TOLEDO, SPAIN– Yes, there is a street in this Spanish city named Calle de Toledo de Ohio, after the city that adopted her name.
They also still do make swords here, as they have since Hannibal’s time, although my guide whispered to me last month that those sold to tourists are mostly made in China.
But the older Toledo is not very much like the Ohio one at all. It has picturesque castles, narrow winding medieval streets, and only about one-third the population. It does have vastly more history, stretching back to pre-Roman times.
Nor is Spain, despite a taste for pricey cars and seemingly far more Burger King outlets per capita than here, much like America, though Ford Motor Co. has its largest manufacturing plant outside the United States in Spain.
True, there are signs of American influence even in this ancient town; for some inexplicable reason, an otherwise picturesque little café near the Plaza de Zocodover in Toledo was jarring the air one recent afternoon with, of all things, old Connie Francis songs.
In one way, the Spanish seem saner. When it comes to Covid-19, attitudes are very different. In two weeks crisscrossing the country, I never saw anyone not wearing a mask indoors, and most people did so outside as well, if they were close to others. Only once, on a Friday night in Madrid, did I see a flock of twenty-somethings largely unmasked, socializing in a crowded downtown square.
Nor did I see any sign of protesters claiming the vaccine was dangerous or didn’t work or was a government plot to control their minds. By the end of September, nearly 80 percent of all Spaniards were fully vaccinated, and the country’s rate of infections and deaths was considerably lower than America’s.
Spaniards, especially in larger cities, such as Barcelona and Madrid, also seem to dress somewhat better and behave more politely than most people on the streets in American towns.
But beneath the surface, they are also deeply conflicted by the legacy of a past most would rather not face. Americans wrestle with their many issues of race openly and loudly.
Spain, however, has a huge and largely hidden dirty secret of its own. The country was torn apart from 1936 to 1939 by a civil war so savage that it made ours look like chivalry.
The nation is just now beginning to open some of the estimated more than 2,000 mass graves scattered through Spain.
One of these held 33,000 skeletons. Spain was where the various European powers — Nazi Germany, fascist Italy, and the Soviet Union – came to test out their weapons as a prelude to World War II. The European democracies stayed officially neutral, which guaranteed that General Francisco Franco’s fascists, who had revolted against a popularly elected left-wing government, eventually won.
When the war ended, half a million Spaniards were dead, and the country was battered and impoverished. Executions of anyone suspected of having left-wing sympathies, perhaps as many as 135,000, went on for decades, usually by garroting.
Franco stayed in power until his death in 1975; though he admired Adolf Hitler, he stopped short of entering World War II, which saved his regime. During the Cold War, the west tolerated him, despite his odious ways, because he was anti-Communist.
Within two years after he finally died, democracy and a constitutional monarchy were restored. But there was a catch: Those who wanted free elections had to agree to a law providing amnesty for all those who took part in any crimes throughout the Franco era.
The United Nations has demanded this be repealed, noting that it violates international human rights law, but so far, Spain has not been willing to do so. “This country has never faced the truth. Spain has never come to terms with its past,” said historian Almudena Cros.
Dr. Cros, who is 51, earned a doctorate in medieval art history before she became mesmerized by the war that ripped her country apart, and then was covered up by the victors and largely forgotten by the rest of the world. Now, whenever she can, she gives compelling tours of what the war did to Madrid.
For four hours, she took me around Madrid, taking me to beautiful buildings and squares, and then showing me pictures of them in 1936, with a large Nazi bomb crater in front of one.
The same firm is in the building and the square is very much the same. Much looks the same now and then, except that in the older picture, there are rows of dead children on the ground.
Later, she took me to the top of a building where the Hotel Florida once stood, where Ernest Hemingway and other correspondents stayed during that war. It is now an elegant food emporium, and we stood among oblivious diners, and she pointed out where the front lines had been for the more than two years in which the city’s workers and local militias had halted the advance of Franco’s armies.
“We still haven’t faced our past. There is no monument that really says what happened here,” she says with some bitterness.
True, she admits, the dictator’s body was removed from his mausoleum two years ago, and the past can now be openly discussed. But schoolchildren are barely taught about the war.
Sometimes, too, she is heckled by fascist sympathizers while giving her tours – and she gives back as good as she gets. Small, but fearless, she tells them, “In Germany you would be in jail.”
Almudena Cros doesn’t need to be reminded that it was the Spanish-born George Santayana who said that those who don’t remember the past are condemned to repeat it. She is deeply worried about Vox, a new neofascist party which is gaining strength in Spain.
“We need to face our past, and the truth,” she told me, something that is true for far more countries than Spain.
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