In A Little Spanish Town...

s is well known, when the Germans intervened in the Spanish Civil War and bombed, among others, a small town in the Spanish Basque called Gernika on 26 April 1937, Pablo Picasso drew up one of his masterpieces "Guernica" for the Paris Expo later in that year. I had an opportunity of seeing it at New York in 1976 where it was in exile when Spain was under Franco's dictatorial regime. It was my dream to visit the town itself since then, and now the opportunity presented itself. It was just one hour's travel from Bilbao.
Gernika, or correctly Gernika-Lumo, is a small town, to be covered in a few minutes' walk from one end to another, and we could easily find the Gernika Peace Museum, our main target. It is a small museum, but very well organized. On the first floor, you will feel as if you were really being bombed with sounds and lights against a narration. You are also led to step on thick transparent glasses on the floor below which you will see the debris of the bombing. The bombing started in the evening. It destroyed most of the buildings in the town except those on the hillside. It was a Monday, the day of the weekly market.
On the upper floor you are introduced to a number of programmes for peace which are being tested at various places on earth. In this sense the Museum is looking beyond Gernika and the Spanish Civil War. On the basement you will find a number of photographs on all the walls, of the concentration camps Franco's regime built all over the country. It was a long period covering almost four decades, when innumerable number of people who wanted to have democracy in Spain suffered. As we were told at the Museum on Gernika, 'Nobody gave them back the happy, open town they had once known'.
At the same time one cannot help wondering whether this long-time existence of a repressive regime in Spain had not influenced the twenty-odd Latin American countries.
The Museum can be contacted by museoa@gernika-lumo.net
Gernika has initiated a series of indiscriminate bombing, like Chongqing, Dresden, many others, and ultimately Hiroshima. Or was it the end? At the same time one is astonished to know that Chernobyl occurred on the same 26 April, 49 years later.
Outside the museum we went to see the life-size copy in ceramics of Picasso's original painting. We also saw a small stone bridge called Renteria Bridge across a river on the outskirts of the town, which was the main target of the bombing to block the way the citizens and refugees could flee from the inferno, but the bridge stood it. One should stand like this really.