I read in the Sunday Times, October 26th edition (page 27 of the News section, that Judge Baltasar Garzon in Spain is pursuing the finding and exhumation from mass graves of 114,266 bodies of people killed by Franco's death squads in the years 1936-51.
The romance of Hemingway novels, of the Europeans who went to volunteer to fight for a just society in Spain - somehow I thought of it as a fight between fascism and social democracy, and of repression and subjugation and of Guernica.
But I did not appreciate the depth of the continuing horror; of killings year in year out through the 1940s of people who were got rid of because they were a nuisance.
114,266 people killed is not a small thing.
The romance of Hemingway novels, of the Europeans who went to volunteer to fight for a just society in Spain - somehow I thought of it as a fight between fascism and social democracy, and of repression and subjugation and of Guernica.
But I did not appreciate the depth of the continuing horror; of killings year in year out through the 1940s of people who were got rid of because they were a nuisance.
114,266 people killed is not a small thing.
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