from Ghosts of Spain: Travels Through a Country's Hidden Past by Giles Tremlett:
One testimony, of a seven-day train trip of women prisoners and their children locked into goods wagons, evoked Primo Levi in its details of hunger, of people forced to live in their own filth, of cold, disease and the death of small children. One of the worst testimonies came from Teresa MartÃn, who spent her infant years in a disease-ridden women’s jail in Saturraran, in the Basque Country. ‘The memories are still there. If anyone wants the memory of what happened to continue, all they have to do is ask. I am sixty-two. This is the first time I have talked about it. It is the first time anybody has asked.’
The Catalan broadcaster was inundated by letters. Some correspondents drew perplexed comparisons with Argentina, where the right-wing juntas of the 1970s stole children from prisoners who were secretly killed, the desaparecidos. ‘Why do we know more about what happened in Argentina or Germany during their dictatorships than we know about what happened here for forty years, even though it ended twenty-five years ago?’ asked one viewer. ‘I am a university-educated woman. I cannot understand why, after so many years of study, this has never appeared in a history lesson,’ wrote another.
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