His efforts, along with countless others demanding Spain and those who perpetrated Spain’s bloody past to confront this violence, have opened up avenues to negotiate more equitable and democratic memories today.

Silva’s search for his grandfather both literally and figuratively unearthed long-silenced stories of the war’s brutality and revealed the myriad of tensions related to Spanish memory. That is, until these narratives re-emerged at the turn of the 21st century, brought to light by Emilio Silva, a journalist and human rights activist whose grandfather, who identified as a Republican, was murdered in 1936 by Nationalist forces and tossed in a ditch. The Nationalist narrative persisted because Spanish authorities stifled any and all opposing memories of the war, silencing the stories of the hundreds of thousands of Republicans killed and exiled during and after the war, as well as those of the estimated 114,000 Republican victims whose fates remain unknown today. This interpretation of events remained essentially unchallenged in Spanish popular memory for decades, aided by censorship and repression during Franco’s own rule from 1939 to 1975, and by informal and institutionalized practices of later governments.

The traditional narrative of the war, asserted by the victorious dictator Francisco Franco, held that Franco and his Nationalist forces defeated an oppositional leftist coalition, the Republicans, to restore Spain to its past greatness. Preston said many previous histories had focused on violence in areas controlled by the Republican government, rather than by supporters of the 1936 military uprising which began the war and eventually installed Franco as dictator in 1939.Provocatively deemed “The Spanish Holocaust” by historian Paul Preston, the Spanish Civil War-a conflict, extending from 1936 to 1939 that resulted in the repression, torture, and death of hundreds of thousands of people-weighs heavily in Spain’s collective memory. The English edition will be published in autumn 2011. “There was an awful lot of death and suffering that isn’t actually quantifiable because we don’t know all the names,” he told Reuters during a tour to promote the Spanish version of the book, released earlier this month. “I cannot think of a word that better encapsulates the astounding level of suffering of civilians in the Spanish Civil War and after,” Preston said in response to a question about the use of the word holocaust in the book’s title.

MADRID (Reuters) - Veteran British historian Paul Preston estimates 200,000 Spaniards were killed far from the front line in the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, and thousands more in the ensuing decades-long dictatorship of Francisco Franco.Īfter a decade of research, Preston gives details in his latest of many books on the War and its aftermath, whose English title is “The Spanish Holocaust: Inquisition and Extermination in Twentieth-Century Spain.”

The Spanish Holocaust by Paul Preston