Authors: Dave Boling
He entered through a side door and ascended the back steps of the hotel to avoid the partying in the lounge. In his suite,
von Richt-hofen penned his official report to be sent to Berlin:
Guernica literally leveled to the ground. Attack carried out with 250-kilogram and incendiary bombs, about one third of the
latter. When the first Junker squadron arrived, there was smoke everywhere already (from the vanguard assault); nobody could
identify the targets of roads, bridges, and suburbs, so they just dropped everything right into the center. The 250s toppled
houses and destroyed the water mains. The incendiaries now could spread and become effective. The material of the houses—tile
roofs, wooden porches, and half-timbering—resulted in complete annihilation. Bomb craters can be seen in the streets. Simply
terrific.
He did not explain why more airborne firepower than had been expended throughout the entire First World War was dedicated
to destroying the lone target of military significance—the small Renteria Bridge. He also did not explain why the Renteria
Bridge was not only still standing, but was untouched.
(April 27, 1937–May 1939)
Father Xabier hurried to President Aguirre’s office in Bilbao, arriving at three A.M. Tuesday. His robes were stiffening with
dried fluids, and he reeked of phosphorus and smoke and putrefying tissue. As he fought exhaustion, his hands quivered and
his legs bounced.
“Good God,” Aguirre gasped, coming around his desk to embrace the priest and try to calm his palsy.
“I know . . . I’m sorry,” the priest said.
The military had briefed Aguirre, but he hadn’t talked face-to-face yet with anyone who had been on the ground in Guernica.
“Go slowly,” Aguirre said. “Tell me everything.”
Xabier sat in a hard-backed wooden chair and his legs shook so violently that the chair vibrated against the floor. He knew
that Aguirre needed a dispassionate chronology, sparing sanguine details, but he had to pause and catch his breath as the
recollections overtook him. What he had seen was stored as disconnected images, which were stacked in his mind like still
photos. But as he reconstructed the day for Aguirre, his mind replayed it all as if it were a newsreel. Having to explain
the avalanche of events forced him to crystallize those things that he had intentionally allowed to remain unfocused. It meant
affixing words to it all.
Aguirre stopped him after only a few moments; he had been given summaries earlier. He needed a few immediate specifics from
someone he trusted.
“Is there any chance the planes were not German?” he asked.
“Who else would they be?”
“Italians, maybe, maybe Nationalists.”
Xabier thought. Of course they were Germans, but there may have been Italians involved, too. “A fireman showed me an unexploded
incendiary on the street that had German eagle insignias all over it.”
“That’s important; we can only imagine the lies Franco will use to explain all this. If there’s ever been an argument against
the Non-Intervention Pact, this is it. The world won’t stand for this. There’s still a chance to win this war if the French
and British and Americans are shaken out of neutrality by this.”
“Politics!” Xabier yelled. “Is this about politics?”
But before the sound of his shout had died in the room, he knew that yes, of course, it was about politics.
“I know . . . I know . . . I know, I’m sorry,” Aguirre said.
Xabier’s mind turned back to his family after he had made his report: Are they safe? What can I tell them? Who is left to
tell? He knew Aguirre had to take a larger view, how it affected all the Basques. He had family, too.
And of all the questions flying through his mind, Xabier voiced one: “What do you want me to do?”
“You can tell the world everything you just told me.”
Aguirre moved behind his cluttered desk and began writing papers that would accommodate Father Xabier’s quick transport out
of Bilbao.
“I need you to get to Paris, to tell the press what happened,” the president said. “I want an eyewitness, a priest in his
frock, to tell the people the truth. Tell them what happened. Tell them who was responsible. Tell them everything. The sooner
the better. Write your speech on the way and leave nothing out. I’ve heard your sermons, father; go preach to the world.”
“All right, I can go later today; I’ve got to get cleaned up and changed.”
“Father,” Aguirre interrupted, “don’t.”
Xabier understood. “Can you do one thing for me? Can you have somebody track down my family?”
Aguirre promised to do so and ushered him out. He needed to concentrate now on a crucial morning radio response. The people
had to be convinced that this was not the end. There was still a chance to save Bilbao, which was the main rebel goal in Biscaya
anyway. They needed inspiration from their leader now. They needed reassurance. He was certain this attack wouldn’t crush
the Basque resolve but would reinforce it.
