“I die for freedom. Ramón RA”: the clue that a shot left his diggers

A relative holds the Ramón Rodríguez Arias medal that served to identify him after he was exhumed in a Franco regime mass grave in 2022. JORGE MORENO (UNED)

Knowing that this was the last, the prisoner Ramón Rodríguez Arias wrote a letter to his family in 1940 with two requests: that they carry their heads high and flowers at his grave.

He was 27 years old, a farmer and a member of the CNT.

He could not know that eight decades later, a group of anthropologists would open the grave that he shared in Manzanares (Ciudad Real) with 12 other men, but in that letter he had also left a clue for the cartographers of the future, the Memory Maps team of the UNED: “Progress has not ended.

Humanity will do me justice.

They can get me off the ground.

There are many above me, but they will know me by the medal that I carry in my pocket”.

He himself had engraved it by hand with the message: “I die for freedom.

Ramon RA”

Ramon Rodriguez Arias

In March 2022, when the Manzanares grave was opened, the anthropologists were not looking for any Ramón.

When they found the medal among the bones, they thought that perhaps the undertaker had made a mistake in the list of executions because there had been two mass executions on the same day.

To try to return the remains to their relatives, the team went to the Civil Registry.

There she discovered that Ramón, single, had a sister.

Cecilia Rodríguez had died in 2004, but next to the woman's date of death, a postal address in Cartagena (Murcia) was read.

Last February, without much hope, Jorge Moreno, director of Memory Maps, knocked on that door.

- Good afternoon, I wanted to know if Cecilia Rodríguez Arias lived here.

- No.

- Wait, look, I am a professor at UNED.

Last year we dug a grave in Manzanares and we found the body of Cecilia's brother, his name was Ramón Rodríguez Arias.

- That's in Ciudad Real.

- Exactly, in Manzanares.

We have found his body and next to it, a small medal.

- Goes up.

Moreno went up.

Francisco Quiñones and Encarnación López, a stupefied octogenarian couple, invited him in.

He was Cecilia's son, that is, Ramón RA's nephew “This looks like a movie.

We know about the medal because my mother-in-law said it, he wrote it to her in a letter," she said.

The anthropologist asked to see her.

Encarnación then explained that one day, in a fit, fed up with rereading it and suffering, Cecilia had torn it up, but that years later, hospitalized, when she thought she was going to die, just like her brother had done in 1940, she asked for a piece of paper and a pencil.

"From reading the letter so much," Encarnación recounted, "he had learned it by heart and rewrote it to leave it with us, so that we would never forget Ramón."

In the living room of that house in Cartagena, Francisco rereads the last lines: "I will die thinking of my mother, my girlfriend and my sister...".

Trembling with emotion, the three of them called Catalina Quiñones, Cecilia's daughter.

"I froze," she recalled herself last Friday.

“My mother has to be clapping, wherever she is.

She never forgot my uncle ”.

Catalina Quiñones, Ramón Arias' niece, shows the medal she was carrying in her pocket when they killed him and which has served to identify him 82 years later. JORGE MORENO (UNED)

The medal occupies the last section of the exhibition

which exhibits, in the Cristina García Rodero Museum in Puertollano (Ciudad Real), objects recovered in graves, houses and archives during 14 years of research.

The first group that visits the exhibition, which will remain open until May 31, listens to Ramón's story in awe.

Some cry.

“Our goal,” explains Moreno, “is to understand how violence was perpetrated against the civilian population, how in some cases resistance was achieved, and how that memory was transmitted, because the memory or forgetfulness of these people shapes us as a society.”

Catalina records with her mobile the public that listens to the adventures of her family.

“This exhibition allows us to turn private memory into a collective one”, explains the anthropologist Julián López.

Perhaps it also contributes to a certain pedagogy, now that historical revisionism returns and even Ramón Tamames,

A man looks at one of the photographs in the exhibition The Absent Body, at the Cristina García Rodero Museum in Puertollano (Ciudad Real). JAVIER DE PAZ GARCÍA

“Song for the woman I adore”

The exhibition is a journey through time and is done from a chair, which invites you to sit in front of each object and document, read a brief explanation of the circumstances in which it was made or recovered, and put yourself in the shoes of its author and heirs.

