Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War - The Podcast

The personal is the political, except when it’s not. Sometimes the need for survival is a driver.

In searching for relatives whom they’ve never met, Daniel and Patricia explore the stories and silences kept in Spanish graveyards, burial sites, and cemeteries that they visited during their research.

In the ideological cauldron of war, how do individuals end up on “sides”?  Daniel and Patricia explore that it’s not as simple as left versus right, despite the propaganda of the 1930s.

Co-hosts Daniel and Patricia introduce the family members at the heart of their Spanish Civil War stories: Ben Barsky, combatant in one of the International Brigades and José Becerra, a high-placed official in the city hall of Pueblonuevo del Terrible (Córdoba) Spain.

In this podcast, two historians, formerly teacher and student, share their research discoveries and family stories connected to the Spanish Civil War. Daniel Czitrom taught at Mount Holyoke College in Massachusetts for 41 years and Patricia Schechter currently teaches at Portland State University in Oregon. Czitrom’s book is a memoir entitled Kitchen Table History: Wrestling with my Family’s Radical Past and Schechter’s book is a study of an important mining town in Andalusia titled El Terrible: Life and Labor in Pueblonuevo, 1887-1939. Each takes a fresh look at the Spanish Civil War through the lenses of family history, politics, labor, and migration.  Their conversations explore revelations from the archives as well as the family silences which cannot and even should not be broken.