Mario Bosch Vergara

This is the diary that my father kept in 1937 and 1938. He was a captain in the Republican army. He died in 1983 without ever telling me about his diary. After he died, my brother found it among his papers in a closet.  

My father was wounded in combat and then taken prisoner. He spent three years in a concentration camp. When he left, he weighed 43 kilos and had typhus. He had to report to the authorities periodically. He never went into hiding, and I only know that from time to time he met clandestinely with neighbours in the roof terrace of the house in Barcelona, something my mother was against because of the possible consequences. Occasionally, he told me about the war, when the prisoners were on a forced march without food and a woman from a village they were passing through called to him and a comrade to eat a bowl of chickpeas. I remember the look of gratitude on his face when he told me. Or when they called out the names of the men who would not be returning to the concentration camp, and how they cried. Or the punishments administered by pulling on of every ten men out of formation. Or when he told me about the 1951 tram strike in Barcelona, his face lit up with hope. And how he refused to work on May 1, the Day of Saint Joseph the Worker, the Francoust name for it. “ It’s the worker’s day, not Saint Joseph’s”.  

It was frightening. I remember that in 1960, twenty-one years after the end of the war, when I was eight and a student in the Pious Schools of San Antonio Abad, in geography class, which was taught by a retired cavalry captain. On that day, the principal came into the room with two other men and said they were going to call us by name and ask us questions. The question was what side my father had been on during the war. Years later, my brother, who was nine years older than me, told me that when I got home and told him about it he was furious and asked me what I had said. (That he had been in the Republican army.) There were no reprisals that we knew of. I guess they did these things to remind us that they were watching, keeping up the fear. My French teacher was a Frenchman who had fled to Spain because of his Nazi ideology.  

This was the atmosphere in which a child in Barcelona lived at the start of the 1960s.