The Mass Graves of Silence

This 110-minute television documentary by Montse Armengou and Ricardo Belis was produced by the program 30 minuts on TV3 (Catalonia’s regional television), following in the tradition of acclaimed Catalan documentaries on the Civil War and its immediate aftermath, such as Operation Nicolai (1992) and Francoism’s Lost Children (2002). The documentary was broadcast during prime time in two 55-minute episodes on Sunday, 2 and 9 March 2003. In 2004, the same filmmakers published a book—in both Catalan and Spanish versions—titled? The Graves of Silence. Is There a Spanish Holocaust? with a foreword by Santiago Carrillo.

The first part of the documentary focuses on the Francoist executions in Badajoz, particularly in Zafra, in August 1936 as an example of a premeditated repressive strategy that was unrelated to combat or to violence carried out by the Republican side. Drawing on archival documents, eyewitness testimonies, and accounts by historians, the film highlights the brutality of the executions and the trauma experienced by the victims’ families.

The second part begins with testimonies about the brutal entry of Francoist troops into Catalonia through Pallars Sobirà (Lleida). Starting at minute 17, a previously mentioned topic takes center stage in the final part of the documentary: the families’ desire to recover the remains from mass graves. The documentary focuses on the exhumation in Piedrafita de Babia (León) in the summer of 2002. It gives voice to the various protagonists who succeeded in putting the reopening of Francoist graves on the public agenda: the relatives of the disappeared, members of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH), and the young volunteers who carried out out the excavation. They are the ones who point to the persistence of Francoist memory and the shortcomings of Spanish democracy in explaining the long silence on the issue and the state’s inaction in the recovery process.

Although the first exhumation promoted by Emilio Silva, president of the ARMH, in the summer of 2000 marked the beginning of the last major upheaval in the memory of the Civil War, The Mass Graves of Silence was one of the first and most important audiovisual productions on a topic, and would have significant political, media, and social relevance in the years that followed

ALA