Snippets from Spain
Spending Saturday in Jail in Segovia
I spent last Saturday in jail in Segovia. Thirty others also decided to pass a spring morning inside this prison, now called the Democratic Memorial of Segovia. It pays tribute to the men and women of this city, and of other places around Spain, who were locked up and tortured here for resisting Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s dictatorship and his Fascist regime. Usually, one doesn’t think of jail and democracy together.
The building, starting in 1924, housed a Women’s Reformatory with space for two-hundred residents. In 1933, Victoria Kent, lawyer, feminist, Director of General Prisons, and later exile of Franco’s regime, converted the institution into a penitentiary hospital for men. It adhered to Kent’s new jail reform legislation, including elimination of shackles and chains, freedom of worship, and improved diet and hygiene. She abolished torture cells. (More on Kent in this Snippet.)
When the Civil War broke out on July 16, 1936, the leaders of Franco’s Nationalist party slashed Kent’s reforms. They imposed a dictum of one of Franco’s generals: “Repression must be extremely violent because the enemy is strong and well organized.” These words invited tens of thousands of indiscriminate executions and mass incarceration for those who fought to guard the country’s five-year-old democracy.
In Segovia, Nationalist soldiers threw anyone opposing Franco’s doctrine into jail. Por-democracy Republicans, communists, socialists, anarchists, Marxists, union members, and atheists crowded its cells.
We visitors, standing on the cement floor for two hours, shivered in sweaters and jackets. Some wore gloves. Little light seeped through the windows in the cells. They were so high that prisoners could not peer out on trees, grass, or hills. The window ledge slanted so that even if they could get handhold, they would have fallen to the floor immediately. Five to six prisoners shared a cell. Filthy mattress littered the floor. They emptied the shared toilet bucket once a day. They had one pitcher of water. The first floor cells for torture and solitary confinement trapped dampness.
One of the tour member’s eyes filled with tears when he saw soiled brown mattress. He said his father had spent five years in this jail. He never knew much about his father’s imprisonment because he had died when his son was a year old. His mother refused to talk about it. “Very emotional,” he muttered about the visit.
The jail authorities developed a system in which prisoners could pay off their “debt” for food and lodging, for which they received a miniscule number of pesetas. They labored in the laundry, kitchen, or cooperative store. They cleaned the bathroom buckets and toiled in the agricultural fields. Prisoners with long sentences, masons, and communists were denied this opportunity. Work allowed them to “redeem” themselves for their sinful actions and political beliefs. Their atonement demonstrated the regime’s relationship between politics, Catholicism, sin, and punishment.
After the war, from 1941 to 1943, the prison became a tuberculosis sanitorium. From 1946 to 1956, it was a women’s prison. After that, it returned to its original use as a reformatory, this time for “fallen women,” prostitutes. Employees “rehabilitated” them to get married or become nuns. In 1969, the building turned into a Penitentiary Center for Convicted Criminals, political prisoners.
During our tour, someone asked why the women prisoners in the photographs smiled. Our guide explained that appearing happy, dressing in clean gray and white uniforms, and primping their hair demonstrated defiance. Neither the regime nor the jail would break their spirits.
Authorities allowed them to write to their families twice a month. They read incoming and outgoing letters to censor anti-regime political and religious language. Three holidays a year, children could spend a few hours with their mothers. They sometimes came with cigarettes, photographs, letters, newspaper clippings, and political pamphlets sewed in their clothes. The regime used this apparent kindness and generosity to manipulate the prisoners’ emotions.
One prisoner, Maria Salvo Iborra, embodied the spirit of her female jail mates. Born in Cataluña in 1920 to a cabinet maker active in a workers’ movement and a Catholic illiterate mother, she began at age thirteen to work as a porter. She participated in a youth movement. When the war started, she, as an employee of a clothing workshop, joined a workers’ union. She became the Secretary of Propaganda for a socialist youth organization. When Cataluña fell to Franco’s troops, she fled to France where authorities moved her to different concentration camps. French police then handed her to the Spanish Civil Guard in the city of Bilbao.
Now twenty-one years old, she continued her secret work with the Unified Socialist Party of Cataluña until she was arrested in Madrid for “conspiracy against the internal security of the State.” Her captors tortured her for thirty days. She was sent to prisons in Madrid and Barcelona. In 1944, a military tribunal sentenced her to thirty years of confinement for attacks against the state and locked her up in Segovia.
After sixteen years, authorities released her. They forbade her to return to Barcelona. Despite that, she did. She resumed her political activities and joined the feminist movement. After Franco’s death, Salvo led several organizations to honor those who had died, especially women resistors. Among other awards, she received a medal of honor from the Barcelona government in 2003 for her work to ensure that these women’s sacrifices were not forgotten. She died at age one hundred.
In 2000, the Segovia prison ceased functioning when a new one opened. Today, the former prison helps visitors understand the realities of a Fascist government and remember those brave souls who suffered there because they fought to preserve their democratic country. It’s the only prison of its kind. Given that 20 percent of the current generation of Spaniards between eighteen and twenty-four-years old idealize the Franco era, every city should have a memorial like this one.
Your last sentence is the punch in the gut.
Tragedias de la historia de mi país. Huellas que nos enseñan lo que no debe volver a pasar. Tragedies of my homeland. Traces etched in time about what must never recur