While the exact numbers remain impossible to determine, historians estimate that Franco's men killed up to 100,000 people during the brutal Spanish Civil War, and tens of thousands were executed during his dictatorial rule from 1939 until his death in 1975. Hundreds of thousands more were imprisoned, sent to labor camps or subjected to political persecution. To these figures, we must add the roughly half a million people who fled or were forced into exile. Among the multitudes of Francoism's victims were women and children who endured psychological and physical abuse in prisons, orphanages and asylums. Yet for decades their experiences have remained marginal in the public narrative ' highlighting the uneven acknowledgment of different groups of victims amid Spain's broader struggle to confront its past. Still, their stories remain alive in the testimonies of the women who were imprisoned by the regime. In the summer of 2024, I conducted research at the Documentation Center of...
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