Yarn 27 | Escape from Madrid
The untold story of how Turkish diplomats saved the lives of a thousand refugees during the longest siege of the Spanish Civil War.
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Listen here:
SFX: Yarn Intro sting
NARRATOR
“All wars are civil wars because all men are brothers”.
A guy called Francois Fenelon said that way back in the 1600s and I don’t disagree.
What makes civil wars different is that when they are over, combatants don’t leave the battlefield and go home thousands of miles away from each other.
No. They have to live right next to each other and they have to just… get on with life again… the best they can.
So what tends to happen is that people… just don’t talk about it.
So the next generation doesn’t talk about it and it becomes a sleeping dog no-one wants to wake up.
Very bad things happen in any war.
In civil war, add into the mix old grudges, sectarianism and societal inequalities and things can escalate to places no one could ever thought they were capable of.
So what happens when someone of a curious nature starts asking questions.
PABLO
I’m not shy, I have to say.
NARRATOR
What happens when someone decides to poke the sleeping dog?
PABLO
I started knocking on all the doors that I could.
NARRATOR
This is my friend Pablo…
PABLO
Hi, my name is Pablo De Miguel. I’m a spanish, living in Dublin, Ireland. My passion is for history. I’ve been researching a family episode related to the Spanish Civil War that has led me to write a book.
NARRATOR
This is the story of how Pablo unraveled a family mystery…
PABLO
Ok, I just want to know more about this guy.
NARRATOR
He originally wanted to know what happened to his Great uncle during the Spanish Civil war?…
PABLO
I was ashamed I didn’t even know his name. Uncle Pepe is like a nickname.
NARRATOR
But this led him to unearth a major international diplomatic incident… that was little known until now…
PABLO
It is really unknown or at least people don’t want to know about it. Nowadays the civil war is a really hot topic. My generation didn’t study it. It was one of those topics you don’t touch.
NARRATOR
But that didn’t stop Pablo, when he was a child if anyone mentioned the civil war, he wanted to know more…
PABLO
When I was a kid my grandmother, not always but at certain times we would talk about the civil war. It’s really uncommon to get grandparents to talk about the civil war, because it was really traumatic and they didn’t want to relive it or revive those feelings.
And I got to the story of one of my uncles who got killed in Paracuellos. It’s a population in Madrid.
NARRATOR
Pablo’s great uncle was one of a few thousand people killed in what would become known as the Paracuellos Massacre. A series of mass killings of civilians and soldiers by the Republican side of the Spanish Civil War…
PABLO
Between November and December of 1936, when the war was in the first 6 months
NARRATOR
The final death toll still remains a subject of debate and controversy in spain…
PABLO
They were prisoners and they took them out from the prison and they were just killed. So that made me want to know more about this guy.
NARRATOR
Before we continue it makes sense to give you some wider context of the period we’ll be talking about…
SFX: Pause for music cue
The Spanish civil war is an incredibly complex subject. Details of which are still being unearthed and debated to this day.
Historians have said the Spanish Civil War was a dress rehearsal for World War II.
Spain spent much of the 1920s under the dictatorship of Miguel Primo de Rivera. The economic hardships caused by the Great Depression intensified tensions between the classes in Spain.
Labor unrest and strikes were widespread in the early 1930s, and the election of February 16, 1936, brought a Leftist government to power.
The Conservative Right didn’t go along with this. They feared Communism, the secularization of the country and wanted to restore Catholic control and the monarchy.
The army mutinied and attempted a military coup.
A bloody civil war ensued throughout the country.
The Nationalists, as the Rebels were called, received support from Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany.
Nationalists were mostly Roman Catholic, monarchists, higher ranking members of the military, most landowners, and many businessmen. General Franco eventually emerged as the unified leader of the rebels.
The Republicans received support from the Soviet Union and Mexico.
Republicans were made up of communists, anarchists and socialists and were mostly urban workers, agricultural laborers, and many of the educated middle class.
In the first weeks and months of the revolt the rebels (or nationalists) achieved control in some areas, primarily in Spanish Morocco, the Canary Islands, and the Balearic Islands.
The Republican government managed to put down uprisings from within the major cities, including Madrid and Barcelona.
