Carlos Martín Gaebler

My name is Carlos Martín Gaebler. I have a doctorate in Philology and, for thrity-nine years, I was a profesor at the University of Seville. Since retiring two years ago, I have devoted myself to writing, photographing the world, and enjoying life. 

This is a photograph of Manuel Sánchez Librero (Aznalcóllar, Sevilla, 1904-1937).  Manuel was a bus driver for the Compañía Gaditana de Minas, which ran routes between Aznalcóllar and Seville, Sanlúcar la Mayor and Gerena. He was not a member of any political party and it was said he never got involved in politics. 

Good-looking, with blond hair and green eyes, Manuel Sánchez Librero was the brother of Amelia Sánchez Librero and uncle of Manola Palomo Sánchez, who provided saliva a DNA sample so that his remains could be identified when they were located. Manuel was murdered in Sanlúcar la Mayor for being a democrat, an agnostic and, surely a decent person as well. 

After Manuel was murdered, his sister Amelia started to stand up to the Falangists who made her put the Francoist flag on the balcony of their family home in Aznalcóllar. One one occasion, she went up to the roof terrace, grabbed a black house coat, and tied it to a large broom and hung it from the balcony as a sign of mourning. Almost immediately, the Falangists turned up at the house to remind her that this what not the flag they had given her to display. Amelia refused to comply and the broom and house coat remained there. Amelia was a woman who would not put up with anything. When they ordered her to raise her arm in the fascist salute, she refused. When the Falangistas brought a crutch to make her raise her arm, she would put her hands in her pockets or stand with her arms crossed. 

My grandmother, María Ojeda Díaz, hired Amelia Sánchez Librero as nanny when her son, my uncle Fernando, was born in the 1940s. In the 1960s, when we were little and visited my grandmother in Alcalá de Guadaíra, “Tata Amelia” was another member of the family. As the years passed, my grandmother died, Amelia went to work for my uncle, we grew older, and Amelia died at 104. It goes without saying that no one in the family ever said anything about who Ameila was, that my grandmother had hired her “in spite of” being the sister of a “victim of reprisals”. 

After Amelia died, I got closer to her niece, Manola Palomo Sánchez, a lucid woman with a good memory, who told me many stories about my beloved grandmother, and my grandparents, something that neitehr my parents nor any other member of my biological family had ever done. I was writing an homage to my grandmother, María, and Manola gave me a vast amount of family and historical information. Then one day she mentioned that her aunt Amelia – my “tata Amelia” – had a brother, her uncle Manuel, and she told me about everything that had happened to them. I was so moved by this story  that I decided to pay tribute to it by adding the circumstances of his disappearance to what I had already written and published in my blog a few years ago. Among other things, it was exciting to hold in my own hands that crust of bread and the barely used pad of bus tickets that Erodia, Manola’s oldest daughter, had preserved. 

I still visit Manola on the outskirts of Seville and phone her once in a while because her health is poor. She is the last survivor of those tragic years and has retained a prodigious memory.