82 years, two months and a common grave between Antonia and Juan

Rafael Gómez Pimpollo Sevilla poses in his forge in Solana with the photo of his father, Rafael Gómez-Pimpollo Serrano, murdered in 1940 when he was two years old. Samuel Sánchez (EL PAÍS)

In the Manzanares cemetery (Ciudad Real, 18,000 inhabitants), a group of specialists led by archaeologist Ester Montero, from the UNED Memory Maps team, exhumes a mass grave with 13 shot in 1940. About 20 meters away, a small The cross points to the grave—the only one around that has flowers—of a young woman, Antonia Alcolea, 27 years old.

She is the widow of Juan José Barba García, one of the victims of the pit.

“She died shortly after my father was killed.

I think it's worth it, ”says her daughter Francisca at her house in Viso del Marqués, 67 kilometers away.

When DNA confirms the identity of the recovered skeletons, she wants to exhume her mother's remains as well.

“She only has a cross with her name on it because we didn't have any money then.

Now I want to bring them together again, bury them together.”

Exhumation of 13 victims of reprisals in a grave in the Manzanares cemetery (Ciudad Real).

Samuel Sanchez (THE COUNTRY)

Paca was just seven years old and had a four-year-old sister, Isabel, when he lost, two months apart, his father, who was shot, and his mother, who fell ill with tuberculosis.

Her grandmother couldn't support them.

"At first an aunt took me with her to Valencia, but she got together and it looks like she wouldn't like me to be with them, so one day she brought me back to Manzanares, left me at a door and told me: 'Stay here I'm going to run an errand and now I'll be back'.

But she never came back."

Paca Barba poses at his house in Viso del Marqués (Ciudad Real) with the portraits of his parents, Juan José Barba and Antonia Alcolea.

He was assassinated in 1940 and is in the Manzanares grave.

She died two months later of tuberculosis and is buried 20 meters from the grave.

Samuel Sanchez (THE COUNTRY)

The door was that of the hospice where another married couple had taken in their sister.

“They had three sons and the woman wanted a girl so they adopted Isabel.

Another day she came looking for me a man.

When I got to his house, his wife was very happy.

She loved me very much, like a daughter.”

Her photograph shares the limelight in her living room with the portrait of her parents.

“I have watched them many times.

My sister looks like my mother, and I look like my father,” she says.

Of the short time they shared, he has very few memories.

Almost all of them were built with the little that they were told about them.

“My father was a day laborer, very strong and hard-working.

They told me that he denounced a very bad man they called El Trueno and that he was envious of him.”

When he found out where, he started bringing her flowers.

Her father is one of the 288 shot between 1939 and 1947 buried in 14 common graves in the Manzanares cemetery.

Anthropologist Alfonso Villalta explains that in the 1980s, upon learning of the place where they had been buried, some relatives placed commemorative plaques in the surrounding area with the names and ages of the victims and messages such as "He gave his life for freedom" or "Never we have forgotten you”.

The psychologist María Avendaño, who shelters the descendants, explains that the youngest of the 13 victims of the grave that they are exhuming was 25 years old and the oldest, 60. They were day laborers, mechanics, masons, blacksmiths... members of the PSOE, Republican Left, UGT and CNT.

The Memory Maps team, with funding from the Ciudad Real Provincial Council, has an object restorer,

Elizabeth Angle.

In the grave they have found an alliance and they trust that, when cleaning it, some inscription will appear that will help identify its owner.

Anthropologists are still looking for relatives of three of the 13 victims of the grave: Antonio Fernández Ortiz, a mechanic, whose brother, also shot, lies in another mass grave in Manzanares;

Luis Torres Camacho, shoe shiner, and Gabriel Nieto Parrado, farmer.

One of the forensic anthropologists from the Memory Maps team is working on the exhumation of the grave in the Manzanares cemetery.

Samuel Sanchez (THE COUNTRY)

Nor has Rafael Gómez-Pimpollo forgotten a man he barely knew, his father, named after him.

The time that has elapsed since his execution, 81 years, does not prevent him from being moved when he recites from memory the poetry that he sent to his mother from prison shortly before she died and that, framed in his bedroom, is the last thing he sees before going to sleep and the first thing he reads when he wakes up: “

.

The poetry that Rafael Gómez-Pimpollo Serrano wrote from prison shortly before being shot in 1940, and that his son framed and hung in his bedroom. Samuel Sánchez (EL PAÍS)

“The one who shot him apologized to my mother”

"I was two years old when they killed him," recalls Rafael, 83, at his home in La Solana (Ciudad Real).

“My mother always told me that he was killed 'by order of Franco' and that he was a good man.

That she advised him to flee to France, but he said he hadn't done anything wrong and he didn't have to.

The first time they arrested him they let him go after a short time, but then they denounced him again, they say because of envy, and he never came back.

He was 26 years old when he was shot.

My mother also told me that the one who shot him later apologized and said that he did what he was told.”

Rafael shows an old brass plate.

"It's the one my father used to eat in prison."

On the back of it there is an inscription in a circle: “I remember my wife and son Rafael Gómez-Pimpollo Sevilla from his father Rafael Gómez-Pimpollo Serrano.

Manzanares, June 14, 1940″.

He was sentenced to death on April 22 and executed at 0530 on August 17 of that year.

In his file it appears that “on July 18, 1936 ″, the date of the coup, he was a “socialist”.

Below is the list of usual accusations in court-martial: “Did you exalt the red cause in your public conversations?

A lot.

Was he insulting our National Army or its Generals?

insistently”.

They accuse him of participating in the murder of “seven right-wing people”.

One of the witnesses says that she does not know him.

Others say that he was "a hardworking boy,

He didn't have a bad record."

Several refer to "rumors" to accuse him.

And two witnesses point out that "despite knowing his right-wing affiliation, he never bothered them", but the statement of a woman who assures that she saw him in the house where the crimes were committed prevails.

During his statement, Rafael assured that in August 1936 he had joined the CNT and that month he had volunteered "at the head of the Red Army", but denied having participated in the murders.

baptized by force

Rafael asks the anthropologists if the skeletons recovered in the pit show fire wounds.

They explain yes.

"I wish this had been done before my mother died," he laments.

“She didn't know how to read, but she was a very smart and brave woman.

She helped me out with the black market and she wasn't afraid, despite the fact that one day they shaved her head”.

“They forced her to baptize me, when she was five years old, and she didn't come.

I remember that my aunt dragged me and I kicked because she didn't want to go.

They made me a Christian by force, but when I grew up I became an evangelical.

One day in 1970 a sergeant attacked me for it and mentioned my father.

I got furious and told her not to talk about him.

He then he threatened to shoot me.

My wife remembers it well because that day I came home crying.

Footwear of one of the victims recovered in the mass grave of the Manzanares cemetery (Ciudad Real).

Samuel Sanchez (THE COUNTRY)

A few kilometers away, Olga Valle, 64, waits for DNA to confirm that one of the skeletons recovered in the pit is that of her grandfather Juan Valle, shot at 45. "Before I went to study in Madrid," she recalls , “my father told me: 'Sit down, I'm going to show you grandfather's farewell.'

It is a handkerchief where he addresses his wife and his five children, the eldest 18 years old and the youngest three.

In a margin, write down his date of birth, the date he met my grandmother, his wedding, and his death sentence.

He asks my father, who was the oldest of the boys, to take good care of his mother and his sisters and to always be faithful to his ideas.

It was ".

Juan Valle's farewell to his family, written on a handkerchief shortly before he was shot in 1940. Cedida by the family.

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