore beneath a new municipal park.

There were 4,000 victims in Malaga but they form just a fraction of those who, during the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War and for years afterwards, were dispatched by firing squad or pistol in one of Europe's worst acts of revenge. Yet millions of British tourists are wholly unaware of the carnage that occurred here.

Holidaymakers exploring the Moorish and Renaissance history of Granada have no idea that the stunning ravines that rise on every side were dumping grounds for thousands who were murdered by vigilante groups, cleansing the villages of political opponents.

I did not know either. I should have, because the civil war is in my DNA. It was because of that war that my parents met. My father, Luis, was forced to flee the terror and pitched up in England. He felt despair at what had happened to Spain but he survived the conflict, and to that extent he was one of the lucky ones.

I came to see the harrowing graves as part of a television investigation into how Spain should deal with the horrors of its 20th Century history. Many Spanish people fear that revisiting the past will tear the country apart, undoing the healing of the past 30 years.

For Spain's millions of foreign visitors, the war is largely unknown, except that the name of one victim might still spring to mind. The poet and playwright Federico Garcia Lorca was one of the terror's early victims and certainly its most famous. Unable to comprehend the madness that had gripped his country, he quipped: 'Nobody shoots poets.'

He was wrong. He and three friends were seized and put to death. Today the families of two of those killed alongside him are seeking an exhumation of the grave site where the remains are thought to lie. Lorca's family would prefer to avoid a media circus and say he suffered enough violence without his bones being dug up.

But they have bowed to pressure and given blood samples so that if bodies are found, his can be identified. An area of woodland has been fenced off ready for the digging to commence. The controversy over Lorca is a small part of the gulf that has opened in Spain as politicians debate how to deal with what they call ' historic memory'.

The Civil War began when the army rebelled against the democratically elected government on July 18, 1936. Francisco Franco, one of Spain's youngest and most brilliant army generals, became leader of the uprising and later dictator of Spain, ruling until his death in 1975.

On his passing, Spain chose, as an act of national policy, to forget. There would be no truth and reconciliation commissions, no trials for war crimes, just oblivion.

It worked, apparently. Despite the atrocities of its past and the divisions between families and within families, Spain adopted collective amnesia, and moved on to become a rather successful democracy. Since the Seventies, moderate parties of the Left and Right have been in power under the benign eye of a constitutional monarch, King Juan Carlos.

Painful past: Soldiers fighting for General Franco in 1937

The king himself symbolises the Spanish compromise. Brought up by Franco to be his heir, he outraged the old guard by sweeping aside the general's despotic legacy in favour of elected governments.

My earliest memories include my father speaking of his hatred of Franco. His tone was shocking because he was the most loving and gentle of humans. My three brothers and I were, literally, not allowed to kill a fly because his respect for life was absolute. Yet loathing for Franco poured from him. He carried a debilitating wound, of the spirit not the body.

My father's life had been devastated by the Spanish conflict. As a supporter of the government in 1936, he had fought against the rebels. In January 1939, as the government side was stumbling to defeat, he crossed the Pyrenees into exile.

He had no idea then that he would end up in Britain, and I never heard exactly how it came about. He may have had an instinct for survival because had he lingered in France he might, like many others, have perished in the concentration camps where refugees were held.

With a ghastly symmetry, in the same January that my father plodded through the mountains to exile, his brother Justino was killed fighting for Franco. Justino was one of five of my father's brothers who fought on the opposite side. Such divisions were common.

The family was middle class, which made it naturally suspicious of socialists and communists. But my father was a liberal intellectual and a Catholic idealist who believed in man's essential goodness. At the front, he refused to carry a weapon for fear of killing one of his brothers.

In England, my father was separated from his country and family, and had forsaken the best job in the world for him - teaching at the prestigious university of Salamanca, 150 miles from Madrid. It was founded before Cambridge and is at least as beautiful.

I believe that 'leaving' his language was the greatest sorrow of all for my father. He had an enormous vocabulary in his native tongue. He loved nothing more than conversation, except perhaps penning verses. I always remember him drumming his fingers against his forehead, tapping out the rhythms of sonnets forming in his mind.

In exile, having to speak in a foreign language that he did not master, frustrated him. People mistook his inarticulacy in English for stupidity, and that was difficult for a clever and proud man.

Of course, my politics are different from his and I have tried to reach an objective view of Spain past and present. I've been influenced a little by uncles who fought for Franco.

My friends in Spanish politics are mainly on the Right, and they are worried that today's socialist Spanish government is using the issue of historic memory to polarise Spain. They say promoting exhumations risks digging up the past, awakening old grievances.

Close family: Michael Portillo, right, then aged seven, with his parents and brothers Jolyon, left, Charles, top, and Justin, bottom

They see it as an attempt to tar the modern Right with the crimes of long-extinct fascists. They fear a spark could set off the powder keg of Spain's suppressed hatreds.

So when I set out to make my documentary, I was strongly of the view that sleeping dogs should rest undisturbed. Forgetfulness had served Spain well.

I called on my cousin, Angel Luis, who lives in the house near Salamanca where his father and mine grew up. Angel Luis is an archivist who has safeguarded records from our family's past. He showed me photographs of my father in the Twenties.