A few hours later on Radio Bilbao he announced:
German airmen in the service of the Spanish rebels have bombarded Guernica, burning the historic town that is held in such
veneration by all Basques. They have sought to wound us in the most sensitive of our patriotic sentiments, once more making
it clear what Euskadi may expect of those who do not hesitate to destroy us down to the very sanctuary that records the centuries
of our liberty and democracy. The invading army must be warned that the Basques will respond to terrible violence in kind
with unheard-of tenacity and heroism.
On a cool late-April afternoon, Pablo Picasso was taking a short walk through familiar territory. He headed south from his
studio on Rue des Grands Augustins toward the bustling Boulevard Saint-Germain. He passed the ancient church of Saint-Germain-des-Prés
as he strolled to Café de Flore with his afghan hound at his side.
A human-rights march stirred Paris that day and civic passion rose for the impending May Day parades. It is unlikely that
many noticed a brief in the evening editions containing the first sketchy details of the Guernica bombing. Dora Maar, his
muse of the moment, brought the papers with her to the café and intentionally in-flamed Picasso with the accounts of atrocities
in his native country.
“This,” Maar prodded, tapping at the paper, “is the subject for your mural.” But there was so little information in the brief
notice.
The next morning, as the artist puttered in his studio, Maar read to him the headlines that topped the more extensive reports
in
L’Humanite
: MOST HORRIBLE BOMBING OF SPANISH WAR and PLANES REDUCE CITY OF GUERNICA TO CINDERS.
“Read more,” he demanded, pacing the studio.
Picasso heard only phrases as Dora read aloud from the London
Times
: “Guernica, the most ancient town of the Basques . . . destroyed by insurgent air raiders . . . fighters plunged low to machine-gun
those who had taken refuge in the fields . . . unparalleled in military history . . . destruction of the cradle of the Basque
race.”
She thumbed to an even more graphic report in another paper: “. . . a small hospital, wiped out with its forty-two wounded
occupants . . . a bomb shelter in which over fifty women and children were trapped and burned alive . . .”
Picasso grabbed the stack of papers in front of Maar. Impossible. Other reports marginalized the damage. Some reports even
suggested that Basque arsonists played a role in the destruction of their own spiritual home.
Picasso knew and admired many Basques. They were tougher than tree bark, he said, and natural defenders of their land. They
would never set those fires or kill their own. They also wouldn’t surrender, he told Maar.
Early Thursday morning, Father Xabier Ansotegui reached Gare de Lyon in Paris and met reporters eager for credible eyewitness
accounts of Guernica’s destruction. Reports from various sources in Spain were vastly conflicting, and the town was closed
to outsiders.
The Basque priest stepped in front of the gathering, still unwashed and wretched. His hair was matted, his cassock had grown
stiff in spots, and his gold crucifix was covered with dull-brown matter. He introduced himself as a native of Guernica who
had grown up in the town and now lived in Bilbao. His credibility was unassailable.
He had shaped a presentation on the train but did not read from the outline, knowing it was better to speak as it came to
him.
“It was one of those magnificently clear days, the sky soft and serene. The streets were busy with the traffic of market day.”
He spoke softly, and some reporters were still so shaken by his appearance that they were slow to begin taking notes.
“. . . Women, children, and old men were falling in heaps, like flies, and everywhere we saw lakes of blood.”
Xabier swallowed, looking into the eyes of reporters in the front row.
“. . . I saw an old peasant standing alone in a field; a machine-gun bullet had killed him . . . The sound of the explosions
and of the crumbling houses cannot be imagined.”
Xabier explained the bombing patterns, the waves of planes that swept through the valley, the craters that carved up the town,
and the manner in which the incendiaries turned the city into “an enormous furnace.”
“. . . We were completely incapable of believing what we saw.”
Respectfully, reporters raised their hands and tried to steer the priest from his emotional account into specifics. They wanted
to define the event with numbers. But Father Xabier Ansotegui was unable to.
“How many?” he was asked by a writer attempting to get an estimate of those killed.
“How many?” Xabier asked back. “How many what? How many people? How many pieces? How many lives? How many children?”
How could he explain? His friend Aguirre knew the politics of numbers. But he felt it was like stacking bodies onto a scale
to weigh the loss.
“When you see burned children laying in the street, charred . . . melted, you don’t count them,” Xabier said. “When you see
a group of boys fused into a blackened mass, you don’t take inventory. How many died? How many? Death was infinite.”
