The resilient memory of the Spanish Civil War and Francoism

Introduction

In his book Blood in Spain, Ronald Fraser (2001) illustrates what it means to recover historical memory and its relationship with written history by telling the tale of a grandmother who, after listening to the stories that her granddaughter has read in a school textbook about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, is deeply moved and begins to mourn. The grandmother’s tears are not caused by the memory of a painful era, but because what her granddaughter is learning about the history of Spain is not the version she knows about the same facts.

In this regard, it is important to consider that the history of Spain over four decades was written by the victors. As Dacia Viejo-Rose (2011) indicates, “there was an aspiration for social control through excluding part of the population by undermining their right to civic participation and by imposing a sense of debt to the ‘glorious martyrs’ and their representatives”; the victorious side “had monuments, orations and commemorations, while the other side was not allowed to publicly mourn in Spain, or retrieve the bodies of loved ones that disappeared during the war and after” (pp. 471–473). The official epic built official memory, thus shaping a set of principles and values that permeated the memory of the Spanish society.

Reconstructing the past through the memory of the survivors means studying history using human subjectivity, which involves the effort of remembering, the distortion of the memories themselves, and the way these are put into words. History of this kind is an existential story manifested through personal experiences which coexists, as Eric Hobsbawm (1998) indicates (p. 4), alongside academic history, based on documents. In this sense, Maurice Halbwachs (1995: 210) states that lived history differs from written history because it is contextualized in a dynamic environment in which a memory can be based on a deformed, blurred, or altered image from the past.

The goal of this article is to research the historical memory of Francoism through the oral narratives of repression suffered during that period, investigating how the actors remember and make sense of these events in the present. It is therefore important to contextualize the moment at which they expressed their memories. The time-scale of memory of repression in Spain has been interpreted, as Alison Ribeiro de Menezes points out, as falling into at least three distinct periods:

according to Regime dictates during the Francoist period, then reinterpreted in accordance with the new memory horizon of the Transition to democracy, while since roughly the turn of the millennium, it has been undergoing a further revision that has aroused heated disputes in the political, civic, and academic arenas. (Ribeiro de Menezes, 2014: 11)

Indeed, the social and political silence established during the transition to democracy in the pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting) justified an amnesia and amnesty that has been challenged in recent years from different positions and with differing intentions. Certain political organizations and social sectors believe it is pertinent to publicly clarify an obscure past, but inside this movement there are internal disputes about the political perspective and intentions that should be adopted to recover such memories. ¹ Consequently, the social and political legacy and the current context produce, according to Antonio Gómez-López Quiñones (2012), a “structural political framework that constrains the potential for a more ambitious understanding of historical memory” (p. 88).

Certainly, the period in which the interviews were collected, during the financial crisis and in an atmosphere of political and institutional distrust, may have permeated both the memories and the way they are expressed, merging the representation of past repression and resilience with the protagonists’ present resistance against a future they observe with anxiety. Thus, present emotions are projected onto the past, coloring their remembrance, and in a certain way, these memories reflect the present situation of dissatisfaction and ideological fragmentation.

The aim of this article is both to provide information about this historical period and, simultaneously, to examine the memories and testimonies of the survivors in order to understand their past strategies to overcome repression. Recognizing their experiences, it will be possible to restore the dignity of those individuals who were classified as criminals in historical and legal archives and suffered processes of social stigmatization.

These are oral narratives that complement what the history books and contemporary documents tell us about those years. As Francisco Erice (2008) indicates, using this method does not mean rejecting the need for rigorous historical research, but rather represents a way of strengthening the links between civil society and the discipline of history. Fraser (2001) has pointed out, in this regard, that “oral history does not replace traditional historiography, but complements and fills its interstices” (p. 19). Life stories are, therefore, a testament to the values, ideology, and repression during Francoism, which allows us to form a more complete picture of history, focusing on intangible aspects such as the feelings, motivations, and experiences of those who lived through those episodes, in order to understand better, beyond official documents, the lives and experiences of many individuals, of a community, a society.

