There are so many people that the roe deer can be seen at eleven o’clock in the morning, crossing the road without fear or acceleration, which will then lose the asphalt in the bend and turn into a dirt track. The last town we left, very close to Barcelona Highway, is empty in anticipation of summer. Even Camilo José Sella did not pass this part of La Alcaria on his famous voyage. It is so abandoned that there is no garbage. The only remnants we find are the reserves left by the Francoist soldiers and the small remnants of the prisoners of the concentration camp who lived in these last days in this forest of parsley and gall oak.
On the maps, which indicate the 300 Franciscan concentration camps, there is no exact location of Jadrak in Guadalajara. In the town known, as a child they played in the stone barracks where soldiers of Franco’s army lived. Only they are left with the branches of trees that have risen to their feet, which grow smoothly and hide the memory of humiliation and repression.
Where it was not uncommon to see neighbors, there were nearly 30 tombs appearing on either side of a very narrow path. At the time of the maximum occupation, they were coming to house more than 4,000 people who had to live in appalling conditions in these pits dug in the ground. These are strips covered with vegetation and have now been discovered by a team of archaeologists from Incipit-CSIC, led by Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal and Luis Antonio Ruiz, funding the three-week work of the Democratic Secretary of State. Memory.
Neither time has passed nor the people and remains left frozen on the ground and under the brush. Now a team of eight is moving dirt and bushes to reveal the conditions in which the prisoners have been since 1937. The rebels first used captive Republican prisoners in the north to build barracks for Francoist soldiers fighting on the Guadalajara front. Then, from March to April 1939, it became a concentration camp. Luis Antonio Ruiz says that every 20 Spaniards was a prisoner of one of them in 1937-1939.
“We did not know about the concentration camp,” said Jadrak Mayor Hector Gregorio Esteban (PSOE). It was local researchers Alfonso Lopez Beltran and Julian Duenas who discovered the excavations and confirmed them by flying a plane. As soon as they reviewed the data of the Avila General Military Archive and the National Geographical Institute, they found documents that spoke of the existence of a command post, transfer center, and concentration camp in the mountains. From May 1938 there were troops of the 74th Division, the 131st Baillen Regiment, and the 73rd Division. By March 1939, a total of 4,338 prisoners had been registered.
In other words, it was a military complex during the war and, since 1939, an ephemeral and makeshift concentration camp used to concentrate mass-surrendered soldiers. Experts say the barracks were completed in late 1938, four months before the end of the war. “It’s the beginning of a hellish journey that could last for decades or end in death. From this forest they entered the operative chain which took them to prisons or forced labor camps. All these centers are factories where you can not. To get involved in the new state, “Alfredo Gonzalez-Ruibal summed up the newspaper.
“This concentration camp is clearly evidence of a war crime. The minimum conditions for the treatment of prisoners of war were not met here. They were in trenches, half-buried, overcrowded and malnourished. “They lived in Burus, surrounded by barbed wire. It has nothing to do with the popular image of Nazi camps organized in barracks and marked streets. ‘They looked like cattle,'” said Luis Antonio Ruiz.
The discovery is unique to the working group as it remains intact. They say it is hard to find another material unit like the one in Jadrak. There are trenches, a military camp, a labor camp and a concentration camp. It is a place of memory but also of heritage. It would hardly be enough to attach posters to turn the place into a museum, they joke about the state of conservation in which it is found. Only political will can make this site a reality.
“The remnants have a lot of identities,” said Ruiz, who is surprised by the lack of knowledge about Franco’s concentration camps. “It was a massive phenomenon, practically everyone had one at their doorstep,” said the archaeologist, who is convinced that crucial elements will emerge in the coming days to understand how prisoners survived bad weather in inhumane conditions. The winter of 1937 was the coldest in the 1930s.
The reason for oblivion, archaeologists say, is the Franco regime. “It took him many years to naturalize and move to a mode of development of soft authoritarianism. Later, the transition did not help to condemn the erasure of facts,” Ruiball said. As if that were not enough, the repression of the losers in the cities near the concentration camp should not have helped to preserve the memory of the hellish place. Here prisoners were classified according to their political identity. If they were loyal, chained to the mode or shot. Archaeologists do not expect to find human remains as they have been killed in remote areas.
Aerial shots taken by North American aviation in the 1940s and 1950s show a completely different relief from the lush space before our eyes. There is no trace of green varnish in these pictures that we find on current maps. Most of the traumatic sites of the Civil War rebuilt the forest after 25 years, becoming invisible and silent.
In addition, it is normal to recycle these repression spaces. This is not the case. He was frozen in time, a hidden forest that did dirty work and hid crimes. “War has become taboo. They did not want to talk about anything. It helped to forget about it,” said Jadrak Mayor.
And then came the speech in the cities. The time when there was more population in this area was during the Civil War. The rest of the population and the memory that summed up the war and the aftermath of the most horrific war, was filled with a vacuum.
Source: El Diario
I am Ida Scott, a journalist and content author with a passion for uncovering the truth. I have been writing professionally for Today Times Live since 2020 and specialize in political news. My career began when I was just 17; I had already developed a knack for research and an eye for detail which made me stand out from my peers.
