Note to Readers:  My heart is heavy as I think of current conflicts and suffering in our world.  If I had a magic wand, I would wave it and offer a healing incantation.  For now, I offer this story of war and remembering.

The family’s ancestral home near Barcelona was set to be demolished to make way for new construction.  Two red, cardboard boxes in the garage held a secret – five thousand, mostly unpublished, photos taken during the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).  

Antoni Campana (1905-1989) documented scenes with his Leica Camera as his beloved Barcelona crumbled amid fighting between Republican (Loyalist) and Nationalist (Francoist) forces.  The Republicans, allied with the USSR, supported the democratically elected government of the Second Spanish Republic (1931-1939).  The Nationalists, allied with Germany and Italy, supported General Francisco Franco’s military junta that overthrew Spain’s democratically elected government.  

The Nationalists’ relentless bombing terrorized inhabitants and marked Barcelona as the first European city to experience indiscriminate attacks on civilian homes, hospitals, schools and shops.  This pattern of attacking civilians would continue into World War II.  An estimated 2,500 to 3,000 Barcelonans died amid 385 aerial attacks.

Campana’s images of children playing amid rubble, women waiting in line for bread, community feeding kitchens, and desperate and weary refugees from Malaga show the impact of war on everyday people.  He also documented the destruction of Roman Catholic churches alongside banners displaying handsome, “fatherly” images of Lenin and Stalin—reflecting the politics of anticlerical factions among the Republicans.  Campana’s photo of a young, pregnant, anarchist militia member named Anita Garbin (1915-1977) made her the “Madonna” of her movement, a revolutionary saint.  Franco’s forces prevailed and Anita became one among hundreds of thousands of Spaniards who escaped and lived in exile.  Campana was there to document Franco’s Victory Parade in Barcelona in February 1939.  German, Italian, and Moroccan soldiers—allies of the Nationalists—marched alongside Franco’s troops.

An estimated 500,000 Spanish soldiers and civilians, loyal to the Republican cause, fled to the border, to France, in the La Retirada (retreat).  Most were on foot.  This slow-moving mass of humanity—comprised of civilians and soldiers, some of whom were injured—were escaping Franco’s vengeance.  French authorities, unprepared for this massive influx, were hostile and suspicious of incoming refugees which included anarchists and communists.  

Families were separated at the border.  Women, children, the elderly, and the disabled were transferred to accommodation centers.  Men were sent to internment camps in Argeles-sur-Mer, St. Cyprien, and Le Barcares.  Surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by Senegalese troops, an estimated 60,000 Spanish men were held in humane conditions.  Robert Capa (1913-1954), the Hungarian photojournalist, documented detainees sleeping in holes they dug in the soil. Food was scarce.  Sanitation facilities were non-existent; 1,500 detainees died of dysentery.  

In a lesser-known aspect of history, French officials moved the male detainees to “concentration camps” in the South of France in Bram, Agde, Vernet, and Rivesaltes.  Germany invaded France in May 1940.  These Spanish prisoners would be joined by East European Jews and Romany. 

War continued in Europe.  Some detainees emigrated.  Some returned to Spain at risk of persecution, prison, or death.  The majority were conscripted into unpaid “Squads of Foreign Workers” or the French Foreign Legion.  Some were sent to the gas chambers at Mauthausen, caught up in the German deportations.  Others joined the French Resistance, contributing to France’s liberation on June 6, 1944.  They were finally granted status as “Political Refugees on March 15, 1945. 

Campana, a liberal, Roman Catholic and Catalan nationalist, captured images from varying sides during the Spanish Civil War.  He worked at the propaganda offices of the Catalan government and the Iberian Anarchist Federation.  He served in the air force of the Spanish Republic which opposed Franco.

Campana chose to remain in Spain when the war ended, despite personal risk. Franco’s government set out on a path of revenge, unleashing a massive purge campaign to weed out those who had been loyal to the Republic.  Franco’s extensive list of “enemies” included Republicans; liberals; socialists; Protestants; intellectuals; homosexuals; freemasons; Romany; Jews; and Basque, Catalan, Andalusian and Galician nationalists.  Thousands were expelled from the military and the civil service. Professorships at universities and teaching posts in schools were targeted.  One quarter of Spain’s school teachers lost their jobs.

Campana maintained a friendship with Jose Ortiz Echague, a photographer who had been a Francoist soldier.  Echague helped Campana find work amid the post-war, politically charged witch hunts.  Campana also took chances.  He bravely refused to comply with Franco’s order for photographers to surrender negatives and prints made during the war.  He kept them hidden, not wanting to put former Republicans at risk.

Campana pursued her career as a photographer and photo shop owner in the decades following the war.  He continued to keep the photos hidden, even after Franco’s death in 1975.  He expressed the wish that the photos not be exhibited.  His grandchildren discovered them when cleaning out the family home in 2018.  His family made the decision to share the photos publicly.

I wonder why Campana chose to keep the photos a secret—even after Franco’s death when it was safe to reveal them.  Was this about his own personal trauma and not wanting to revisit the pain of war?  Was it about protecting contemporary Spanish society from images of a deadly, divisive time in their history?

Campana could easily have destroyed the photos, but he chose to keep them.  I wonder if he intentionally “left” the photos in the garage, hoping his descendants would discover them with enough time and emotional distance to receive them as an honored and sacred message from the past.

To learn more and see some of Campana’s photos:  Antoni Campana exhibit at Pavillon Populaire, Montpellier, France:  https://www.montpellier.fr/506-les-expos-du-pavillon-populaire-a-montpellier.htm

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