La gente de la sierra / Between Two Fires – David Baird

Decades of suppression during Franco’s regime, of distrust and reticence after it, have meant that the history of the Spanish Civil War has often been chronicled and made known by writers from outside of Spain.
 
This book, by British author and journalist David Baird, who has lived in Andalucia since the 1970s, unearths postwar stories that would otherwise have remained buried, like many victims of the dictatorship in their unmarked graves.
 
Baird’s account centres on Frigiliana village in the province of Málaga, where he has lived since the 1970s, and specifically about the vigorous guerilla movement that operated in the mountains above the village after the war ended in 1939. Led by a disciplined character known as Roberto, the men of the maquis, opposed to or simply persecuted by Franco’s state, survived in the sierra as an insurgent band until the last of them was killed in 1952.
 
While supported by archive material such as Guardia Civil reports, Town Hall and parish records, the book is based firmly on the testimonies of ageing citizens of Frigiliana, including guerrilleros themselves, whose stories might otherwise have gone to the grave with them.
 
These locals, who might have been reluctant to open up to a Spanish researcher, entrusted Baird with their personal histories of the 1940s. Beatings by the Guardia Civil, threats and abject poverty drove desperate men up into the sierra, adding new recruits, often illiterate and apolitical, to Roberto’s nominally Communist brigade.
 
They would ultimately be abandoned and betrayed by the Communist leadership in Spain, who on Stalin’s instruction gave up on the ragtag armed struggle, without bothering to tell “the people of the sierra”, let alone attempt to extract and rescue them.
 
The hardship and hunger of those years is hard to reconcile with the Frigiliana of today, which has made a mint from tourism and foreigners buying up village property. The Costa del Sol speculators moved inland to gobble it all up. The unseemly, money-driven invasion has reached saturation point and the local character of the village is virtually eradicated. They may have prosperity, but peace have they none.
 
Frigiliana’s old residents, David Baird adopted as one of their own, are strangers in their own town, their voices drowned out by English and other European accents. Baird’s book is a light held up to a forgotten generation.