PABLO
The attempt of the rebels taking control of Madrid failed.
The army was dissolved, because the army was the ones trying to do the coup. So the government dissolved the army. Then they armed the population.
The first six months of the war in Madrid there was no law and order, there were no police men, no army. So the people got guns and rifles.
The anarchists and the communists, when they saw there was no law and order they started their own revolution, inside.
NARRATOR
So the rebels didn’t initially take control of Madrid but the official government didn’t have much control either…
PABLO
They were paramilitaries, and they started persecuting people who were not aligned with their ideas. And they killed a lot of people without any trials.
The persecution was not only for the rich aristocratic layer of society, it was also laborers who didn’t go along with the strike in October 1934.
NARRATOR
This is where old scores and retributions surfaced.
The 1934 strike Pablo is talking about, two years before, was a major strike action undertaken by miners in northern Spain against the then conservative government. The strike and the wider demonstrations eventually developed into a violent uprising against the conservative regime. Demonstrators and strikers were arrested and 260 people died.
This revolt has been regarded by some as “the first battle of” or “the prelude to” the Spanish Civil War.
PABLO
So they were killed because of that, two years later. They were killing and executing people two years later.
NARRATOR
Pablo’s research uncovered that his uncle was a soldier in the army and he was one of those people killed in the very early stages of the war in Madrid during the lockdown by the Republicans.
PABLO
He was a captain of engineers in the army. So I started to collect information and I started to get to know the profile of this guy in the army. I was able to redo his life…
Actually my book is not about him! That’s a really good start. So maybe we need to cut?
NARRATOR
Ok, let’s try this again…
SFX: Yarn Intro sting
PABLO
When I was done about him. I was going… My family is from Salamanca, which is in the north west. That’s why my family didn’t really participate in the civil war because that part was under Nationalist control.
I was invited to a dinner, where I met one of my Mum’s relatives. And she was the only one who got to know Jose Solbes Soler; Uncle Pepe.
She was 95 at the time, she’s still alive. She’s 101 or something like that now. She was like;
“Oh you did a great job and Uncle Pepe was like this and like that.”
So I was getting even more information. She told me:
“You need to study, you need to learn about your great auntie, the wife of Uncle Pepe.”
And I say:
“Why?”
And she was like:
“No, she was in Madrid when Uncle Pepe was captured in Madrid.”
But Jose Solbes Soler; Uncle Pepe, was deployed in Salamanca.
NARRATOR
Here’s where the mystery starts.
Pablo knew from reading military records that his great uncle was stationed in Salamanca, where his family lived. But he also knew Uncle Pepe was executed just outside Madrid, over 200 kilometers away from Salamanca.
Now, this woman who knew Uncle Pepe was saying that Uncle Pepe’s wife was also in Madrid with her husband.
Soldiers don’t usually take their wives with them on deployments.
PABLO
Everything was just really curious. I was intrigued by the story of why they were in Madrid? After knowing these facts I connected the dots. This guy, the Uncle Pepe, was you know, in a balloon?
NARRATOR
Though used a lot more widely during the first world war, military balloons were still being used in the 1930s by armies for reconnaissance or meteorological purposes…
PABLO
He got in an accident and he broke one of his arms in June 1936. And he got a medical appointment in Madrid, I don’t know why.
But they both traveled together to Madrid the day prior to the start of the civil war.
NARRATOR
That is some very bad luck.
The republican militias had locked down the city and were combing the streets for any nationalist sympathizers. Pablo’s relatives were in trouble because his great uncle was in the army and they were from Salamanca.
PABLO
Salamaca was in control of the rebels and Madrid was in control of the republicans.
NARRATOR
Uncle pepe’s fate was clear; He was caught, taken to a prison camp and executed but Pablo’s great aunt survived the civil war. She eventually died an old woman back in Salamanca.
PABLO
That old lady told me — she ended up coming back home to Salamanca through Italy. She went from Madrid to Italy to Salamanca, which is a nonsense trip, right? I said:
“What happened here?”
NARRATOR
But no one in Pablo’s family knew anything else. He had encountered a second mystery.
PABLO
So this is where I started researching the story of my great aunt, Manolita Redondo.
It’s unbelievable.
