A piece of paper with a typed name also written by hand inside a small glass bottle has allowed specialists from the ArqueoAntro Scientific Association to identify Germán Pérez Sánchez as one of the 12 people shot on October 13, 1941 at the wall from Paterna. The discovery was announced last Tuesday during exhumation work subsidized by the Democratic Memory area of the Diputació de València in Fossa 146 of the cemetery where more than 2,000 people were shot during the years after the Civil War.
According to the studies of Vicent Gavarda, doctor in History from the University of Valencia, Germán Pérez was a 50-year-old coppersmith from Utiel who was shot by Franco's authorities two years after the war ended. In 1985, Gavarda carried out a search and compilation of those executed in Paterna through the civil registry of the municipality itself and published in 1993 his most impressive work: Els afusellaments al País Valencià 1938-1956 (Alfons el Magnànim).
The historian tells La Vanguardia that Germán's body was one of those that were expected to be found in the work because on the grave there were tiles with two names: that of the boilermaker from Utiel and that of Bautista Muñoz Mascarell, a 67-year-old sawyer. Manuel and member of the local Popular Executive Committee.
Gavarda explains that, in the graves, the dead were buried in one or more bags. The sacks were procedures by which several prisoners were extracted (taken out) from prisons to be executed. "They were all buried together unless the families had the resources to collect the body and take it away or pay for an individual niche," he says.
Likewise, the researcher points out, at the end of the 60s, if families wanted to maintain the graves, they had to buy the spaces. It was then that Gavarda understood that the families of Germán and Bautista made an economic effort to maintain the land and put up the commemorative plaque.
Theirs are the only two names that appear despite the fact that, according to Gavarda's studies, Juan Canet Bou, a 24-year-old farmer from Cullera, was also buried next to them; Francisco Arbos Salas, a 36-year-old cook from Vila-real, married and founder of the local Popular Front; Miguel Forner Latorre, a 27-year-old barber from Utiel; Alfredo Pérez Pérez, a 38-year-old Utileno farmer, married and member of the City Council; Juan Calvo Boluda, a 45-year-old day laborer from Manuel; Rafael Gregori Llorens, a 45-year-old farmer from Manuel; Francisco Cuenca Ferrando, a 55-year-old espardenyer from Simat de la Valldigna; Juan Ochea Aparicio, a 47-year-old baker from Valencia; Francisco Tormo Herrero, 26-year-old locksmith from Valencia; and Agustín Fontecha Perulero, a 21-year-old farmer from Toledo.
The discovery of the bottle to facilitate the identification of the body connects with the story of Pepica Celda, a tenacious woman who, after obtaining one of the last grants from the Historical Memory Law, began a race against time to exhume the grave where she was convinced that the bodies rested. remains of his father, José Celda, a farmer shot on September 14, 1940 for being leftist.
The story of Pepica and her father has been brilliantly fictionalized by the cartoonist Paco Roca and the journalist Rodrigo Terrasa in the comic El abismo del olvido (Astiberri), which recently won the VI ACDCómic Awards for Best National Work. In their book, the authors also focus on the figure of Leoncio Badía, a young republican whose death sentence was commuted by the Franco regime to the punishment of burying his own. They explain how the Paterna gravedigger collaborated for years with the widows and relatives of those who were retaliated against in the Civil War to locate their graves and identify their bodies.
And the little bottle that has been found belonging to Germán Pérez is not the only one from the paternero cemetery. Manuel Polo, forensic anthropologist from the Paleolab Group - who participated in the exhumation, in 2012, of grave 126 in which the body of Pepica Celda's father was found - says that they found the bodies in 12 coffins. In each of them, a small bottle was documented, except in one where the bottle had been completely destroyed. The names of those shot had been written inside, although only two could be identified - Manuel Gimeno Ballester and Ramón Gandia Belda - since the stoppers were made of cork and the passage of time underground made any other identification impossible.
Polo points out that this modus operandi was found in another grave, in this case individual, this time written the name with a typewriter. He points out that the same information was always included in the recovered papers: name, surname, place of origin and date of execution.
Therefore, their theory is that the undertaker, Leoncio Badía, at the request of the families, introduced the little bottles for future identification. This, at least, is explained by direct relatives of the victims. "It was like a message in a bottle and the message is clear: get me out of here."
Polo points out that it was a "specific procedure and that it was not applied to all victims." He points out that the relatives of 126 would have more resources to pay for the coffin and through contact with Leoncio they were able to introduce the bottles "with the very clear intention of being able, in the future, to recover and identify the bodies." As for the rest of the bodies, he admits, "they were thrown unceremoniously into the graves."
The practice of bottles has not been exclusive to Paterna. Gavarda explains that in the San Cristóbal de Navarra cemetery, the priest buried the republican prisoners along with his personal data locked in a bottle.
However, Gavarda points out that the figure of the Paterna undertaker must be demystified and highlights that the placement of the bottles was a very specific matter and organized by the families who had received the farewell letter from their loved ones and went to the cemetery with the bottle and the name already noted. "Leoncio did not have a store of jars in the cemetery." The historian emphasizes that of the more than 2,000 bodies, only 13 small bottles have been found and the majority of bodies were buried in the haste required by the continuous shootings and the size and depth of the graves. "The man would seek his life, but it is true that he did no harm, he even helped some families."
Be that as it may, the truth is that this practice, however unique, has helped some families close wounds without having to wait for DNA tests and that, in itself, is nothing short of heroic.