“Song for the woman I adore” recalls the poem that Nicolás Vera sent, as a farewell before being shot, to his wife, Virtudes Palmer, imprisoned in the Les Corts prison, where his daughter was born.

Several of her friends, who had been arrested for singing “subversive songs”, decided to put the poetry to music.

In 2021, the niece of one of them, Mary Monreal, sang it for the Memory Maps researchers.

Another chair offers the opportunity to sit down and meet the painter Cipriano Salvador and see the story he wrote and drew in the El Dueso prison (Cantabria) to send it to his five-year-old son for Three Kings Day.

It is called

and it takes place in a classroom in which the students are different animals (cats, lions, chickens, turtles...) who "speak the same language, help each other and live together without wars".

Sometimes, he explains to the boy, whom he hadn't seen since he was a baby, there are fights, "but the anger soon dies down."

Story that Cipriano Salvador drew and drew in the El Dueso prison for his five-year-old son. JAVIER DE PAZ GARCÍA

A little further on, inside a closet, you can see an old safe.

Ramón Ramírez never showed its content to anyone.

When he died, in 2019, at the age of 93, the family found the key in his pants pocket.

The chest contained a story unknown to them, that of Escolástico Pérez, father of Eugenia, Ramón's wife.

"In the box," explains Tomás Ballesteros, a Memory Maps researcher, "was the handkerchief with a poem that he had made in prison for his wife and his daughter before they killed him, in 1940."

Upon discovering that his grandfather had been shot, the family began the search for the remains, until they found out that he was in a common grave in Ciudad Real.

Box with the handkerchief and the letters that Escolástico Pérez sent to his family from prison. JAVIER DE PAZ GARCÍA

A similar treasure was found by the family of Jesús García Amador, the socialist mayor of Albadalejo (Ciudad Real) shot in 1939. He was a widower and wrote a letter to his uncles asking them to take care of his children and to explain that he had done nothing wrong .

The letter has some blots on the ink.

"One of his daughters," says Ballesteros, "explained to us that they are the tears of Jesus when writing it."

Farewell message from Vicente Verdejo to his wife written in the Valdepeñas prison before being shot on October 29, 1940.

The anthropologist Alfonso Villalta shows a tiny pencil with which another shot "wrote his last lines."

It measures little more than a fingernail and was recovered in the exhumation of a common grave in Almagro.

In the same display case is the tobacco pack on the back of which Vicente Verdejo said goodbye to his wife before being shot in 1940 and which his family has guarded and inherited ever since.

Just like the descendants of Santos Racionero with the almost 100 messages on pieces of paper that he sent to his family from jail, hidden in the clothes he gave them to wash or in the pots of food they brought him until one day, on September 9, 1939, they were told not to come back: they had executed him.

Maria Jose Bautista and her father, Felipe Bautista, show in Almagro the hundred tiny letters that Santos Racionero sent hidden, from prison, before being shot.

Jaime Villanueva

Other documents exhibited in the exhibition reflect the ridiculousness of the Franco regime, such as the replicas of the 17,000 files that the Army of Occupation made of the "suspects" of Ciudad Real: peasants, farmers, day laborers... or the name changes in the Registry Civil to comply with the BOE order of February 1939 that prohibited, for example, being called Libertad.

Before leaving, the public can take one of the 4,000 figurines made by the artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo.

The work, titled

represents the women shaved bald by the Franco regime and fills a room in the museum.

To collect yours, the visitor has to leave, in return, a

with a story.

“My great-grandfather Balbino Castro was arrested at his house in Peñarroya at dinner time.

They took him away and left his wife Alfonsa alone with seven children.

We believe that he is in a common grave… ”, reads one of them.

“Silence and contained pain he lived in my house.

May the memory," says another of the notes, "come to light and the pain dissipate."

4,000 figurines of shaved women made by the artist Fernando Sánchez Castillo and exhibited at the Cristina García Rodero Museum in Puertollano (Ciudad Real). JAVIER DE PAZ GARCÍA

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