Luis was a superb dresser. He had met at school a boy who later became Spain's most famous tailor. When he was starting out, the tailor gave Luis his best suits and asked him to be his walking advertisement.

Then there were letters from the front written by my uncle Justino, full of bravado and confidence about the cause for which he was about to sacrifice his life.

From Angel Luis I discovered, too, how close my father came to being killed at the start of the war. He was on a break in Madrid when Franco's rebellion began.

He tried at once to make his way back to his home, not knowing Salamanca had fallen within hours of the uprising and the city's mayor had been shot.

Luis's bus stopped en route at a cafe, and there he met a woman he knew, travelling in the opposite direction. She told him of the mayhem unfolding around his university, and so he turned back. That chance encounter may have saved his life.

But as Angel Luis recounted those stories, he hesitated. Even now there are things that shouldn't be recalled, unless you are looking for trouble.

I soon met people whose fathers had been less lucky than mine. There are many alive today who remember the knock on the door during the night and parents being dragged away, never to be seen again.

For decades, those orphans have been determined to gain some sort of closure, if not justice. These people move you to tears. They are traumatised by childhood horrors, and through seven decades fear has forced them to live silently with that grief. It has been their life's mission to recover a parent's body.

The slaughter was on a Biblical scale and both sides were guilty. In the first year of Civil War, fanatical government supporters shot policemen and priests - maybe 55,000 fell victim to lynch mobs.

On the other side, between 130,000 and 200,000 were murdered or given death sentences by rudimentary courts, or shelled and bombed on roads as they fled from hostile forces.

The Civil War introduced Europe to the terror of bombing from the air. In April 1937, Franco's ally, Hitler, used the Basque town of Guernica as a testing ground. Two thousand died in an afternoon. The massacre prompted Picasso to paint his masterpiece of protest, and persuaded Britain to admit 4,000 refugee children.

Some of those children ended up in Oxfordshire near where my mother, Cora, was at university reading Spanish. She visited them to practise the language. When my father arrived in Britain, he also visited the children's sanctuary, and that's how my parents met.

Many of the 55,000 killed by Leftist partisans were reburied when the Civil War ended and some were given elaborate funerals. They were unlucky victims of mob violence.

But on Franco's side, murder was official policy. He boasted that he wanted to conquer Spain 'centimetre by centimetre', to eliminate all those who did not support his coup. The killings continued into the Fifties.

The dead on the losing side haven't been given funerals - they have been ignored. They lie where they fell, in valleys, in fields, in national parks. You may, unwittingly, have stepped across their bones while on holiday.

So I began to realise that forgetfulness has been achieved at the cost of fairness. If your father died fighting for Franco, even if you had no grave to visit, you could pay respects at the Valley of the Fallen, near Madrid. The monument was built with slave labour from the defeated side, so can hardly be regarded as a national memorial to all who died.

I am also now beginning to see that the issue of historic memory is not really about exhumation at all. I have some experience of exhumation because of work I have done with the former Yugoslavia. There, the conflict is recent and returning human remains to families for burial can help the healing. But after decades have passed, I feel the clamour to open old graves merely prolongs the agony and postpones the moment when people can move on.

In Spain's case the horrors are now so long ago that it seems pointlessin all but exceptional cases. Even those who think they know where a father's body lies could be mistaken. Lorca may not lie where people believe. Truly, I hope they do not find him.

Yet Lorca and a few others are the most promising cases for identification. In most cases it would be impossible. There are no records. People were loaded on to lorries to be slain in distant killing fields, or pulverised by artillery as they raced for safety. So it is clear that exhumation could be appropriate only in a few cases.

Spain has no need to be put through the trauma of turning up huge numbers of corpses, which would inevitably lead to renewed accusations and bitterness.

However, that is not the end of the argument. If digging up bodies is generally not the answer, should not at least the places where they lie be recognised, even sanctified in some way?

Shouldn't tourists know that the pretty hillsides that they photograph are also the last resting place of those men, women and children executed during Franco's reign of terror? Is there not a duty to enable relatives to visit grave sites that are recognised, and to let them read with pride the names of the dead carved into a monument?

As an outsider I must be careful about proposing glib solutions. Spaniards that I trust are anxious that this issue will dissolve the glue that holds the country together. There are divisions of ideology, wealth, class, religion, ethnicity and language that were present long before the Civil War and have not disappeared since. That said, I now feel that forgetfulness is no longer enough. It had its moment when Spain's democracy was still in the incubator.

Eventually there comes a time when the institutions of a constitutional state must be robust enough to face the truths of history. The process needs political leadership, and maybe that is lacking. For now, the Right feels that it is suffering a new injustice. The issue of historic memory is being used, they say, as a political weapon.

It is probably too much to ask, but Spain needs politicians and public on either side to accept that blame for past atrocities is widely spread. Horrendous acts of barbarism were committed. The time to investigate and to punish has gone. But the time quietly to respect the dead has come.

Spain's history is a deeply painful memory for many families. But a mature democracy must be strong enough to acknowledge its past. That, I feel, is the sort of Spain that my father hoped for.

• Digging Up The Dead