SFX: Pause for music cue
PABLO
She knew that her husband was taken away or killed. I don’t know if she knew her husband was killed, I’m guessing she didn’t know that. I’m assuming she felt insecure in Madrid.
And then she knocked on the door of the… Turkish Embassy.
She got asylum in the Turkish Embassy but I didn’t get that from the conversation from this old lady in Salamanca. The only thing she shared was that she was in Italy before she got back home.
And then my reviewing lists I saw her, so i could identify her and then I got a list of almost 1,000 people.
What happened with a lot of people, and I mean a lot of people, almost 12 thousand in Madrid because they were persecuted by those militias of the communists and anarchists, mainly. So they knocked the door of the embassies and they say:
“Hey, I’m going to get killed, can I get in?”
Which was literally… get in and never come back out because if you are out, you are gonna get killed.
NARRATOR
So what embassies started taking people in?
PABLO
The main embassies were Chile, Argentina, Norway, France and Turkey.
NARRATOR
I would have expected the Italian and German embassies to be the ones to take in ‘Nationalist’ refugees, seeing as those countries were pro nationalist?
PABLO
No, The Italian and German embassies recognised Franco’s government. The republican government assaulted the Italian and German embassies and got the refugees in them. Refugees were not safe in those embassies because they lost the immunity of the building. In international law the building and the land inside it is treated as if they were in their own home country. So when they recognised Franco’s government they lost that so they got assaulted.
NARRATOR
Pablo had found his great aunt’s name on a list with a thousand other people who took refuge in the Turkish embassy and he knew she eventually made it home. What he wanted to know next was…
PABLO
How they get in to the embassy and how they get out of the embassy.
NARRATOR
So first up…
How did they get in? Very few were Turkish citizens. What kind of people were they?
PABLO
In the Turkish case and on other embassies as well, how you get access to the embassy was like, okay you know the ambassador or you know any of the other diplomats working on that embassy.
So mainly aristocrats and wealthy people were the first to got into the embassy, for two main reasons; Because they have access to the ambassador and the diplomats under the ambassador.
And because the second reason, and the most important reason, they were the first ones persecuted by the militia, because they got a lot of money, they represented the power and they wanted to took off the power.
So those were the first guys who got killed in many situations, so they were the first to ask for asylum.
NARRATOR
Madrid’s high society were using their connections to find refuge in any embassy they could. And a particular rich family did one better; they got an embassy to come to them…
PABLO
What happened is, one of the aristocratic families owned the building. They asked asylum to the embassy and at the end he basically took control of the whole building.
NARRATOR
21 Zurbano street, located in an affluent part of Madrid was home to the Countess of Arcentales and her family.
It’s a beautiful six story palatial townhouse. Built in the 1910s in the art nouveau style. It features an ornate cut brown stone facade with decorative urns, cast iron balcony railings and the top floor is bookended with rounded corner turrets that almost look like bell towers.
The building was so big in fact that the Countess rented out a couple of floors. One floor was rented to the Turkish Embassy, another was rented to the Finish embassy and the Irish embassy even rented a small office on one floor.
So when the Countess’s family sought asylum they just asked the Finnish and Turkish embassy embassies to annex the floors the Countess’ family inhabited, this eventually extended diplomatic protection to include the whole building and an attached back building.
Although this didn’t include the Irish embassy. When civil war broke out, the Irish shut their office and evacuated all their staff.
As the lockdown in Madrid intensified, the word got out. Head to 21 Zurbano. So what started out as a safe haven for the Countess’s family and the elites… but then, ordinary Madrileños (Madrid-len-o-s) came knocking…
PABLO
And then everything kind of pours down. The aristocratic, they got all the relationships with the second layer of society, right? And I would say (missing word) workers like; lawyers, architects, industrials. That kind of, not wealthy people but more than the plain worker, right?
And what happened was that layer of society got into the embassy.
And the third layer, they know all the second layer and they got into that.
At the end you could find all kind of people into the embassy; from hairdressers, land workers, farmers, military people…
NARRATOR
Pablo will probably never know exactly how his great Aunt found her way inside. But once she was in, she was stuck in there…
PABLO
The two first stories they didn’t even have the windows open so they were with curtains. Because they could get spotted and they could get killed.