By analyzing the memories of those who suffered repression, it should be possible to overcome and suture the wounds of the past. As Berber Bevernage and Lore Colaert (2014) indicate (p. 3), “the therapy of truth revealing ultimately serves closure.” Also, the stories collected have led, in many cases, to an appeal to restore the dignity of those who were labeled as criminals, underlining the need to honor those who were imprisoned or executed after trials ² of dubious legality carried out with a view to retaliation and annihilation of the enemy. Hence, the testimonies of those interviewed have given visibility to the victims ignored by history and have provided the opportunity to clarify some of the facts that were only partially recorded in the historical archives of the time, reconstructing the past in the present (Díaz Soler, 2009: 89). This process helps to relieve the pain that had been internalized and silenced for a long time, constructing a future in which the past represents a resource rather than an obstacle to social cohesion.

In what follows, we will explain the process and methodology used to collect the participants’ memories. When examining these oral narratives, we structured the strategies of resilience observed in a binary type articulated around two aspects: silence or action. In the subsequent section, we consider how the individual strategies of the past can be gathered together in collective resilience in the present. In this sense, in the conclusions, we discuss further the benefits of providing a voice and giving visibility to individuals who were ignored by history so as to strengthen social cohesion and democratic values.

The process of collecting, examining, and (re)elaborating memories

The social behaviors analyzed are actions in situations that must be contextualized in order to be understood. The stories collected, with their particularities and diversities, are a medium to build a collective narrative in which individuality is inserted but not dissolved (Galeano Marín and Hurtado Orozco, 2004: 11). As Paloma Aguilar Fernández (1996: 25) explains, in the study of historical memory, the depositary subject is the collective, which does not mean that everyone inside the group holds the same factual memory and remembers the same historical episodes. It was therefore considered important in this research to establish a dialogue between individual and collective memories. The participants expressed their experiences and thoughts from their own singularity and particularity, but the individual testimonies allowed us to build a narrative with common themes that connected their memories. In this sense, the individual experiences of resilience expressed by the interviewees enabled us to apprehend and identify, at the micro-level, the logic of action that corresponds to the social world or meso-level (Bertaux, 2005: 18).

Totally, 57 interviews were collected from 2009 to 2011, bringing together an immense volume of memories that saturated the discourses of the informants. The use of semi-structured in-depth interviews helped interviewees to express freely, in content and in form, their experiences of repression and the strategies used to overcome adverse situations. This discourse was analyzed ³ in a process of examination and comprehension that served to construct new hypotheses and assumptions about the events of the past and how they were experienced by the protagonists. We have therefore accepted the lack of historical accuracy in the description of certain events, places, names, or dates. By doing so, we have accepted both the advantages and limitations of the vehicle that we used to obtain and analyze the information: memory itself. Memory is rooted in the past but concludes in the present when is expressed, modifying, altering, and deleting the experiences people had.

The selection of respondents did not aim to be representative but to procure a socio-structural representation of the object of study (Vallés, 1997), corresponding to the previously defined social type: individuals who suffered repression during Francoism. Consequently, the interviewees hold a common ideological past and a similar position concerning the recovery of historical memory; indeed they voluntarily participated in the research to illuminate a past which remains obscure after almost 40 years of democracy. The interviewees were contacted with the support of the non-governmental organizations (NGOs) Psicólogos sin Fronteras, the Asociación para la Recuperación de la Memoria Histórica (ARMH) and the Asociación de Alumnos mayores de la Universidad Carlos III de Madrid. ⁴ These associations distributed the information about this research among their members, and those persons who expressed the desire to participate were interviewed.

We collected 57 life stories embedded in a common history and common experience. The process of resilience observed depends on several components: their circumstances, the personality of the individual, the existence of social networks providing support, and, of course, the characteristics of the repression. The types of repression included are heterogeneous since they emerge from different contexts (prisons, schools, or social life); they have diverse origins (political, ideological, or religious) and the acts of repression took on different forms (executions, imprisonments, physical punishments, social stigmatization, or loss of material elements).

