FUNDACIÓN VÍCTIMAS DEL TERRORISMO 93 - ENGLISH

76 TESTIMONY You say you lived a "stolen childhood". When did you really realise that your life had changed forever? At first, I wasn't fully aware. Everything was a whirlwind of confusing moments and memories: people coming and going from the house, lots of commotion... I really understood it during the school Christmas festival. My mother was dres- sed in black — she decided to mourn for almost fifteen years — and my sis- ter couldn't stop crying. That's when I realised how profoundly our lives had changed. The first time we returned to my father's village also had a profound effect on me. Everyone said, 'I share your grief,' and I didn't understand what that meant. At school, my classmates looked at me differently, and that made me rea- lise that I no longer had a normal child- hood. Everything suddenly accelerated: I saw my mother crying, reacting in a way I didn't recognise, and taking on responsi- bilities that were not appropriate for my age, such as signing documents for a life certificate when I was only ten years old. None of this was planned; part of our childhood had been taken away from us. And in the years that followed, the televi- sion news was filled with reports of attac- ks, a constant reminder of the tragedy we had been forced to live through. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of your father? My own memories mix with those that others have told me, and sometimes I can no longer tell which are mine and which are not. But there is one that is definitely mine. Every night, when I went to bed, he would come and tuck me in very tightly, because I asked him to, until I could hard- ly move. He would bend down to kiss me and, as he did so, his bus pass and comb would fall out of his shirt pocket. I remem- ber the smell of soap, playing together all the time, walks in the hills, climbing trees... I grew up admiring my father, and even today, his every gesture and every memory stays with me; I feel that he is still looking after me in some way. How did your father's murder affect your relationship with the National Police and your idea of 'duty fulfilled'? For me, the National Police has always been like an extension of my family it's hard to explain, but I feel close to them, almost as if they were part of our own li- ves. Over the years, I have also come to appreciate even more what it means to be a police officer: coming home, hanging up your uniform and, at the same time, being a father, brother, friend... dealing with everything that work and personal life entails. It's something I find admi- rable. GRAPO justified its attacks as political struggle. What do you think when you hear justifications of this kind today? It provokes two feelings in me that so- metimes mix together. On the one hand, a lot of concern and helplessness. Hea- ring someone justify what happened does not change anything that happened, but it does make me think about how im- portant it is to do everything possible to prevent it from happening again. On the other hand, I feel anger, not only at the justifications themselves, but also at how the media and politicians talk about the victims. Sometimes they treat us as if we were all the same, a homogeneous group, when each story is different. There are three of us in my family and none of "I consciously decided not to hold a grudge because hatred is something that consumes you, and I don't want that in my life"