Letter from Madrid

"My grandfather was a 'red,' as they called Socialist and Communist republicans at the time. In his village in Murcia, they wouldn't even sell him bread. He was a pariah. He ended up moving to Belgium when my father was nine, in the 1950s, to escape Franco's regime," recounted Roberto, a press photographer in his forties who preferred not to give his last name. He was born in Belgium, where he lived until he was 20, where he was steeped in the Spanish language and culture while enduring the pain of exile. Then he decided to "return" to Spain. But can one really say they are "returning" to a country where they have never lived, to which their attachment is mainly built on the memories and sufferings of their parents, or the nostalgia and regrets of ancestors forced to leave? "For me, it was obvious. It's my country, at least as much as, if not more than, Belgium."

"To say one is 'returning,' in reference to one's ancestors' exile, makes sense. From birth, you can inherit your parents' experiences and traumas. You can also inherit the pain of grandparents who died before they could walk again in the streets where they took their first steps," said Emilio Silva, president of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, who inherited the trauma of being the grandson of someone who "disappeared" during the Spanish Civil War – Silva had his grandfather exhumed from a mass grave in 2000. "This return is, above all, an emotional one."

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