Claims of Crimes Against Civilians for an International Audience: 1936–1946

Pilar Fidalgo, imprisoned in the same Zamora jail with Amparo Barayón, published a 1937 account about military rebels’ and fascist supporters’ murderous actions against civilians, including the great Spanish writer Ramón J. Sender’s wife. The English-language translation that appeared in London in 1939, A Young Mother in Franco’s Prisons, is representative of the eyewitness accounts that denounced on an international scale the crimes of the “Nationalist” insurgency. This testimony, and dozens of others like it, urgently spread the word about the Republic’s struggle against the Hitler and Mussolini-backed rebellion and the dire straits of the Republic’s civilian population. The first depiction of the tragic plight of Amparo Barayón belongs to the years of ardent defense of the righteous cause of the democratically elected Republic under siege by fascism. The calls initially issued in the 1930s and 1940s and sent abroad under the sign of the bodies of the dead, are some of the most clear-eyed and excruciatingly detailed documents of Francoist terror and cruelty. I use Pilar Fidalgo’s work as a template to categorize the recurring characteristics commonly found in a wide range of personal accounts that all have as their textual centerpiece the murdered body. Each author seeks redress for those who did not survive.