The notebook written in 1938, in the midst of the Civil War, by a meticulous Republican doctor has now allowed, 84 years later, identify a combatant killed in the Battle of the Ebro. The daughter and grandson of Josep Aubeso Rovira, who disappeared in combat more than eight decades ago, finally receive his remains this Sunday in the Montjuïc cemetery.
Months before being recruited to participate in the momentous battle, Aubeso said goodbye to his three children at the Estació de França in Barcelona. He did not see them again. A plasterer by profession, he was mobilized by the republican army in the spring of 1938 and was overtaken by the enemy in August. His family only knew, thanks to a letter, that he was badly injured. Until, in 2016, a geolocation study of graves by the Rovira i Virgili University included in the Mas de Santa Magdalena the names of 20 soldiers who would have died in the hospital associated with that location, located in the municipality of Móra d ‘Ebre. Josep Aubeso’s was one of them.
“A little over a year ago, the Generalitat told us that there were clear clues that my grandfather was there,” explains Roger Roig, Aubeso’s grandson. The Mas de Santa Magdalena is the largest Civil War grave located to date; between December 2020 and July 2021 in that place, the general directorate of Democratic Memory of the Department of Justice recovered 177 individuals through an archaeological intervention.
Aubeso’s story is similar to that of thousands of other dead during the war: the Generalitat’s census of missing persons has 6,311 names registered. The difficulty of exhuming graves from almost 90 years ago shows that, until now, less than 10% of the more than 671 graves that the Government calculates that there are in Catalonia have been intervened.
The happy ending, if one can speak of the fact that the family was able to recover Aubeso’s remains so many years later, would not have been possible if one of his daughters, Carmen Aubeso, had not contacted the Generalitat and, in 2005 his father would have been registered in the register of missing persons and she would not have subsequently donated a DNA sample.
Confirmation via DNA
That was enough for them to call Roger Roig a little over a month ago to inform him that “they already had a positive test”: the DNA in the sample matched the remains of one of those buried in the Mas of Santa Magdalena. “It is not easy for samples to be preserved in bones at this point,” says Roig.
It is also not easy to have evidence as conclusive as the annotations of Dr. Gras Artero. This surgeon and medical captain of the republican army wrote about Aubeso in one of the notebooks he dedicated to the cases he had dealt with during the Battle of the Ebro. Those documents were kept by his son, also a doctor Miquel Gras de Molins, and were digitized by the Association No Jubilem la Memòria del Priorat.
Specifically, the Aubeso case was in Dr. Gras’s second notebook. From the annotations it is known that he arrived at the hospital very badly injured at 9 am on August 20. “Diagnosis: left thigh and hip with complete destruction of the joint and complete fracture of the upper third of the femur and enormous muscular destruction with gas gangrene”. “Arrived smashed”, summarizes his grandson. Aubeso’s wounds caused his death 32 hours later, at 4:00 p.m. on August 21, 1938.
Aubeso’s is the second successful identification of the Mas of Santa Magdalena. The first was that of Andreu Flores i Flores, whose remains were handed over in March by the President of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, and the Minister of Justice, Lourdes Ciuró, to her relatives in the Arenys de Munt cemetery.
Inquiries in the Valley of the Fallen
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In the beginning, it did not seem easy for the descendants of Aubeso to find his remains. When her daughter went to the Generalitat to request information about her disappearance, the investigation did not initially produce any results. “There was even a report of the Valley of the Fallen, because they led some Republican soldiers to be buried there as additional humiliation,” says Roig. But neither was Aubeso there.
Dr. Gras’s notebook was the key element in solving the case, but Roig highlights the “excellent” work of all those who have intervened in the identification of his grandfather. He only regrets that her mother, who is now 89 years old and participates this Sunday in the tribute ceremony together with Ciuró, has had to wait so long to find the remains of her father.