the journal of cross border studies in ireland - The Centre for Cross ...

and that the proximity to France andeven the borderline itself that runsbetween France and Spain throughthese mountains belong to easy traditionin the same ways as the rituals of StJohn´s Eve in Isil do, or the idea ofbirth and marriage and death in thesevillages. It is easy to see the border inthis undisturbed world as somethingwhich belongs to nature as much asto culture, which is as fully acceptedand understood as the change in theseasons, something not made byhistory, but made by more elementalforces which have always been in place,or made indeed by God.But then there is a photograph. Andif that photograph had come to usuncaptioned it could be any group ofvillagers, all the generations, gatheredin front of a municipal building sometime in the first half of the twentiethcentury. The fact that they all look soserious need not matter. In those yearsin formal group photographs people sawno reason to smile. They understoodthe camera as a serious instrument ofrecord. But the caption gives us thedate and the place and the origin of thepeople. It is 1938, and it is ClermontFerrand on the French side of theborder, and the people, around eightyof them ranging from the very old to thevery young, are from the village of Alosd´Isil, about four kilometers from Isil, thevillage described above. At first glance,they could be the entire population ofthe village until you notice the presenceof very few men aged between eighteenand fifty. Recently, an historian, workingwith this photograph, has been ableto identify most of the people in it, andhas been able to interview some whowere in that photograph and who arestill alive, and has been thus able topiece together what happened in thosemonths of 1938 to the quiet traditionallife in a village in Spain close to theFrench border that caused most ofits population to flee to France usingmountain paths.The new politics of memorySuch historical investigation has onlybeen possible in the past few years,in a time when the silent pact made in1975 on the death of Franco betweenboth sides not to re open old wounds,or put anyone on trial, or have a truthand reconciliation commission, nolonger seems necessary or useful. Thesilence had done its work, had alloweda democratic society to emerge fromthe shadows. In the past few years,however, these very shadows and thatvery silence have come to seem likepoison from the past. Not only are themurdered dead of the war being dug upand identified from communal graves allover Spain, but in the border area, in thePyrenees which belong to both Franceand Spain, the paths used in theseterrible years between 1936 and 1945have been re-opened in memory ofthose who were forced to use them.And in all the villages on the Spanish, orCatalan side, of the border last summerthere were lectures and exhibitions,with titles like ´The Path of Freedom´,´The Pallares Exile in France´, ´TheCatalan Exile of 1939´. The exhibitionshave included photographs of thelandscape as it is now, and as it wasthen, actual diaries of those who fledacross the border, and mementoes22JOURNAL OF CROSS BORDER STUDIES IN IRELAND No.5