Simon Breden

I did this interview in April 1997 for a high school assignment on the Civil War. Aurelio Emiliano Domínguez Santos, born on 31 December 1918, was a cousin of my grandfather José Luis Santos Ruíz, who was brought up in Ocaña (Toledo) during the war. In 1939-1940, Aurelio was in the Ocaña jail with my great grandfather, Daniel Santos Ferrer. Both were accused of acting for the enemy, or the “reds” as they were called. The photo, taken on one of the days in which only their children under fourteen could visit them, shows Daniel Santos and José Luis Santos with a toy airplane. Prisoners would make toys to give as presents during those visits. Aurelio also coincided in prison with his father, Francisco, but because he was a minor he was eventually released and the death sentence he had been facing was commuted.

I was only sixteen when I interviewed Aurelio and my questions were ingenuous, such as: Did you fight in any battles? But having a relative who was in the war helped me connect to that reality, as well as to my family’s memory. The taped conversation includes flour generations: Autelio and his wife Chon, my grandfather José Luis, and my mother Mari Carmen, reflects that transmission of memory. It also strengthened our family identity. I believe it is important that this testimony be available to everyone who might be interested in it. In my case, it helped me deepen my study of history, something that fascinated me even when I was little.

Now I am a professor in the University of Deusto in Bilbao, specializing in performing arts and translation. I recently had the opportunity to combine my interests in theatre and history in a book about the Unity Theatre and the Spanish Civil War. The London-based Unity Theatre was devoted to producing agit-prop plays on leftist and worker themes. Carried out as part of the project “Methods of active propaganda during the Spanish Civil War” led by Emilio Peral Vega of the Universidad Complutense de Madrid  and financed by a grant from the Ministry of Education and Culture, the book, El Unity Theatre y la Guerra Civil española, was published by Guillermo Escolar in 2020. It brings together eight texts that reflect on the Spanish Civil War, short works that tried to explain to the British public why that conflict should matter to them. In their own way, those texts also belong to that historical memory which interests us all.