To the sound of the dolçaina and the tabal and surrounded by republican flags, the boxes with the remains of nine soldiers exhumed in the graves of Vistabella toured this Sunday the streets of this small municipality in the province of Castellón to the municipal cemetery where the consistory of the town has given two niches for them to rest in peace with the hope of finding their relatives in the future. An emotional tribute in which there was no shortage of albaes, a floral offering and the reading of various poems.
As the mayor of the town, Jordi Alcon, explained to La Vanguardia, it has not been possible to identify the remains found despite the calls that the Penyagolosa Study Center has made and intensified in recent days with the intention of locating possible relatives of combatants disappeared in the so-called Levante Front.
Only, explains Antonio Giner, from the aforementioned study center, the grandson of one of the possible victims contacted them, to whom his relatives told him that "grandfather had been murdered in Vistabella." The DNA tests, it is a slow process, will confirm if it is one of the assault guards executed by the Francoist side in this town.
The first mayor explains that it is difficult to locate the relatives, because in the trenches of Vistabella soldiers from different parts of Spain came together trying to prevent the entry of the national army in Valencia. "We have documented 200 people who died in Vistabella and, so far, we have only found the rest of nine of them."
While explaining these data, a message from the technical team that was working this Monday in a pit in the municipality came to his phone; they had just found more bones in the Tossal de l'Albagés grave. After a long day of work, Antonio Giner confirmed that the remains of "a fairly complete body" have been found in an area where oral testimonies explain that his relatives were forced to inform two people after the battle. Today the other will be sought.
The exhumation works are part of the celebration of the XIV Vistabella del Maestrat Conference on Historical Memory, which began last Saturday with book presentations, exhibitions and talks and which will end this Tuesday with a guided visit to the trenches of the Serra de la Battle and Mas del Boiro.
Alcon recounts how testimonies collected during these years explain that many of those 200 dead Republicans ended up surrendering and were shot by the enemy side, without first registering their names or being tried, which makes it even more difficult to identify the remains found and that these can be matched with the DNA of possible relatives.
For this reason, on the plaque that was placed behind the funeral procession and that commemorates their presence in the cemetery, there is no name written, but the memory and tribute "to the memory of the nine soldiers of the Republic who died by firing squad fighting against fascism in Vistabella”.
As explained by the Town Hall, the combats for the defense of Vistabella took place on June 2-3, 1938 and more than 200 Republican soldiers died in combat or were shot. “Of the nine bodies recovered, one corresponds to a soldier killed in combat near Mas de Marimón; two others were killed when they were confronting the troops of the 3rd Company of Tabor de Tetuán, upon their arrival at Mas de los Arcos; the other six, belonging to the Assault Guards - one of the units that Vistabella garrisoned - were shot at Mas del Collarín”.
The bodies were recovered in the exhumation campaigns carried out between 2020 and 2022 by the ArqueoAntro Scientific Association with the support of the Penyagolosa Study Center and the Castelló Historical Memory Research Group.
A repair, more than 85 years later, which, as Giner explains, is very necessary to publicize what happened and "more so in these times."
