From time to time a stray hiker wandering about the ravines and crags of the sierras of Southern Spain stumbles across splinters of human bone bleached by the sun. These forgotten fragments and little else are what remain of a pitiless war which many Spaniards were hardly aware of and which was ignored by the world beyond the Pyrenees.
As a visitor you may well have heard older inhabitants reminiscing about the hard times of the 1940s and “la gente de la sierra”. They are talking of the time when parts of rural Spain were in a state of war because of an anti-Franco guerrilla movement. Several historians have investigated those terrible years, but now for the first time a book in English has been published on the subject.
Entitled “Between Two Fires – Guerrilla war in the sierras of Spain” it is written by journalist David Baird. And it has earned high praise from the historian Paul Preston and Lorca biographer Ian Gibson.
David centres his book on the village of Frigiliana in Malaga province. He sees it as a microcosm of what occurred in many parts of the country, but which went virtually unreported at the time. From a community of just over 2,000 inhabitants, 21 men fled to the mountains and joined the band led by Roberto, the nom de guerre of a legendary chief of the guerrillas.
Although, officially, the Spanish Civil War ended on April 1, 1939, armed resistance against Franco and his regime was not over. In the 1940s groups of guerrillas slipped out of their sierra hideaways to harass the dictatorship and try to create a climate of rebellion throughout the peninsula. The authorities regarded them as “bandits” but in Frigiliana, where virtually every family had some connection with the guerrillas, they simply refer to them as “the people of the sierra”.
There were acts of courage and of cowardice, of egoism and of selflessness, of tragedy and of treachery. And those who suffered for the sins of others were, as always, the innocent ones.
The author spent more than five years tracking down and interviewing survivors and scouring official records, from Madrid to Washington. He came across important new documentary evidence about American secret service involvement with the guerrillas and about the murder of three young villagers. Most of the protagonists have passed on, and one by one the witnesses are disappearing.
“In a way I wrote the book to pay a debt,” says David. “I felt I owed it to this community to record its recent history before those who lived through it had all disappeared.”
