José Luis Moreno Campos

My name is José Luis Moreno Campos. I was born in 1958, in Santa Mª del Campo Rus, a small village in Cuencia province, but I have lived in Madrid my entire life. I now regret my lack of curiosity when I was a child and adolescent. How much memory has been lost.

My grandmother, Navidad Moreno, who was born on Christmas Day in 1900, gave me the bank notes you see here. She had kept them since the end of the Civil War. At the end of the 1970s, while I was spending some of my vacations in the village, she told me to go with her to her room, the room in which I had been born, because she wanted to give me something.

She opened the chest where she kept her bedding and, in a large cloth bundle, the unsold saffron crop from the year before. Underneath other documents at the back of an upper shelf, there was an envelope containing bank notes issued before 1936. She gave it to me, telling me to keep it with as much secrecy and care as she had done, and not to mention to anyone that I had it not who had given it to me. It was clear that she was still afraid that something bad could happen, even though Franco was dead.

In telling this story, I want to show after the Civil War the vanquished lived with such fear that they would not even admit to having bank notes that were issued before the Republic and which they had not exchanged for the new ones issued by the Francoists. These were issued between 1923 and 1928, except for the 100 pesetas bill, which was issued in 1932, a few days after the Republic was proclaimed. I don’t know why she didn’t exchange them for the new notes, and now it is too late to find out.

I hope that this will help prevent the small stories like this one, that different generations who came after the Civil War preserve, from getting lost.