"It's an injustice!": Students from Castellbisbal want to exhume the town's mass grave

CastellbisbalJust a few steps separate the Les Vinyes School Institute from the Castellbisbal cemetery. That's why, when they showed the cemetery in class as part of the Forgotten Memory project, where they delve into the Civil War and the repression, they were so impressed. map of gravesSome students jumped out of their chairs. "We saw that we had one right next to us. At first, I thought we were standing on top of it; it was shocking, and we went to the cemetery," says Estel, a student from Les Vinyes. "It's awful that we had it so close and didn't know anything," she adds. In the cemetery of this town in the Vallès Occidental region, there are two mass graves, one with the remains of three soldiers and another with twelve, and only the name of one of the Republican soldiers buried there is known. The men who were buried there died while trying, unsuccessfully, to stop the Francoist offensive of January 25, 1939. No signage commemorates them. The 3rd and 4th year ESO students at this school haven't just learned about the mass grave and its history. From the school, they have begun a real detective operation to find out more and have launched a campaign to have the grave exhumed. Part of the investigation led them to the family of one of the soldiers buried there, and this Friday, the son-in-law and two of the grandchildren of soldier Joan Torruella brought flowers to the cemetery in a very moving ceremony with the students. "We didn't just want to fulfill the school project and do enough. We wanted to do much more because it's so important," says Celia. "This should have been done as a country. I think it's terrible that it hasn't been done until now," explains Bruna. "Families have the right to know where they can bring flowers and where they can go to talk to their dead; they have right to exhume relatives "To give them a proper burial," Rayan says.

Joan Mir is the grandson of Joan Torruella, the soldier from Cardedeu who died in Castellbisbal, leaving behind a wife and two children, a 6-year-old girl and a 4-year-old boy. The girl, Pilar, brought flowers to the cemetery during the burial because she was wearing a ring with his initials. "They notified my grandmother and my mother," Mir recounts. When Pilar had saved enough money, she had a cross and a photograph of her grandfather installed. However, both the cross and the photograph disappeared. "We came for many years, but when my mother died, about seventeen years ago, we stopped. Besides, the cemetery had changed, and the cross was gone," he explains. Just a few hours separated Joan Torruella's death from another family tragedy. "Cardedeu was bombed, and five people died in my father's house; among them, my father's little sister, my aunt," says Mir, who at the cemetery reminded the students of the deaths that occur in war. "Young people die, like my father, children... Never again a war," he says.

"We want to take up the mantle"

The students expressed their deep gratitude to Joan Torruella's family for attending the tribute. "Thank you so much, from the bottom of our hearts, for coming," the students said in their speech. "Tomorrow is All Saints' Day, a holiday on which, since time immemorial and throughout the world, the dead are honored. They are remembered, they are made present, they remember us as they thanked us for their lives. They deserve."

They also recalled the values for which they fought during the Civil War: "Here are people who decided to fight to defend what the ballot box had legitimately decided, people who wanted to stop the advance of fascism, people who fought to defend freedom, democracy, for themselves, but it was also theirs. People whose names and memories were uprooted. Now, more than 86 years after that winter of '39, we, a group of students from IE Les Vinyes, want to take up the mantle and begin the procedures to allow those who exhume the remains to open the graves, so that their families can say goodbye to them with dignity."

Two students, Emma and Alexia, also wrote a poem that, among other things, says this:

Democratic memory is a right.
Every open grave unearths a story.
Today we cry out to that past.
A past that, after so long silenced, must be honored.

All these students dedicated more than 100 hours to learning about the Civil War and the dictatorship. "We dedicated three months and nine hours a week because we believe it's necessary to delve deeper and that it's not enough to treat this subject superficially. It's moving to see how they reflect. It happened with one of the students, who flirted with Vox and made jokes, and after the project he stopped trivializing certain things. And when they work together, they can change things," says Belén Cuesta, a teacher at Les Vinyes. They even created a committee dedicated exclusively to the mass grave and had the help and advice of a forensic archaeologist. René Pachecowho has extensive experience in searching for missing persons.

The students' family discoveries

The project has helped many students research their own family history and discover facts they were unaware of. "We have used the Spanish archives portal PADRES “Or ‘All the Numbers,’ looking for a thread to pull on to find information,” says Cuesta. Martina, for example, explains that she found documentation about the arrest, summary trial, imprisonment, and disappearance of her great-great-grandfather Santiago: “He lived in a small town in Zaragoza, they took him away and shot him. He’s buried in a mass grave,” Martina explains. Jhonatan discovered that his origins are not Paraguayan, but that his great-great-grandparents, the teacher Julia Ferrari and Manuel Garrido, a Republican soldier, were Spanish exiles who first arrived in Argentina and then in the town of Curuguaty, Paraguay. He was buried at the entrance to the Berlanga cemetery (Badajoz) on October 4, 1936. Marta now knows that her great-grandfather’s family lost everything because their lands were collectivized during the Second Republic. “It’s not right that we don’t know our past, and now, instead of giving us more rights, they’re taking them away,” says Bruna. "There's a great deal of ignorance about Franco; people don't know what he did, and that's the fault of families and schools that haven't explained it," says Celia. For both of them, the school project has opened up a new avenue of study regarding the war and the dictatorship.