One
evening a week ago I was entering the chapel at home at the end of the day when
Alfonso, another occupant of the residence I live in and who’s taking up morals
(that is, Moral Theology) in the same Faculty that I study, took me aside to
tell me that he was planning an excursion that weekend. He had already talked
about it with Ricardo, another housemate from Peru. There were no concrete
plans yet as to where the destination would be. I readily said yes and some
days later, as I was passing by the two in the corridor in between classes,
Alfonso told me that the plan was to go to Belchite, a town located some
kilometers south of Zaragoza, about an hour and a half drive from Pamplona. The
town was known for being the site of a siege during the civil war between
Spanish republican and nationalist
forces, which left great part of it in ruins. Months after the siege, when the
town was back in nationalist hands, Francisco Franco while promising to rebuild
the town immediately next to where the old town stood, decreed that the site of
the siege not be rebuilt, as a memorial of what had taken place during those
days between the last days of August and the first days of September 1937. The
passage of time and the added pilferage of the townsfolk, who recycled building
materials, made for the steady deterioration of the buildings. The old town
gradually became abandoned and derelict, though people would come to visit the
sight, be they tourists or sympathizers of either republican or nationalist
ideologies.
Due
to the bloody history of the place, it had become the mecca of some occult
practitioners and experts in psychic phenomena. The town had emerged from
obscurity at one time because of the audio recordings of bombs and planes, as
well as recognizable and distinct human voices that seem to come from the
actual siege, done sixty or seventy years after the event.
The
prospect made me look forward to going there. We went, the five of us, Alfonso,
Ricardo, Francis from India, Eugene (Philippines), and I, leaving Pamplona at
nine in the morning and arriving at the place by eleven or so. I could observe
the barren terrain that stretched for miles around the place as soon as we left
Zaragoza. I surmised that it would’ve been very difficult to escape, seeing
that there was nowhere to hide in, since the town was settled in a barren
expanse of brush, sand and rocky hills, everything was so dry. As we neared the
place I could see that nothing much was left of the old town. What the war had
spared, time and the elements had shown no mercy. A few structures barely
stood, such as the original entrance to the town, another arch at the other
end, a handful of what used to be the important buildings of the town, and the
three church buildings, their towers still standing, pointing to the heavens
like accusing fingers, from where the most of the destructive bombs had come.
We
had a guide, who told us about the history of the siege and began to point out
certain key locations as we began to make our way through the ruins. The main
streets of the town where still well marked.
I’m
not psychic, but I fancied having a very feeling while I made my way through
the streets. Belchite in its heyday was the second most important town after
Zaragoza; its location made it an ideal setting for the republicans to prove to
the international community that it had an army capable of carrying out an
offensive. The attack was actually against the nationalist forces that were
entrenched in the town.
When the siege began on the 24th of August
1937, there scarcely 3,000 defenders in the town, against 30,000 republican
soldiers who tried to penetrate and attack the town. For more than a week, with
the death toll rising rapidly on both sides, the defenders tried to keep the
invaders at bay, the latter trying to advance one house at a time. The town was
practically cut of from the outside world, making the situation horrendous for
the unarmed civilians within—men women and children, whom by the end of the
siege would be dead by the hundreds. We came upon the town square where the
guide told us that soon after the siege the survivors were faced with the
grisly task of collecting the hundreds of corpses of the fallen, pile them up
in the center and burn them. what had remained imprinted in the collective
memory of the people who witnessed the spectacle were the streams of blood that
ran down the street below the plaza. As the fire gradually consumed the
cadavers, the blood began to be mixed with the streams of sizzling human fat
that came from the burning pyre. It was would be an understatement that the
stench could’ve been horrible. I was looking at the street were the blood and
the liquids ran that day, and I shuddered.
We
went through every place in the old town. It reminded me of pictures of
Sarajevo (or Warsaw, as a Polish housemate commented after having seen the
pictures). Eugene, a Scripture scholar, murmured something about the book of
Lamentations.
Walking
among the ruins of what was once a bustling human settlement was eerie,
especially after knowing that a lot of lives were lost in this place, a lot of
blood was shed, a lot of hate and violence unleashed. Like the blood that had
stained its streets, whose stench is difficult remove, to the years had not
erased the foreboding that still hung in the air, or at least it seemed to me.
It appears that the place had been doomed forever to disintegrate slowly. I
could imagine that the people who had lived through all of the hell of those
days—which this blog entry had poorly tried to convey—had just tried to forget and
move on, something which I think is virtually impossible.
The
visit had struck us all, undoubtedly. Speaking for myself, it was an
unforgettable experience, and I had gotten many things from it.
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