When I was a kid, my brothers and I used to spend some weeks of each summer with our grandparents in a small town on the Catalan coast. One summer, my grandmother's uncle from Santander, el Tio Manolo, came to spend a few days with us. El Tio was a bachelor in his seventies, highly energetic, cheerful, and witty. He could spend hours talking, recounting the story of his life, which was marked by a civil war and a dictatorship. Tio Manolo was conscripted by the Republican army when he was 17 years old – he was a member of the so-called “baby bottle's draft.” He survived the battlefield, but he lost his brother (our great-grandfather), an officer of the Republican army, in a battle with the Italians in the province of Burgos in August 1937. After the end of the war, the Francoists imprisoned Tio Manolo and he was condemned to death several times; he used to tell us that he was alive by pure chance because, for some unknown reason, the prison guards never called his name at the time of execution. He spent at least seven years in prison camps. When he was released, he was almost 30, and in his adult life had known little more than violence, torture, and hunger. He was a true survivor and a paradigm of resilience; no wonder we were fascinated by him.

The story of Tio Manolo and his brother was one of combatants who fought for the Republic and lost. In addition to our uncle's stories, our grandmother would often tell us about her grandfather, who adopted her when the coup split her family in the summer of 1936. El Abuelo was a Catalan landowner and thus a conservative, and for a while he had to hide in the Pyrenees mountains, threatened by anarchist militiamen who intended to kill him. He became the mayor of his small locality after the civil war ended. When Tio Manolo arrived in his village at the end of the war, fleeing from the Francoists, he tried to help him. El Abuelo could not influence Tio Manolo's detention, but we believe that his local political power allowed him to intervene in his favor and probably help him evade execution.