PABLO
The rooftop was not really in use that time because they got all the militia who could spot them in other rooftops so they didn’t use that much.
NARRATOR
During Pablo’s research he found personal accounts written by some of the inhabitants. Here’s one from the point of view of a young boy at the time…
BOY
We went to bed very early because the lights couldn’t be left on past a certain time for fear of bombings because everything became so dark and so quiet.
And at the same time, there were so many people crowded together. It was a contrast that made me feel a strange sensation of loneliness and being lost.
Pablo
And the fact that you were saying that they were not able to go out… is one of the things that I thought at the beginning but there were people that needed to go out for many different reasons and they exposed themselves and they got out, of the embassy and I dont know of any cases where they were not allowed getting back but I know mostly women went out to try to find food.
Food was scarce. You couldn’t find anything in Madrid back in those days and you were having a thousand people in two buildings so it was really hard.
NARRATOR
Here’s another account from that young boy, this time on the subject of food…
BOY
I remember how the embassy provided cans of cold meat and beautiful oranges. Distribute at a rate of one for every three or four people. The peels were eaten fried as a substitute for potatoes.
PABLO
It’s interesting because how they were organised inside of the house…
You have to think about a thousand people inside the house.
I was able to get into one of those apartments.. I calculated that more than 60 to 65 people were living in each. People were sleeping on every single square metre that they could find.
Entire families, like families of 25 members, with kids, men, women, everything. Yeah, there were no distinction. There were some distinctions, in that men were sleeping on one side of the house and women were sleeping on the other side.
How they were organised was there were chiefs of each house, right? And then there were the main chief of the house, so every house chief was reporting to the main chief. And this is how they are knowing the main necessities per house.
NARRATOR
Some of the personal accounts Pablo uncovered showed that the inhabitants’ organisation… included their own currency to be used within the embassy. They even minted their own rudimentary coins…
BOY
They were made from cardboard and their design size and color denoted their value.
The 25 cent piece which I remembered most vividly was rectangular and featured a Turkish flag to ensure its authenticity.
My mother marked the back of each coin with her initial m at her signature.
NARRATOR
For Pablo’s great aunt life inside the embassy went on like this for quite a while…
PABLO
It was from the beginning of August… August 1936 until May 1937 so that was a good 9 months.
NARRATOR
After 9 months the embassy and its ambassador, Tevfik Kamil Koperler (Tefik Kamil Kopiler) reached their breaking point…
PABLO
The Turkish ambassador, Koperler, wanted to get a full evacuation.
“I want to get these people out from the Turkish embassy because I don’t have any resources to maintain them in Madrid.”
NARRATOR
Negotiations began between the Turkish government and the Spanish Republicans, who were still defending Madrid and Barcelona…
PABLO
At the beginning.. At the really beginning of the conversations and basically almost until the end, everyone should go to Istanbul BUT the Spanish government on the Republican side changed and they got an agreement with the Turkish. The agreement was to get everyone out of the embassy BUT the military people should remain.
Only women children and men that could not participate in the war would basically go to Italy. The men that could participate in the war, this means between 18 and 25, they should go to Istanbul.
NARRATOR
The Republicans were not going to allow people who they saw as Nationalist sympathizers or potential combatants, out of the city so they could go and join the nationalists. They wanted them out of the country. Istanbul, on the other side of the mediterranean ocean was far enough away but negotiators for the refugees in the embassy argued it was too far away for people that posed no threat to the Republicans.
Italy was favorable because they had friendlier ties to the nationalists and they agreed to take them in. So a compromise was met. Women, children and older people could go to Italy but any man of fighting age had to go all the way to Istanbul and any active soldiers were not allowed to leave the embassy at all. They would stay behind and the Ambassador would deal with them later.
But for Pablo’s great aunt, she would be leaving spain. For the first time in her life..
PABLO
The Turkish government sent a boat from Turkey to Valencia. And that boat stayed there until all the refugees from Madrid get to the boat. Madrid is 350 km from Valencia so the logistics were amazing. All the embassies that did any evacuations were from Valencia or Alicante, on the coast. Basically what they did was to hire buses and they were doing trips with these people.
