El abismo del olvido

On September 14, 1940, 532 days after the end of the Spanish Civil War, José Celda was executed by the Franco regime along with 11 other men against the back wall of the Paterna cemetery in Valencia, and buried with them in a mass grave. More than seven decades later, and after a long journey through the dark side of a country haunted by its past, Pepica, José's daughter, an elderly woman in her eighties who was eight years old when her father was killed, finally managed to locate and recover his remains, restoring his dignity. In Pepica Celda's personal battle against oblivion, the role of Leoncio Badía, a young Republican who had been sentenced some time before to work as a gravedigger in his village cemetery, was crucial. Risking his life, Leoncio, a man obsessed with the meaning of life and the order of the universe, had collaborated for years and in secret with the widows of those repressed in the war to identify their corpses, give them a dignified burial, locate their graves and hide messages among their remains, convinced that one day someone could take them out of there.