Did Your Great-Grandfather Kill Mine?

My grandmother, Rosita Sesé Miralles, died on February 1, 2016, without knowing where her father, Manuel Sesé Mur, was buried. Two Civil Guards shot him at point-blank range one afternoon in January 1948, and from that moment on, his whereabouts remained an open wound. My grandmother passed away without ever hearing me tell her what she so deserved to know: “Grandma, I know the names of those who killed him that day. I know where they buried him.”

That murder has shaped my entire life. Writing this book has allowed me to stop feeling like an outsider for being so deeply connected to the murder of Manuel Sesé Mur, which took place forty-seven years before I was born, and to my grandmother’s suffering in its aftermath. Because, like me, this country is full of great-grandchildren marked by an inherited legacy of trauma and violence.

These pages tell the stories of dozens of descendants of people who were shot, imprisoned, tortured, or disappeared under Franco’s regime. They are great-granddaughters and great-grandsons who did not experience the war or the dictatorship, but who have inherited their silences, their absences, and their consequences. Many grew up hearing half-finished sentences, seeing photographs tucked away in envelopes, and sensing a pain that no one ever fully explained. And yet, they are the ones who have searched the archives, driven exhumations forward, and sought to give names, faces, and truth to what people tried to erase for decades. Here, great-grandparents cease to be shadowy figures in family stories and finally become real people, with names of their own, stories, bodies, and a presence that demands justice.

This is not merely a book about the past. It is a book about what we do with that legacy today, about impunity, about the fractures of Spain’s Transition to democracy, and about a generation—the great-grandchildren—striving to reinterpret a past that remains shrouded in silence.