Contextualizing resilience: types of repression

Some people are forced to experience traumatic situations at specific periods of their life, which leaves scars that may or may not heal. Resilience is, as Boris Cyrulnik (2006a) points out, that process by which a person is able to overcome extreme situations of great stress or to form a personality that allows them to develop a life without suffering because of the past. The notion of resilience contains two different meanings: the ability of a substance or object to spring back into shape, referring to elasticity, and the capacity to recover quickly from difficulty, referring to toughness. ⁵ Resistance and recovery are part of the application of the term resilience to the social sciences (Bonanno, 2004; Bonanno et al., 2002; Bonanno and Kaltman, 2001), and both implications also converge in the different strategies adopted by our interviewees.

Another peculiarity of the action of resilience is its positive connotation (Becoña, 2006; Luthar and Cushing, 1999; Melillo, 2001; Rutter, 1993). The processes of resilience are, as our interviewees show, associated with the intention to recover or overcome an adverse and difficult situation to improve their vital condition in the future (Manciaux et al., 2001). Resilience is therefore a dynamic and complex process that goes beyond the reaction to an event; resilience is the subsequent step to repression, but it may begin before the action has been completed and persist after the repression has ceased.

The different resilient strategies adopted by our interviewees are determined by the repression exercised by the dictatorship. In this sense, it is possible to distinguish, according to Xavier Tusell Gómez (1975), three different periods in the regime in which the repressive actions and actors suffered modifications: the civil war and its aftermath, the central period of the dictatorship (from 1945 to the 1960s), and the final years of the regime, until Franco’s death in 1975. The means used to punish, arrest, and control were adapted to the emerging situations of Spanish society and the international context. Hence, after a first stage of purification and consolidation of the regime, the intensity of the repression was “professionalized,” with fewer informal and spontaneous initiatives. In this middle period, the need to appease the Allies, after World War II, called a halt to prosecutions of those accused of supporting the Republic in the Civil War (Anderson, 2009: 4). Finally, the last stages of the regime were characterized by the need to increase tolerance toward their ideological opponents to facilitate international relations.

The strategies of resilience observed in the oral narratives gathered can also be examined in terms of the nature of the repression, distinguishing between formal and informal repression. Formal repression was rooted in political or ideological reasons, and its consequences were often visible as it was partly documented with trials, imprisonments, executions, or dismissals. ⁶ Formal repression was carried out by the state and its institutions, and it was, on many occasions, accompanied by uncertainty, which made it difficult to deal with the punishment as it produced feelings of unfairness and also of being constantly exposed to the machinations of power. One interviewee described the puzzling process suffered after the Civil War, when she was arrested because of her previous connections with the Republic but she was not accused of anything specific:

And when I left, because I got very scared because as I had not been judged or anything, because I thought I was leaving [the prison] to return later, because many women were imprisoned and I got very scared. […] I will afterwards show you the document of my probation, I’m still on probation … because I was not judged, I was there for 9 months, I was imprisoned and then I left. So I was not accused of anything, only of being a roja, of joining the rebellion, but I did not know which rebellion, because it was them who rebelled, not us. (M. M. Woman)

Formal repression was combined and concurred with informal constraint processes, occurring when individuals were stigmatized, imposing labels and obstacles to their personal or social development. Informal repression was also provoked by the direct or indirect commitment to certain ideas or the association with certain political groups, but this kind of punishment was vaguer and more intangible as it transcended the legal–political sphere and was embodied in primary and secondary social circles, implying greater difficulties in reconciling public and private life. Interviewees expressed the idea that being a member of a union or the son of a former Republican mayor led to a process of social stigmatization and isolation in small communities. Interviewees also reflected the impact of being known as “rojo” ⁷ or “republican,” a label that had an impact on their social life and hindered their professional careers. Along these lines, F.R. described the process of social closure suffered by his siblings in the first stages of Francoism:

