death from above

Sunday morning in Barcelona, visibility good. 

It was on a day like this one, 75 years ago this week, that death struck from above, right here in our neighbourhood of El Call. Of the many air raids carried out on Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, the one on the morning of Sunday, January 30th, 1938 was one of the more tragic and infamous. 

Planes from Mussolini's Italian Air Force left their base on Mallorca loaded with bombs and targetted central Barcelona, apparently making two runs over the city a couple of hours apart. In Plaça Sant Felip Neri, fifty metres from where we live, a bomb caused the collapse of a vaulted basement which was being used as a bomb shelter and 42 people died, including 20 children. In our street, Carrer Sant Domènec del Call, another bomb destroyed at least two buildings, at number 13 and number 15, and I don't know how many human lives. Number 15 is our address; and our building (top right in the above photo) was erected on the site of the destruction in the early 1940s. We share our space with many stories that have never been told. 

It's just possible that some of the unknown aspects of the Barcelona bombings may come to light in the near future: although not the stories of those under the bombs, but rather of the bombers themselves. A group of expat Italians who live in Barcelona, AltraItalia, has just succeeded in getting a Barcelona court to investigate the accusation that those air raids constituted war crimes. In the first instance, the case will concentrate on finding out about the Italian pilots who carried out the bombings and the chain of command involved - it sounds a little macabre in itself because if any of those involved are still alive, it may be a case of pursuing and even extraditing old soldiers in their 90s. 

The AltraItalia people say, however, that what they are interested in is getting to the truth and there are certainly many blank spaces in that regard. Like the key question of who gave the orders: although the Italian forces were working to support Franco, it doesn't seem that their attacks on Barcelona and other cities responded to specific requests or indications from the Franquista leadership; rather, they were free agents, not officially part of the war, conducting what have been described as experiments in terror.

On that Sunday in 1938, the residents down on the ground in El Call were among the guinea pigs for those experiments.   

Plaça Manel Ribé, El Call, created on January 30th 1938

by the bomb that destroyed the building at Nº 13, C/St Domènec del Call