‘The Lost Letters’ It is a documentary film Amparo Climent about republican women during the civil war and the first years of the Franco regime. It is an essential content to understand the double cruelty inflicted on women by the national side, as Republicans and women. Humiliated, harassed, raped, murdered, women who wanted to continue living in freedom, who saw in the Franco regime the conservative and fascist prison that relegated them to second-class citizens, without political, professional, human personality, being able to be only what their parents, brothers and sons allowed them to be.
Climent, and the entire cast of wonderful actresses, makes you feel the uneasiness of being a woman in the Franco regime: persecuted, humiliated, hurt, without the possibility of living with your family, with your children, without being able to love or pursue your dreams, without past, present or future. The tear experienced by these women was so strong that The documentary produced deep sadness and anger in me. The applause that followed the credits took me back to October 2022. When I went outside, I recovered my conscience as a free woman, with rights, with discrimination also suffered, but nothing compared to what the writers of those lost letters suffered.
Immediately after, a question jolted my mind. Why was there no one among the attendees from conservative parties but Democrats and, according to them, defenders of women’s rights? We know that Vox is a nostalgic post-Franco extreme right-wing party, but why don’t the PP or Cs feel concerned about do historical justice and recover a memory that does not allow us to forget the names of these women? It seems absolutely impossible to me that convinced democrats find it inappropriate to condemn the military coup of 36, recognize the right of family members and society to know the truth, retrieve the victims from the pits and gutters, declare illegal the Francoist courts that condemned innocents to death death penalty. And above all, it seems inappropriate for history to be studied and known in schools as an antidote so that horror does not turn into oblivion, which is the way to repeat it. They seem noble goals of a democracy that has such a long, devastating and cruel dictatorship in its recent past. However, PP and Cs voted against the recently approved historical memory law. Unheard.
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In the end, demographic and historical luck has made me live in a democratic society in which I am and feel free as a woman, to live, love, work and give my opinion as I want. Is there inequality and discrimination in Spain today? Yes, women suffer gender-based violence, labor and care gaps, objectification, and a long list of macro and micromachismos that survive. For this reason, we have to continue fighting for legal and effective equality, but always with the memory of the suffering of those republican women who fought, suffered and died for our rights. Thanks.