Spanish Civil War Memory Project

Summary

Alfonso Gómez Jerez was born in 1935 in Otero, Toledo. Alfonso recounts that his father, Jesús Gómez Jiménez, was a day laborer in Madrid. He tells that his father was forced to join the Republican Army shortly after the outbreak of the Civil War and disappeared somewhere in the Extremadura Front. Alfonso explains that after his father's disappearance, his mother worked cleaning houses in Madrid. He notes that his mother placed him in the care of the Auxilio Social (a welfare institution) in 1942. Alfonso describes the ten years he spent at an Auxilio Social center in Ciudad Lineal, where he met Franco and his wife several times. He comments that in 1952, his mother took him to live in her village, Erustes, in Toledo. Alfonso relates moving to Germany in 1964 and working there in the jewelry industry until the 1990s. He narrates joining the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Party) upon his return to Spain. Alfonso discusses how he found out about the exhumations of mass graves in the early 2000s, and details his efforts to locate and recover his father's remains