Franco’s Forgotten Crimes
Spaniards have flocked to an exhibition emphasizing the need to remember Nazi Germany’s crimes. Yet the Right insists that highlighting Franco’s own atrocities will only "open old wounds."
Josefa Peiro, 80 holds a portrait of her father, Jose Peiro, as she poses for a portrait on August 29, 2018 in Tavernes, Spain. Jose Peiro was executed in Paterna on November 30, 1939 after the finish of Spain’s Civil war. According to local authorities, 2,238 bodies of victims of Franco’s regime were buried in this cemetery after being executed by firearm since 1939 to 1956 following the end of the Spanish Civil war. David Ramos / Getty Images
“Not too long ago. Not too far away.” Musealia, a company that creates traveling museum exhibitions, in collaboration with the Auschwitz Birkenau State Museum selected this warning as the slogan for its exhibition Auschwitz. The six-hundred-piece display depicts the suffering of prisoners, grapples with the society that enabled the barbarism of the concentration camps, and rejects ideologies based on hatred.
The slogan conveys a fear that the world might move on from what happened in Germany and the territories it occupied during World War II. Auschwitz concludes with two videos of interviews with Holocaust survivors, many imploring society to remember their persecution. This final message encapsulates the exhibition’s broader moral: it is dangerous, indeed unacceptable, to neglect to document systematic repression or to choose to look away from a traumatic past.
Auschwitz has enjoyed a tremendous public reception since its installation in Madrid in December 2017, the first stop on a fourteen-city tour across Europe and North America. Over five hundred thousand people visited the exhibition in the Spanish capital, along with one hundred thousand students given free entry, leading Musealia to twice extend the exhibition’s closing date, now moved to February 2019.
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