From Friday’s edition of
L’Humanite
, Picasso read the stories of the priest’s moving speech. Picasso could see the sky he described. He could feel the fear of
the people and could hear the explosions.
In the paper that day was the first written statement from Basque president José Antonio Aguirre, calling upon the free world
to help in the fight to save a small country soon to be overrun by Fascism. “I ask today of the civilized world if it will
permit the extermination of a people whose first concerns always have been the defense of its liberty and democracy, which
the tree of Guernica has symbolized for centuries.”
Images formed and splintered in Picasso’s mind, with the classic symbols of Spain anchored in his consciousness, splayed by
unseen torment. This would be his mural, his
Guernica
.
Miren turned to Miguel and kissed his neck behind his ear, lingering there long enough to give him a playful nip with her
teeth. God, she smelled wonderful. It was so good to have her back. He had been so worried.
They sat at the transom of the
Egun On.
It felt strange for Miguel to be so comfortable on the water. But that’s how it was with her, just like the first trip when
he took her to meet his family in Lekeitio. Except she was older, of course, and her hair was bobbed. She was more lovely
than ever.
“I tried to find you,” Miguel said.
“I know,” she said.
“I couldn’t.”
“I know. Don’t worry.”
The boat moved so smoothly through the waveless waters that Miguel had no trouble maintaining his focus on Miren, with her
thick sable hair that absorbed the light and her wide sable eyes that gave off their own light.
“I missed you,” he said.
“I missed you, too.”
“Why did it take you so long to come back?”
“I had to find my way. There was so much confusion. There were so many . . .”
Miren looked out across the water at a flight of gulls.
“You look so well,” he said.
Miguel pulled her to him and lifted her onto his lap, smoothing out the layered skirts of her wedding dress to make it comfortable
for her. He hugged her again tightly and breathed in the scent of her neck. They stood to slowly waltz on the deck, shifting
without speaking.
Mariangeles, piloting the boat, turned to them and smiled . . . yes, yes, Miren, I taught him to dance. The boat began rocking
with their steps, rolling harder as the music quickened, harder now, and the waves splashed over the gunwales on both sides.
Miguel began feeling that tightening of his throat, as if he would soon be sick again.
“Where’s Cat?” Miguel asked.
Miren sat with him and took Miguel’s hand.
“Look,” she said. “Look there.”
She pointed to a pair of lines that etched a parallel path, with another merging at an angle.
“Look there,” she said.
He looked. They looked like his father’s hands.
“Keep looking.”
He stared more deeply at the lines.
A heavy teardrop landed there, between the two lines, and flowed toward his thumb, spreading like thick quicksilver.
“Keep looking,” she said.
He looked, but it wasn’t a tear that had fallen. It was a caustic acid, and as it flowed, it began dissolving his flesh, eating
into the meat of his hand, and causing the bones to crumble and fall to the deck.
“Miren!” he shouted.
But she was gone.
A bull blinded by fire had raged through the market before collapsing and dying on a flaming pile of wood that had been the
coal seller’s booth. The bull cooked there for a day, and as its internal gases heated, it expanded; the carcass swelled to
twice its original size. When the bull exploded, it sounded like a bomb’s echo, and Teodoro Mendiola was caught in a fountain
of sizzling entrails and waste. He peeled off his jacket and wiped the mess from his eyes and mouth with disgust, and then
he went back to work.
Along with most of the other men in Guernica who were not crippled by the attack, Mendiola fought fires, carried wounded to
shelters and temporary hospitals, and sorted through scatterings of victims. After being assured that his family was safe,
Mendiola worked for the next day and a half without stopping. His revulsion at the grisly task dulled with the hours, allowing
him to continue a job for which none was prepared. While so many bodies were indistinguishable, at times he was jolted by
a familiar face staring up at him when a wedge of concrete or a fallen beam had been repositioned. The instinctive response
was to say, “Hey, José,” as if greeting them. But after several hours, he knew that none who appeared in this way had survived,
and the sight of a friend’s face brought only more sadness to be stacked on top of that which he already could not carry.
At times, the rescuers were left to stare down into the jagged caverns of melted metal and splintered wood that had collapsed
into the craters left by the heaviest bombs. They would see the back of a white dress, and a leg with a shoe and a leg without
a shoe. They called out: Is anyone alive? Is anyone down there? They would need heavy equipment to lift and untangle these
warrens, and the woman in the white dress would have to be patient for another day.