NARRATOR
Here’s another personal account from one of the women evacuated…
WOMAN
On the 13th of May 1937 the day designated for departure.
After preparing ourselves both spiritually and physically. At nine in the evening, we were called by our numbers to take our respective places in the bus. There were 10 vehicles each bearing the flag of Turkey and we were assigned to the second one. We had to leave the embassy with our number pinned to a lapel of our coats. Another on the suitcase and any other packages we were carrying, departing in an orderly manner at the entrance, the Turkish minister and his associates awaited us.
So on the 23rd of May 1937 the boat got all the people and started his trip back to Istanbul.
NARRATOR
The plan was for the boat to cross the Mediterranean. Make a stop at the port of Syracuse,on the east coast of Sicily to let off the women and children, then carry on to the final destination of Istanbul with the remaining men.
But as the boat approached the Sicillian shore. All the young men of fighting age saw their opportunity to cut their trip short…
PABLO
When the boat was approaching Syracuse and they start to, not to get a fight with the Turkish officials on the boat but they were kind of like, pressing. At the end they jumped to the water. They got off the boat. They were free.
712 people went out from the embassy and only 8 people got to Istanbul and those 8 people were Turkish citizens.
NARRATOR
When reports got back to the Spanish Republicans that only 8 people made it to Istanbul. Turkey and the Turkish ambassador in Madrid were in trouble.
PABLO
That was a major point in the relationship of the Spanish Republicans and the Turkish because that wasn’t the agreement.
NARRATOR
So what happened to Pablo’s Great Aunt and everyone else who got off the boat in Sicily?
PABLO
Some people were in camps until Franco’s government prepared all the evacuations from Italy. And some people who got a little bit more resources, instead of waiting on the camp, they went up to Rome, My great Aunt among this group of 35 people.They got in Rome and they were evacuated but they ended up in the Spanish nationalist side.
NARRATOR
After losing her husband. Spending 9 months locked inside an embassy, surrounded by snipers. After traveling to Valencia, sailing across the Mediterranean. After landing in Sicily then heading for Rome. After finally making it back to her home in Salamanca. You might think she would have at least told her family and friends about the ordeal. But she didn’t say a word..
PABLO
This woman survived the war. She lived 75 years and she didn’t tell anyone about this.
NARRATOR
But our story doesn’t end with Pablo’s Great Aunt. Back at the Turkish Embassy in Madrid there were still 58 people left behind…
PABLO
When everybody got out the agreement that was signed was that only those military people would stay there.
But another [missing word] was that the Turkish ambassador couldn’t get more people in, that was specifically clear on that agreement.
But… The Turkish ambassador let in more people.
NARRATOR
The Turkish ambassador continued to take more people in but now he was breaking the agreement he made with the Spanish Government.
Why did he do this?
Pablo has a theory, which we’ll get to a little later.
But first we have to mention one more twist involving the embassy.
Unbeknownst to Ambassador Kopiler, a pair of Nationalist spies gained access to 21 Zurbano Street…
PABLO
By November 1938 everything got really messy because the two major spies on the Fifth Column, they got into the embassy with fake names and fake identities
NARRATOR
The Fifth Column was a secret subversive group that worked against the Republican leadership from inside Madrid.
This term was coined by Nationalist General Emilio Mola in a radio broadcast on October 16, 1936, in which he said that he had “a fifth column” of sympathizers for General Franco among the Republicans holding the city of Madrid, and it would join his four columns of troops that were currently marching on the city.
The term was popularized by writer Ernest Hemingway and later extended to refer to any traitorous insiders.
PABLO
It only took one month for the Republican intelligence to find out where they were. So the Republican intelligence and the government were in this situation;
“How do we get these two high profiles of the fifth column that are doing all kind of sabotage? We need these guys. So what we are doing is that we are going to assault the embassy.”
They got an excuse. A made up excuse where somebody inside the embassy were just shooting at some policemens on the street, which wasn’t true.
NARRATOR
The Republicans launched their assault on 21 Zurbano. They wanted to catch the spies and shut down the embassy for good.
As they burst into the building…
PABLO
At that same moment a wedding was being celebrated, inside the embassy.