My two brothers were … working, because, my friend, to work it was necessary a very important element, a certificate of good conduct. The certificate of good conduct was issued by the church (laughter). When my mother went to ask for the certificate to the church, because Tetuán was a village, in the neighborhood all the families knew each other […] Don Jose, Don Saturio, or whatever his name was, said that there were no certificates, that the rojos had no certificate, a rojo was not entitled to anything and my mother said “then what rights do we have? to die?” and he responded “to die.” (F.R., Man)

The social character of the punishments and the persistence of informal repressions over time produced more complex and prolonged strategies of resilience. Sometimes, informal punishment was more difficult to overcome because it involved a betrayal of the social environment, of those who surrounded the individual and were part of their lives. If formal punishment meant facing a personal or family loss or incarceration, informal repression frequently meant living with a label, assuming a submissive position, undergoing discrimination, or escaping from one’s previous life. That situation affected the life chances of many individuals; in this sense, J.N. described the difficulties faced by a close relative in finding a job because of his previous association with the Republic:

… and … he said “what is going on?“ and she replied “nothing, the boy, we cannot find anything [any work] for him, everywhere he is rejected because they say he is a rojo. (J.N., Man)

Stigmatization, especially in the early years of Francoism, was often accompanied by physical damage (to which the institutions turned a blind eye), reflecting the occasional blurring of distinctions between formal and informal repression. Indeed, both kinds of repression were used and combined to reinforce and strengthen the authority and power of the regime. R.H. described the repression suffered in his hometown by his family, with ideological connections with the Republic, in the first years of Francoism. He explained the mutual support of the formal and informal repression and also the feeling of helplessness of those who were repressed:

There everybody knew you. That is, there you could not, no … there was nothing to say. Everything was already said. And also … once they tried to stab a nail into my sister’s head, just because she was looking at a shop window, a bakery. (R.H., Man)

Strategies of resilience: from silence to action

Resilience is a process associated with the hope and will to overcome difficulties through various strategies that make it possible to combine personal desolation with hope for the future. Although this might be interpreted as a metamorphosis, alluding to individuals’ capacity to rebuild their personality, in the process of resilience there is always coherence with the person who existed before the repression.

The strategies of resilience observed among the interviewees are the result of the convergence of the individual personality and the social context in which the person is immersed. Hence, resilience cannot be explained exclusively in individual terms; it is not a quality, a skill, or a genetically inherited ability, but a reaction with an unconscious or uncontrolled component that is immersed in a dynamic process rooted in the social environment and the individual’s social condition. Resilience is, consequently, something that belongs not only to the person but also to the social environment; the community, the family, and the social networks available have a great impact on the strategy of resilience assumed by the individual (Abella Galindo and Rangel Aguirre, 2008; Cyrulnik, 2006b; Robles Sánchez, 2013).

The different strategies of resilience adopted by the interviewees reflect their responses to the diverse forms of repression and also the combination of the social context with the individual’s determination to face an adverse situation. It is therefore possible to address the observed forms of resilience in terms of two different strategies that reflect, from a broad perspective and with a variety of reactions, the continuity or rupture with the political or ideological past and the submissiveness or disobedience toward the forces of repression.

Collective resilience: reorganizing the experience of the past in the present

Resilience does not mean acting as if nothing had happened once adversity has been overcome; it implies learning from the experiences lived (Grynwald, 2012). Interviewees refer to the need to verbalize their memories in order to be able to deal with their past individually and also, collectively, remembering and sharing the processes of stigmatization and the social division provoked by the war and the ideological confrontation to defeat the hidden traumas from the past (Díaz Soler, 2009: 89).

