Luís Iriondo

Gernika is considered to be the holy town of the Basques. There is a tree, called the holy tree, under which the representatives of various towns met to try to resolve how to govern the area. At the beginning of the war, in 1936 Gernika was a small town of about 5,000 inhabitants.

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My name is Luis Iriondo Aurtenetxea and I am Juan Iriondo’s and Elvira Aur-tenetxea’s son and I was born here in Gernika. I had two brothers and one sister: Rafael, the eldest, was 17 and he was studying commerce in Bilbao. Patxi, was 9 years old and my sister Mari Cruz, 5 years old. My parents had a furniture business and a coal yard. My mother took charge of the furniture shop and my father the coal yard. At home an-other person was living with us. She was called Damasa. We also had a little dog called “Perla” and a donkey called “Perico”.

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The first time I heard about the war I was on the beach. I was sunbathing on the sand next to my father who was talking with a friend, and I listened to their conversa-tion. They were saying that there had been a rebellion of troops in the north of Africa, in the Spanish protectorate of Morocco.

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Events continued, and increased in pace. Lorries and cars full of armed people started to be seen in the town. One day, two civilian guards riding horses, attracted a crowd by beating drums, they read a communiqué which said there was a state of war. For us, the children, everything was new and seemed like a game.

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The town was changing. Basic need items were becoming unavailable. Barracks were fitted out for the different troops. The front was 30 kms from Gernika, and news about young people from Gernika being killed was heard. The first aeroplanes were seen in the sky, too.

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War wasn’t going well for the Basques. Franco’s troops attacked round Navarra and took San Sebastian.

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As the Francoist advance progressed, the first refugees arrived. More and more people were coming. With the new refugees continuously arriving and the troops in bar-racks, Gernika seemed to be in a festive season. The streets were full of people going up and down.

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We heard about the bombing of nearby towns, especially Durango, only 20 km. from Gernika, and the construction of shelters was taken more seriously.

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On the 26th of April I was going happily to the bank, after having lunch. The day before I had just worn my first long trousers.

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A little later, the alarm bells started ringing. The man asked me: “Why are bells ringing?”
– “Planes” I told him playing down the importance of it. “They are the alarm bells.”
The man was frightened.
– “Where is there a shelter?” He asked.
– “Pass the cattle fairground” I told him “go up some stairs and at the end of the square there are some.”
– “Come with me!” He ordered and I had to follow him very half-heartedly.

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Gernika didn’t have any defence. According to a telegram sent by the Basque president Aguirre to the Airforce Minister on the 15th of April, eleven days before the bombing, there were only 4 aircraft in Biscay ready to fly.

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I went out and stopped, terrified. The whole town was in flames. Smoke covered the sky.

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The fire from Gernika illuminated the square and I saw my mother’s silhouette shouting my name again. I ran towards her and we embraced each other.
“Let’s go to the town” she told me when we moved away a little later. “We are going to be taken to Bilbao.”
While we were going down by the road, she told me what had happened to them during the bombing.

Lienzo de Luís Iriondo (Luis Iriondo’s Painting)

El incendio de Gernika alumbraba la plaza cuando vi en medio de ella la silueta de una mujer. Eché a correr hacia ella y nos fundimos en un abrazo.
The fire from Gernika illuminated the square and I saw my mother’s silhouette shouting my name again. I ran towards her and we embraced each other.

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When we arrived in Gernika there were a lot of people moving around. Soldiers and firemen from Bilbao tried pointlessly to put out the fire. They moved the hoses shouting and giving orders, but pipes had burst and there was no water.

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Meanwhile, the Francoist troops had got into Gernika and were approaching the defences surrounding Bilbao called “El cinturon de hierro” (the iron belt).

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She came back in the afternoon and told us:
– “Be ready. Tomorrow we’ll leave”.
– “Where are we going to go?” I asked her.
– “I don’t know, I think to France. A ship is leaving tonight from Santander and we have to get on it. We can’t stand this any more”.
That night we embarked on an English coal ship.

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As I was the only one with some knowledge of French, I became the colony in-terpreter. I used to go shopping with my mother, and she was appointed as administrator for the group, perhaps because she was the interpreter’s mother. We were a group of about thirty people and the women took turns in the kitchen. Every week the town council’s representative came to take the register and give us an allowance, although I didn’t know where it came from. Possibly it was from the Spanish or the Basque gov-ernment.

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At the end of July we had news of my father. He was still in Bilbao, in the same flat where we left him. Rafael was taken prisoner. He asked us to come back and my mother didn’t hesitate to do it. She was a very determined person. She left me looking after my brother and sister and, without knowing a word of French, she went to Paris, to the Basque Government offices, and sorted out the papers to go back.

We had to go through Paris when the International Fair was taking place and where, in the Spanish Pavilion, Picasso’s painting with the name of my town was being exhibited for the first time. Unfortunately, we didn’t know about it, and it would have been impossible for us to visit it anyway. We departed at night and next morning we were at the Spanish border.

What we found in Spain was very different from what we had left there. We had to sort out our papers in the town council of Irun and when we went to a bar to have breakfast, a notice on the wall attracted my attention. It said: “If you are Spanish, speak Spanish”. I thought it was addressed to people coming from France, but it referred to our language, Basque.

On the train, from San Sebastian to Bilbao, a man started talking to us. We told him we were from Gernika and started telling him about the bombing and destruction of our town when he put a finger on his lips and looking around he told us:
– “Don’t say that Gernika was bombed.”
– “Why ?” We asked him.
– “Because it must be said that it was burnt by the reds.”
That was the last time we spoke about the matter.

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With the arrival of democracy, books relating to the topic proliferated, but they were not news any more. In 1987 we celebrated the 50th anniversary of the bombing as though it was a great party. There was music everywhere, dances, rock concerts etc. Young people of all types and from everywhere arrived in the town and it seemed like they took possession of the town, and paraded as though they conquered it, committing all kinds of outrages. It was a gloomy day for all of us who had lived through the bomb-ing. It was being celebrated with a party of fun and merrymaking to commemorate our town’s destruction and the death of lots of loved ones. Somebody said: “God willing there won’t be another bombing. We hope not to be able to celebrate another anniver-sary like this!”

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Nowadays Gernika is a nice and modern town, with a population of about fifteen thousand inhabitants and where there are no reminders of its destruction. Where once the “plazatoros” was, there is a new building for the market, and where it still takes place every Monday during the year. The young people have heard about the bombing, and it’s something completely alien to them, for them it’s only a historical event.

The town council, forgetting past events, has twinned itself with a German town, called Pforzheim, which was also destroyed, this time by the British air force during World War II. The German Government had promised, as an act of atonement, to build in Gernika a technical studies high school, but finally it limited its donation to three million marks, to help in the building of a sports centre.

Nowadays Gernika is called “the Peace Town” and there is a permanent office devoted to the spread of reconciliation techniques, called “Gernika Gogoratuz” (Re-membering Gernika).

Guernica. A survivor’s diary

Luis Iriondo
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