Return To Spain and Death
In February 1957 he returned to Spain, where most of his family already lived. This return was made possible through a series of negotiations which involved several Nationalist military officers in Madrid, F. José Luís Almenar Betancourt S.J., a Jesuit who was in contact him during his stay in Bolivia, and the Bishop of Cochabamba, a former military chaplain who had served under Rojo.
Although he was not bothered in the beginning by the Francoist authorities, on July 16, 1957 the Special Court for the Repression of Masonry and Communism informed him that he would be prosecuted for the crime of military rebellion, in his position as ex-commander of the Army. This was the customary charge on professional military officers who did not join the rebels in 1936. He was sentenced to 30 years, but did not served a single day as the sentence was suspended sentence, and he was soon pardoned.
Vicente Rojo died at his home in Madrid, June 15, 1966. Of the obituaries appearing in the Spanish press, only the one in El Alcázar, -mouthpiece of the Francoist ex-combatants- and the one by noted Falangist writer Rafael Garcia Serrano in the party press, amply eulogized his military achievements.
He wrote several books detailing his military experiences in the civil war, which were published in the following order: ¡Alerta a los pueblos! (1939), ¡España heroica! (1961) and Así fue la defensa de Madrid (1967).
Read more about this topic: Vicente Rojo Lluch
Famous quotes containing the words return to, return, spain and/or death:
“... one cannot be happy in exile or in oblivion. One cannot always be a stranger. I want to return to my homeland, make all my loved ones happy. I see no further than this.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)
“Athletes have studied how to leap and how to survive the leap some of the time and return to the ground. They don’t always do it well. But they are our philosophers of actual moments and the body and soul in them, and of our manoeuvres in our emergencies and longings.”
—Harold Brodkey (b. 1930)
“How the devil am I to prove to my counsel that I don’t know my murderous impulses through C.G. Jung, jealousy through Marcel Proust, Spain through Hemingway ... It’s true, you need never have read these authorities, you can absorb them through your friends, who also live all their experiences second-hand. What an age!”
—Max Frisch (1911–1991)
“For in the word death
There is nothing to grasp; nothing to catch or claim;
Nothing to adapt the skill of the heart to, skill
In surviving, for death it cannot survive,
Only resign the irrecoverable keys.
The wave falters and drowns. The coulter of joy
Breaks. The harrow of death
Depends. And there are thrown up waves.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)