The identification of grief constitutes an important step to close the wounds from a past that remain open in the minds of many interviewees and their descendants. The verbalization of their past repression also helps to create a joint identity, reconstructing a shared imaginary in which it is possible to assemble a diversity of long-occluded discourses, generating a collective resilience that also affects those who decide to remain mute and the descendants of those who can no longer express their stories.

Interviewees expressed the desire for a “symbolic” restitution of their honor, the dignity of those who died and their prevailing memories, expressing publicly something that obviously does not change what happened in the past, but which can transform the present and the future. They demand moral reparation, a transitional justice that will allow them to openly reconcile their individual and social identity. They consider that the transition to democracy did not satisfactorily confront this matter and the Spanish institutions, during the democracy, “did not properly remember and acknowledge the crimes of Francoism against republican families” (Bevernage and Colaert, 2014: 1–2). Consequently, a significant number of interviewees, descendants of those who were formally repressed by Francoist institutions, imprisoned or executed, demanded justice and the reparation of their dignity in the present:

There are hundreds of thousands of Spaniards buried, some buried well and others poorly buried. And then there is something, to those of us who are not believers, but who believe in a much bigger thing … which is trust, honor, something we owe to our generation, the world has to know what happened in this country between nineteen thirty-nine and nineteen seventy-five. (F.R.D., Man)

… My pain is that the verdicts have not been quashed. I do not demand revenge or compensation, even if some people say that … I would not like … I would not like to die without knowing that those trials have been annulled, because they were trials without trials … a pantomime. (J.L., Man)

… And all I wanted was recognition to my mother, so I struggled to get her pension, not for the economic retribution, but because of the recognition that it implied. (V.M.F., Man)

… She never betrayed her ideals. I would have liked recognition for my mother, who suffered so much … and for me, that I grew up with that helplessness … (C.P., Woman)

Indeed, the socio-political representation of the victims or descendants of victims transcends their personal experiences, as the process of “victimization” permeates their memories, their remembrance, and expression of these memories in the present (Aguilar Fernández, 2008). In this sense, the social and political perception of the victims is influenced by other international processes, most notably by the impact of the historical memory of the Holocaust (Baer and Sznaider, 2015; Gómez López-Quiñones, 2012). The result is the recombination of these memories in a postmodern discourse (Renshaw, 2011), in which the diversity of experiences of repression are blended but are then oriented and connoted depending on the political perception (Aguilar Fernández, 1996, 2007).

Consequently, for our interviewees, to express their experiences means overcoming repression and also the opportunity to abandon the role of victim and take on an active role in the reconstruction of historical memory (Latorre Iglesias, 2012). Also narrating a past that had long been silenced, many interviewees felt that they were performing a resilient act, and while healing their wounds, they also felt that they would help to prevent this past from happening again in the future (Stortz, 2007: 19):

We had to vent our consciences … it was my duty to do what I did … (J.M.L., Man)

The interviewees thus contributed to helping their generation to receive the recognition that history denied them, and they plotted an intergenerational commitment, a willingness to prevent present and future generations from suffering what they suffered, connecting their past with a future which, they are aware, they will not themselves experience:

… This, the [recovery of the] historical memory … and not said by someone who, well, who has a bond with them … if we do not deal with historical memory now it will always be pending. (R.H.F., Man)

… When we are asked about what we are doing with historical memory and the intentions we have … we do it so the past will not happen again, what we have experienced we do not wish it will happen to anyone, no one. Not even to my worst enemy do I wish him to suffer what we have experienced, no, no, and I do not act in the spirit of revenge or hatred, but with the hope that young people will know what happened in the past and that they [the repressed] deserve respect and affection. […] I told them everything I knew, what I have explained to you and they said … do you know what they said? That we honestly appreciate this because this is the history of Spain and that they are hiding it, and that we should be part of the school, should be part of a subject. (C.C., Woman)

