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At first glance, tomb 126 of the Paterna cemetery, a small town near Valence, could seem classic – a stele, flowers. However, it hides a common pit: a hole 6 meters deep in which around 200 victims of the Franco regime are piled up. Among them, José Celda, a republican farmer shot on September 14, 1940.

In the album The abyss of forgetting (Delcourt, 296 pages, 29.95 euros), Rodrigo Terasa, daily journalist El Mundo, And the designer and screenwriter Paco Roca follow the trying fight of his daughter, the octogenarian Pepica Celda, to exhume his body. That of José Celda of course. But also that of Leoncio Badia Navarro, a republican gravedigger of Paterna who died in 1987: in the early 1940s, he was responsible for burying the corpses that militiamen placed to him – 2,238 in this cemetery.

Read also (2019) | Spain buried Franco a second time

In a momentum of humanity, Leoncio Badia Navarro recorded at the risk of his life the names, first names and dates of death of the victims of the regime. He also took small memories to give their loved ones-here a button, there a piece of fabric or a wick of hair, like the one that Pepita Celda, seventy years later, still retains in a tissue paper.

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In this album which invokes the ghosts of the mass graves of Francoism, the authors sail between the eras and skillfully intertwine the struggle of Leoncio Badia Navarro and that of Pepica Celda to remind the memory of those that history has reduced to silence and which embarrass, Even today, a country haunted by its past. Because if Franco died in 1975, the lead screed surrounding the crimes committed under his dictatorship continues, thanks in particular to the amnesty law promulgated in 1977 to avoid reprisals at the time of the democratic transition, but also to the political reversal of the government Rajoy, in 2011, on the 2007 historical memory law.

Read also (2007) | The memory of the victims of the civil war divides Spain

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Source: Lemonde

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