‘Respect – and honour’: the fight to save a Spanish civil war mass grave

Photograph: World History Archive/Alamy

The children of Montecarmelo are in fine and raucous voice as they pour into the playgrounds that flank the quiet alleys of the Fuencarral municipal cemetery.

Equally voluble, if less joyous, are the banners and posters that hang from the balconies, walls and railings of this north Madrid suburb, bellowing their opposition to the city council’s plans to build a huge waste management plant and vehicle depot next to the cemetery.

Schoolchildren and residents, however, are not the only ones who could be affected by the project. If local lore and research by historical associations is correct then somewhere close to the cemetery boundary is a mass grave containing the mortal remains of 451 people, most of them foreign volunteers, who died fighting fascism during the Spanish civil war. Among them, a world away from Charleston, the famous family home in East Sussex where he and his little brother would fight and taunt each other, is Julian Bell, the eldest son of Clive and Vanessa Bell, pillars of the Bloomsbury group, and a nephew of Virginia Woolf.

Bell, a poet who had wanted to fight for the Spanish republic but was persuaded by his family to serve as an ambulance driver, was badly wounded by shrapnel from a bomb blast and died in a hospital near Madrid on 18 July 1937. He was 29.

His body, along with those of hundreds of Spanish republican fighters and foreign International Brigades volunteers were given a decent burial in Fuencarral cemetery, their graves marked and a large plaque hung on the cemetery wall to honour their sacrifice. That respect did not last. In 1941, two years after General Franco’s victory, their remains were excavated from the cemetery and thrown into an unmarked mass grave in what appears to have been a fit of spite that coincided with the beginning of Hitler’s invasion of the Soviet Union.

Although the precise location of the mass grave is unknown, local people and historians have long believed it lies very close to Fuencarral cemetery – and quite possibly on the site earmarked for the new refuse facility.

Residents’ associations, who oppose the waste plant on the grounds that it will bring increased traffic as well air and noise pollution to an area where there are two schools and a nursery, have now been joined by memorial groups who argue the project risks profaning an important civil war grave.

In November last year, the Spanish Association of Friends of the International Brigades wrote to several embassies in Madrid, including the British embassy, asking them to raise the matter with the city council. In its letter, the association said action needed to be taken “to prevent a further affront to the memory and dignity of the fallen international volunteers who, buried with honour in Fuencarral cemetery, were exhumed and tossed into a mass grave in reprisal for having defended the republic”.

Neither Madrid city council nor the Spanish government’s ministry for territorial policy and democratic memory responded to repeated requests for comment. But a recent email has given campaigners grounds for cautious optimism.

The message, from the council’s culture department, said it considered the mass grave theory plausible, adding that it “would appear advisable” to suspend construction of the rubbish plant in order to allow experts and archeologists from the democratic memory ministry to survey the site to determine whether there were remains there.

Luis González, a local resident and amateur historian who has compiled a dossier on the mass grave and is convinced it lies beneath the proposed facility, believes the council’s email could mark a turning point in the campaign.

“We feel relieved but we’re wary,” he says. “If the bodies are there, then the waste site can’t be there – for the sake of both the dead and the living. It seems the council doesn’t care much about the living, but I think it needs to do something of respect for those who lost their lives for democracy.”

Interest in the saga extends beyond the wide, modern avenues of Montecarmelo and beyond Fuencarral cemetery, where the tomb of a local Falangist chief sits not far from the monument to the Soviet citizens who fought for the republic and the wall of plaques that laud the sacrifices of other foreign combatants.

During a visit to Madrid 13 years ago, another Julian Bell went to the cemetery in a fruitless search for the grave of the uncle he never knew. According to the living Julian Bell – the artist son of the poet’s younger brother, Quentin – his namesake found a true, if fatal, sense of purpose in Spain.

“He thought he’d found something real and was involved in something that mattered,” says Bell. “There is a possibly apocryphal report of him saying to someone at his bedside as he’s dying: ‘I always wanted this. I always wanted to go to war’. For him, it was a consummation in some sense to be in that war and to be one of the first of the British to fall against fascism.”

The young man’s loss was something from which his mother, Vanessa, never recovered. “She was in mourning mode really for the rest of her life,” says Bell. “It kind of knocked the stuffing out of her.”

It also marked Bell’s father deeply. “There’s kind of an idea that Bloomsbury people talked a lot, but I think they actually kept quite quiet,” adds the artist. “My father didn’t talk much about his brother and that’s probably because the subject cut him up too much. It was a big hole.”

Occasionally, however, Quentin would talk about how “remarkably plain” he’d always found his big brother’s girlfriends, or about what a particularly reckless driver Julian had been – even though he was hardly a model motorist himself.

“It was brotherly banter,” says Bell. “As rowdy, bolshie little boys – bolshie in the broad sense – they spent their childhood bashing the hell out of each other in Charleston garden.” That, he adds, is how brothers are.

Bell and his family hope the Spanish government will now step in to determine whether the mass grave where their relative and hundreds of others have lain for more than 80 years is indeed where campaigners believe it to be.

“If it is there, there should be respect – and honour for the people who died in the fight against fascism should take precedence over the particular siting of a civic convenience site,” says Bell. “There is only one place the dead can be, but there are many places where a civic amenity can be.”