They took everything from my great-grandfather Silvestre Indias Carvajal and left us with nothing but his story, which was buried at the bottom of a 30-metre-deep well in south-west Spain for 87 years.
Silvestre worked as a municipal clerk in his small home town of Feria in Extremadura. He was given the job in recognition for his service in the war in Morocco, a conflict to which he was dispatched by lottery.
He was living a quiet life – married with three children and another on the way – when Gen Francisco Franco began his coup against the Republican government on 18 July 1936.
One of his duties as town clerk was to guard imprisoned Franco sympathisers who might have joined the uprising.
But when Franco’s forces took Feria, finding very little opposition, his destiny swiftly changed. In August that year, a few weeks after the Spanish civil war began, word reached Silvestre that they were coming for him, so he and two colleagues fled to the countryside. He was found and taken prisoner a few days later and nothing more was known about what happened to him beyond the rumours that ran around the town. Silvestre was 39 years old.
“My cousin says she heard her mother say they’d shot him and thrown him down a well,” my grandmother Silvestra Indias told me three years before her death last July. She was named for the father who disappeared when she was three.
Silvestre’s fate was not unique. It is thought that between 120,000 and 150,000 people were “disappeared” during the war and the subsequent dictatorship and that their bodies were thrown into 2,567 mass graves. From 1939 to 1975, the Franco regime hid their resting places, condemning their families to silence, humiliation and oblivion.
My great-grandmother María Sánchez was left widowed and pregnant with my great-aunt, María Indias. No one told her what had happened to her husband, nor where his remains were. As a single-parent family in postwar rural Spain, life was limited and bleak for those the dead left behind.
“I remember my mum coming to take me out of school,” María Indias told me four years ago. “I said, ‘But Mum, I don’t want to go. I’m happy here and I’m learning to read and write’. But she told me I had to go and work as a nanny.”
Psychologists say that enforced disappearances can cause generational trauma that can echo down at least three generations. They say the descendants of the “disappeared” inherit or absorb the unconscious burden of the suffering of their parents and grandparents. I don’t know how much this tragedy has affected my father and me. But what I do know is that my grandmother’s life would have been a lot easier if she’d at least been able to lay flowers for her father.
But the return to democracy after Franco’s death, known as the Transition, was built on a pact of silence and on an amnesty that covered all the crimes committed during the civil war and the dictatorship. The newly democratic Spain offered no help to families searching for their dead until the year 2000, when, under pressure from historical memory associations and relatives, things began to change.
In 2007, the socialist government of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero passed the historical memory law, which formally recognised Franco’s victims and compelled local governments to fund efforts to unearth mass graves. Fifteen years later, another socialist government built on that legislation with the 2022 democratic memory law, which ordered the creation of a census and a national DNA bank to help locate and identify the remains of the tens of thousands of people who still lie in unmarked graves.
One day in October 2021, I got a call from my aunt Rosi. She told me she had seen a TV programme about archaeologists who were searching for the remains of the disappeared in a well on a country estate on the outskirts of Feria.
Backed by the Extremaduran regional government, archaeologists and forensic specialists from the Aranzadi laboratory had descended on the farm. After pumping the water out of the well and then painstakingly digging through five metres of rock, they came across a tangle of bones.
“Rising and falling water levels had broken the skeletons apart,” says Lourdes Herrasti, who oversaw the recovery. “In other exhumations, the skeletons are articulated, so you can say, ‘This is the arm, this is the head, this is the torso,’ etc. But not in this case.” By sorting and analysing the remains, they eventually discovered that 20 people had lain forgotten at the bottom of the well. They then set about looking for descendants who might be able to provide DNA samples.
My great-aunt María Indias was 86 when she gave a saliva sample to determine whether any of the remains belonged to her father. Two years later, after an exhaustive effort, Javier Jiménez, the director of the Extremaduran regional government’s historical memory service, told us that the remains of my great-grandfather Silvestre had been found among the bones in the well. The only identifiable part of him to have survived was one of his thigh bones.
At a ceremony held in the village in November 2023 and attended by relatives and those who had carried out the exhumation, my grandmother Silvestra was finally able to hug her father once again – albeit through the small coffin that contained what was left of him 87 years after he disappeared.
The reunion came too late for my great-aunt María Indias, who died a month before the remains were handed over. She never got the chance to embrace her father in life or death, but she left this world knowing that she had closed a wound that had been open for her entire life.
The issue of historical memory remains one of the most polarised debates in Spain. Although many families consider the two laws a basic matter of human rights and restitution, the right and the extreme right dismiss them as instruments that serve only to reopen the wounds of the past.
The Extremaduran regional government – now run by the conservative People’s party and their allies in the far-right Vox party – recently repealed the regional historical memory law and plan to replace it with a so-called “coexistence law”. They claim the new law will recognise “all the victims” of the civil war and the Franco dictatorship and avoid a “partisan” view of the past.
But historical memory groups have criticised it as a backwards step for truth, justice and reparation that will whitewash the dictatorship, remove explicit references to Francoism and equate victims with torturers.
Their main fear is that the new law will undermine the public commitment to exhuming and identifying the bodies of the disappeared and returning them to their relatives.
Many families are still waiting to find out what really happened to their “disappeared” loved ones. To date, about 1,000 mass graves have been excavated and the remains of about 13,000 people have been recovered. But time has outrun the exhumation effort. Experts now believe that the construction of roads, buildings and cemeteries means that only a further 20,000 to 25,000 bodies may now be found.
An entire generation of the children of Franco’s victims is about to disappear. That’s why I hope this story will one day reach my five-year-old niece, Carla, and everyone else of her generation. They will never be able to hear these stories from the lips of those who survived them. But they need, more than ever, to know what happened so that this tragedy is never repeated.
“I think we need to dig them up, don’t you?” my grandmother Silvestra once told me. “Why would I want my father’s bones left underground when the family needs to know where he is – and that he existed? How many other bodies are there out there that have never been found?”