However, remembering the past does not mean reviving previous confrontations. On the contrary, it opens up new possibilities for overcoming the classification and labeling of the sides and the individuals who participated, by situating the action in a specific social, political, and cultural context. In this sense, “hatred and revenge” are two words that have been expressed in many interviews, but attached to them, often in the same sentence, two concepts were also present: the need to remember and the intention to forgive. The interviewees expressed the idea that the memories of those events do not arouse hatred nowadays. They unconsciously understand that feelings of hatred do not help to produce successful resilient processes. Indeed, negative feelings become an obstacle if we want to overcome the traumatic experiences of the past, as the memories hurt the individuals instead of helping to heal their wounds. In this sense, the words of Martha E. Stortz (2007) illustrate the feelings of the majority of the interviewees and their descendants: “in forgiving they remembered. In remembering they forgave” (p. 19):

And apparently, everything is forgiven, but it cannot be forgotten. Forgetfulness has nothing to do with forgiveness. Then, I’ve never felt hatred, but forget … I cannot forget, undoubtedly, and I think history is written with the reality of the people. Well, I would like us to get on well with each other, I always wanted that, each person with their ideas, each person defending what they consider … fair. (V.M.F., Man)

… My heart does not hate, but does not forget. (F.R.D., Man)

In this regard, the period of transition to democracy opened new possibilities to restore or redirect the political ideas, but it also brought new discontentment and new conflicts. The leitmotivs of the transition to democracy was nunca más (never again) and “to look ahead in order to overcome the past, but the memory movement reverses this relationship and recommends looking back” (Baer and Sznaider, 2015: 8). However, this hindsight is influenced by the present political and social context and, consequently, some interviewees expressed disappointment with the new political parties and trade unions, as some of them had previously fought and acted clandestinely with ambitious targets, but, in the new scenario, they considerably reduced their political aspirations, especially in terms of recognition of the victims.

Hence, some interviewees believed that democracy has missed the opportunity to create an official, collective process of resilience. The possibilities of generating successful processes of collective resilience are higher when political and social mechanisms are put into place to produce justice in communities and nations that have suffered continuous or extreme acts of mass violence. Considering that the repressions occurred at a historical moment of persecution and social upheaval, the restitution would also have to be social, political, and public (Angulo Menassé, 2009). For a considerable number of interviewees, it is the stigma itself and all the negative connotations that Francoism has attributed to the “rojos” that needs to be modified through institutional and official processes in order to overcome the traumas of the past that are being projected in the present.

The public and institutional interpretation and diagnosis of the social issues of the past are illustrative of the intentions of society in the present; in this regard, Spanish society has not found the solution yet. Instead, it has hidden the real confrontation and, by doing that, has impeded social resilience:

… When we have been there all we’ve seen is forgotten and nobody wants to do anything, and everything is accepted, but that is why I say we are in 2010 and we should have a festivity to honor the Republicans who fought for their country. (C.P., Woman)

Democracy brought ambivalences and contradictions in the behavior of those who were repressed during Francoism. While some interviewees declared satisfaction with the possibility of publicly expressing ideas that were hidden or silenced for a long time, participating in demonstrations and social movements, others perceived the new political era with skepticism, preferring to speak softly due to the fear that they developed and internalized for decades, hoping that public silence would allow them and their descendants to achieve a “normality” that was denied because of social stigmatization. These individuals reflect the difficulty of carrying out processes of resilience when there is no clarity on the recognition of historical events and there are obstacles to building a collective narrative. In this sense, one interviewee demanded the historical clarification of the process of imprisonment and execution of her father for his collaboration with the Republican government:

… And the only thing I wish is that those summary trials should be annulled, because I do not want anyone to smear the name of my father, or the others. I have asked, but they have ignored me […] people now are more afraid. It is another kind of fear, but a more paralyzing fear. (C.P.H. Woman)

