Part 2: Miguel and the victims left behind.
Those 15,000-or-so Republicans who failed to get away on any of the few ships that had left Alicante received little mercy from the victorious Italian fascist forces who successfully took the city on 31 March 1939. In desperate scenes, the Italian troops attacked, tortured and murdered the remaining victims gathered on the quay. Some Republicans chose to take their own lives.
The next day, on 1 April 1939, Franco announced the end of the civil war.
Picture: Archivo Municipal de Alicante
Many Republicans were rounded up and marched between a double line of soldiers pointing rifles and machine guns to a makeshift concentration camp at La Goteta, now a tram stop, and then to the notorious Campo de Los Almendros (Field of Almond Trees) concentration camp before being transferred to other camps for ‘ideological cleansing.’ The 200 x 80 metre plot was built and guarded by Italian troops. Just an open field. No shelter, little water and no food apart from what guards offered through the barbed-wire fencing.
Before arriving, some columns of Republican prisoners were machine-gunned from the nearby slopes of Santa Barbara Castle which caused panic and deaths. Many others went on to die of disease, suicide, forced labour or starvation. The almond trees were quickly stripped of the few remaining fruits from the previous year, and then of the leaves and tender new shoots for food. The trees were soon bare. Up to 2,000 died in the camp.
The Field of Almond Trees site is close to where the Plaza Mar 2 shopping centre stands today where shoppers wheel their supermarket trolleys round Carrefour, try on new suits in Massimo Dutti or pick Breezy Blue Eyeshadow from Yves Rocher. The memorial stands in the shade of an Almond tree remembering those poor, desperate men. The inscription on the memorial reads: “At dawn on 15 November 1939, the military forces which rebelled against the Second Republic shot these defenders of liberty and buried them in this common grave.” Alongside is a poem by Miguel Hernández entitled ‘El Tren de Los Heridos.’ (Train of the Wounded), which includes the poignant words: –
“Silence shipwrecked in the silence
of the mouths closed at night.
It does not cease to be silent or to traverse it.
It speaks the drowned language of the dead.
Silence.”
Others who fought the Nationalists and those caught waiting for ships in Alicante to take them to safety were punished severely. They were sent to several locations, including the city’s bullring or Santa Barbara Castlewhere some 4,000 victims were interned. Some left their names etched into the fortress floors where they are still visible today.
In his book, The Spanish Holocaust, Paul Preston writes: “Families were violently separated and those who protested were beaten or shot. The women and children were transferred to Alicante, where they were kept for a month packed into a cinema with little food and without facilities for washing or changing their babies. The men – including boys from the age of twelve – were either taken to the bullring in Alicante or to a large field outside the town, the Campo de Los Almendros, so called because it was an orchard of almond trees.”
The poet, Miguel Hernández was just one of many who missed boarding the Stanbrook. Just like fellow poet Federico García Lorca who was executed by a firing squad, Miguel also deplored fascism. He grew up poor in nearby Orihuela and lived with a father who chastised him for spending time with books rather than working as a farmhand. As soon as he finished his primary education Miguel was put to work. While he had been at school, he became friends with Ramón Sijé, a well-educated boy who had lent and recommended books to him. Ramón’s death would inspire Miguel’s most famous poem, ‘Elegy.’
Miguel Hernández was accused of being a communist commissar and of writing poems harmful to the Francoist cause, so he escaped to Portugal, another country led by a right-wing dictator, António de Oliveira Salazar. Miguel was arrested and sent back to Spain. Once there he was sentenced to death. Thankfully, with the help of some well-connected friends he was released from prison. But after heading home to Orihuela he was arrested again. This time he was sentenced to 30-years in prison. But he would never get out alive. Miguel was incarcerated in multiple jails under horrendously harsh conditions. He suffered pneumonia in Palencia prison, bronchitis in Ocaña prison and typhus and tuberculosis in Alicante City’s prison.
Miguel Hernández’s best-known poetry was composed in prisons and written on toilet paper. But even the hard Izal toilet paper would have been a luxury here. Rolls of it could be found sitting on the desks of clerks who fed it through their office typewriters instead of paper.
After, his wife, Josefina, told Miguel in a letter that she and their second son, Manuel Miguel, (their first child died in infancy), had only bread and onions to eat. From that came his classic poem, ‘Nanas de la Cebolla,’ (‘Lullabies of the Onion’).
“La cebolla es escarcha
cerrada y pobre.
Escarcha de tus días
y de mis noches.
Hambre y cebolla,
hielo negro y escarcha
grande y redonda.
En la cuna del hambre
mi niño estaba.
Con sangre de cebolla
se amamantaba.
Pero tu sangre,
escarchada de azúcar,
cebolla y hambre.
Una mujer morena
resuelta en luna
se derrama hilo a hilo
sobre la cuna.
Ríete, niño,
que te traigo la luna
cuando es preciso.
Alondra de mi casa,
ríete mucho.
Es tu risa en tus ojos
la luz del mundo.
Ríete tanto
que mi alma al oírte
bata el espacio.
Tu risa me hace libre,
me pone alas.
Soledades me quita,
cárcel me arranca.
Boca que vuela,
corazón que en tus labios
relampaguea.”
(“The onion is frost
shut in and poor.
Frost of your days
and of my nights.
Hunger and onion,
black ice and frost
large and round.
My little boy
was in hunger’s cradle.
He was nursed
on onion blood.
But your blood
is frosted with sugar,
onion and hunger.
A dark woman
dissolved in moonlight
pours herself thread by thread
into the cradle.
Laugh, son,
you can swallow the moon
when you want to.
Lark of my house,
keep laughing.
The laughter in your eyes
is the light of the world.
Laugh so much
that my soul, hearing you,
will beat in space.
Your laughter frees me,
gives me wings.
It sweeps away my loneliness,
knocks down my cell.
Mouth that flies,
heart that turns
to lightning on your lips…)”
Just before his death, Miguel Hernández scrawled his last verse on the wall of the hospital next to his cot:
“Adios hermanos, camaradas, amigos,
Despedidme al sol y los trigos.”
(“Goodbye brothers, comrades, friends
Give my goodbyes to the sun and the wheatfields.”)
He died on 28 March 1942 at the age of 31 of typhus and tuberculosis in Alicante City’s prison, three years to the day after Archie and the SS Stanbrook had sailed away from Alicante.
I had an opportunity to visit Miguel’s grave and walked to it in the early sun of a hot August morning under a canopy of red Bougainvillea and through an avenue of tall Cypress trees. The cemetery was eerily quiet. As Miguel wrote: “It does not cease to be silent or to traverse it. It speaks the drowned language of the dead. Silence.” It was a deeply moving experience. He is buried with his wife and second child. Overlooking his grave, I’m sure I stood in a space drenched by many tears.