Episode 6: A Hole in the Silence
Last Seen
WBUR
4.7 • 3.6K Ratings
🗓️ 1 March 2022
⏱️ 48 minutes
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Summary
Spain has one of the highest number of forced disappearances in the world, second only to Cambodia. During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) and General Francisco Franco's dictatorship, fascist troops killed tens of thousands of people and threw them into mass graves.
For decades, few people knew this — and no one in Spain talked about it. But in the year 2000, a man in the middle of an identity crisis began digging into his family's past, searching for a grandfather who had gone missing in the war.
What Emilio Silva discovered not only changed his own life - it inspired a social movement to recover Memoria Histórica, or historical memory, throughout Spain.
In episode 6, audio producer and writer Isabel Cadenas Cañón (De eso no se habla) reveals the cultural transformation of a country through the personal transformation of one man.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Slack. With Slack, you can bring all your people and |
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| 0:26.9 | Slack.com slash DHQ. Last scene is made at a public radio station, |
| 0:32.6 | WBUR in Boston, which means it's made possible by you, the listener. If you want the show |
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| 0:45.8 | slash pod power. Thank you. And here's the show. WBUR podcasts, Boston. A group of men and women |
| 1:04.2 | are digging into the soil. They've been added for days. At first, they use picks and shovels. |
| 1:10.7 | And now, in what we're hearing, they're using smaller and more precise tools. And of course, |
| 1:16.5 | you cannot hear this, but around them, there are a few people who are looking in silence |
| 1:21.1 | at what they're unearthing. This is Isabel Cadena's canyone, an audio producer and writer |
| 1:27.5 | based in Madrid, Spain. And what are they digging for? Well, this is a mass grave from |
| 1:34.7 | the Spanish Civil War. These people are exhuming the corpses of loved ones, who were disappeared |
| 1:40.5 | and executed at the beginning of the war back in 1936. Examation, mass graves, disappeared |
| 1:48.3 | person. Isabel says those words are very common in Spain today, but that was not always the |
| 1:54.0 | case. Until probably 20 years ago, people didn't talk about the word too much. And of course, |
| 2:02.4 | even less, we talked about exhumations or mass graves. Some people didn't even know |
| 2:07.2 | that mass graves existed. So in Spain, silence, I would say, has a historical weight, you |
| 2:14.5 | know? The protagonist of this story wanted to find and correctly identify a family member |
| 2:19.9 | who had gone missing in the war. And at first, he didn't use words like disappeared or |
... |
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