Now, the third generation, those made up of the grandchildren of the repressed, who were mostly born in the democracy, has the option of recovering the memories of their grandparents without the distress and emotions of earlier times. This is a generation able to face up to a trauma inherited from their ancestors, avoiding old taboos and with the option to break el pacto del olvido (pact of forgetting) established during the transition to democracy. These new actors have the possibility of debating about the past with a different, re-signified, conception of the suffering and the victims. Their responsibility is not to re-judge the original crimes, but to recover the dignity of those who were labeled as criminals, and simultaneously to provide a scenario for their descendants to deal with the memories in a different manner (Baer and Sznaider, 2015; Bevernage and Colaert, 2014). One interviewee, whose grandfather was executed during the Civil War, asked for the restoration of his honor and dignity. She spoke about a past that she perceived distantly, as she never met her grandfather, but she had appropriated the stories that her mother had told her; in her expressions, it is palpable that she feels frustrated at knowing that her grandfather was repressed and her family stigmatized for defending democracy, the same political system that nowadays is still reluctant to recognize and clarify the past:

… “the Grandfather fought for Spain, fought for the Republic,” he said it very quietly and with much fear, every year he said the same: “grandfather fought for Spain and the Republic, because he was a very fair person, so now he would fight for democracy.” My grandfather fought for the Republic, and fought against a coup, they won, then they were the Nationalists and the other were the rojos, contemptuously, they were rojos because my grandfather was a rojo, my grandfather fought for the Republic and that means something … then I am here simply to dignify the name of my grandfather, and dignify all those who fought for the Republic, as today they would fight for democracy and I say this with love, because this is what my mother taught us, that my grandfather was a good person, he was not a bad person to be forgotten, as it is today […]. They were not rojos, they were Spaniards, they were patriots, they were fighting against a coup, later they were the bad guys, no, no, this must be dignified, their honor, of those who fought for Spain and they would do the same today for democracy. (C.P.H. Woman)

Conclusion

Resilience, as well as repression, has distinctive characteristics that differentiate the experience of the 57 people interviewed. However, their lives have a common component: they have suffered repression, and they all have had to deal with sorrow. The opportunity of giving voice to those memories means connecting the past with the present and linking individual experiences with the collective imaginary, developing a resilient strategy that affects not only this group of people but the whole of society.

This article has constituted a resilient strategy for those who participated in our research, as the identification and narration of a painful past has also provided relief to some interviewees who had kept silent for a long time. In this sense, resilience refers to the strategies assumed in the past and also to the acts of the present. Likewise, this article can be considered a meta-resilient action, as it is articulated in the analysis of resilience strategies adopted in the past to deal with a situation that remains socially conflictive in the present. Understanding the mechanisms, reasons, and motivations that led many people to deal with adverse situations is a way to learn about the past of a society from the perspective of these individuals, enriching historical events with subjective, personal, and intangible elements. Moreover, repressive actions and the subsequent resilient strategies in the past are connected with the present in a transitive memory that seeks not to return to or repair the past, but which aims to dignify those individuals who were labeled as criminals in legal or historical archives or who are absent from the official versions of history.

By giving voice to testimonies that were silenced for a long time, we may encourage third and fourth generations to approach the experiences and life stories of their ancestors and to prevent similar situations in the future. Knowledge about the past may also serve to strengthen the socio-political present and future. Certainly, the values and principles of the political past have prevented many people from expressing their experiences and thoughts, but new democratic values should not only impede the reemergence of the past but should also promote shared collective memories to supersede the ideological confrontation rooted in the past.

Past experiences and memories will be useful to reconstruct a past that many of those involved and their descendants remember with sorrow. The present strategies used to deal with these memories resemble the strategies adopted to overcome repression. In both cases, there is distress and resilience. However, the resilience of the past had a different component, the intention to survive: surviving in biological terms, which meant, in many cases, escaping from death, but also surviving in social terms, as for many interviewees their strategies of resilience reflected their intention to live in a society without ideological stigma. Today, under democracy, the stigma has been replaced with a vague ideological conflict, the product of a trauma that has not been treated and cannot be forgotten. The solidarity between those who decided to share their memories and a generation that would like to hear their life stories will help to overcome the past and strengthen the future.