Belchite
This will be the hardest page of the blog to write so far because I have so many jumbled thoughts and impressions in my head from what has been going on today. And until today I knew nothing much about the Spanish civil war, so my learning is very incomplete and you will have to excuse any inaccuracies.
I discovered last night that there are two public tours every day around the ruins of the old town of Belchite , one at mid day and one at 5pm. I decided to go for the midday slot and spent the morning where I had slept in the new town of Belchite, catching up on the diary and sorting out my stuff.
I presented myself at the gate of the old town at mid day, to be greeted by this fellow in the 1937 Republican government uniform of the Spanish army.
Spain became a republic (for the second time) in 1931 but suffered from a lot of political extremism and violence in the years leading up to the civil war. Following the assassination of the official leader of the political opposition in 1936, a faction of the army mutinied and issued a statement of no confidence in the government, encouraging all military units in the country to join them. But the response from other military bases was unequivocal and the various political divisions in the country suddenly became polarised. The military action began in the South and West, moved north and east, gradually encircling the capital.
At the beginning of the war Belchite was a prosperous town and a regional centre for Banking, administration and agriculture. As well as some light industry, it also boasted a seminary, two large churches, a synagogue and a convent. Because it had not joined the nationalist mutiny it was de facto a government or republican town. During the course of hostilities it changed hands at least twice, although it was not always clear in whose hands the prevailing power was held. Tunnels were built between homes and the fighting was very much from one street and one house to the next.
Gradually the town was all but annihilated. When the war was over in 1939, many of those who fought on the republican side were interned in a concentration camp outside the town. I think the saddest thing I heard was that in 1954, 15 years later, the inmates of that same concentration camp were ordered to build a new town of Belchite next door to the old one which was unsafe to live in. The last residents of the old town moved out in 1964. There are photographs from this period and the hardship of living in these post war conditions was distressing to see. What I also found difficult to reconcile is that although most of the people who lived in that concentration camp are probably now dead, their children are certainly still alive, and no older than I am. How is it that they have not all become delinquents, on the basis that hurt people hurt people?
I recall on my last visit to Spain going to a fiesta that started in the town around midnight. I noticed two families arrive at more or less the same time just before the festivities got under way. The two most elderly gentlemen (who must have been children of the civil war period) from each party greeted each other and it looked as though they had not seen each other for a long time. I will never forget their gentle silent smiles, and the faint almost imperceptible swelling of tears in their eyes as they gazed around the town Square together, smiles that said, well things haven't worked out too badly, we have done ok.
And I think of this Buddhist doctrine of acceptance and forgiveness and loving kindness and how close it is to the Christian doctrine of brotherly love, and how in Spain they have had to suffer the pain of dictatorship for most of the period since the second world war, and how much the general population has had to restrain themselves in the absence of an apparent democracy. But it obviously hasn't hampered their ability to love one another. Indeed the Spanish ability to carry on celebrating and being sociable in spite of everything, violent weather, inhospitable countryside and extreme economic inequality, is pretty remarkable. Visiting this monument to the civil war has really humbled me and made me remember an old teaching I once heard as an adolescent; that what we resist tends to persist and what we accept tends to dissolve.