I was able to contact that family that got married and actually one of his sons shared me an audio file of the bride telling the experience after the assault, which is amazing…
PABLO
What happened is all the people got arrested. They separated the military people from the regular people.
NARRATOR
The Embassy was no more…
PABLO
All people went from Madrid to Barcelona. And in Barcelona they were in different prisons, where they were doing all kind of works related to setting up a railroad.
More than 15 people died because the conditions were so bad. They didn’t have food and they were working more than 12 hours. It was one of those kinds of crazy things.
Actually in those conditions one of those high profiles of the spy organisation that get into the embassy, actually died and the other one escaped.
When Franco basically took Barcelona, the, the Repubican Army that were controlling these prisons, they get them into a train to France. And the second spy that survived escaped by jumping off the train.
And he was found by Franco’s army that was getting into Barcelona.
NARRATOR
So what about Ambassador Kopiler? What happened to him? And why did he ignore the agreement and continue taking in, people he believed were refugees?
PABLO
More people got into the… And this is something I’m still studying; Why did the ambassador basically broke that agreement.
This is also related with the situation of Turkey with Italy.
NARRATOR
Pablo thinks the answer involves a bit of state craft and geo politics…
PABLO
We have to have in consideration that Turkey was basically a republic that was formed after the Ottoman empire break down, right? So they were really young and basically they were vulnerable in that sense.
Franco was an ally of Italy and Germany and also Italy got some interest in some of the Turkish territory, right?
But also they got in a sandwich. They got Russia on the other side wanted to supply the Spanish Republicans. That’s why I guess they tried to play both sides, like to not be caught in the middle.
NARRATOR
Turkey was attempting to walk a very thin line…
PABLO
“I’m not looking at the Russians so they can ship whatever they want through the Bosporus and I’m not looking to Madrid in my embassy because there is Italy allied with Franco and I don’t want to mess up anything.”
That’s my hypothesis on why I mean… You as an ambassador, you are ruled by your government and you would not risk your reputation as an ambassador to get people in without the permission of your government.
NARRATOR
Pablo’s theory is that the ambassador was given the ok from the Turkish government. He was still acting under their orders.
PABLO
That permission came from high up.
Because after that, Koperler was not a welcome man, after the embassy was assaulted. He left Spain after that.
And Turkey, as I said, they broke relationships with the Spanish Republicans.
But after that he, he was in Serbia as a diplomat. He continued his diplomatic career. That means that he didn’t break amy rules.
NARRATOR
It’s a fair point. If your ambassador did go against orders why would you give him another diplomatic posting?
Pablo’s theory gains even more weight by the fact that the Turkish government did fire another one of their diplomats at the same embassy
PABLO
The secretary of the embassy, he was stealing to get people in. So there were people who got into the embassy because the secretary of the embassy asked for money.
And that guy was removed from the diplomatic career after they find out what he was doing in Madrid.
I couldn’t find what happened about him. And all the people I asked in Turkey they couldn’t find where or what happened to that guy. He just vanished
NARRATOR
If you know your history, you’ll be aware of how the civil war ended. On March 29 1939 Madrid surrendered to Franco’s forces. The siege was over. The Nationalists had won…
SFX: Newsreel audio of Franco’s parade through Mardid
PABLO
When Franco took Madrid, all the refugees that were persecuted by the Republicans, they were free.
I wouldn’t say all of them were Franco’s supporters. Some people got into an embassy, not because they were supporting Franco or because they were supporting the coup but because they were being persecuted.
But we tend to link that… they were supporting Franco.
At the end they were kind of supporting Franco because for them he was the guy who finally freed them.
NARRATOR
So now the Nationalists were in power. What happened to the civilians who supported the republicans? Did roles reverse? They were the refugees now. Did they go knocking on the door of embassies?
PABLO
When Franco took control of the city, they started to ask for asylum to the same embassies but Franco didn’t allow the embassies to get the refugees. So at the end no one from the Republican side could have access to those embassies. They couldn’t do the opposite.
SFX: Pause for music cue
NARRATOR
With all resistance quashed, Franco was free to rule Spain. His regime was characterized by authoritarianism and repression. During his rule, Franco’s government committed numerous atrocities, including political persecution, censorship, and human rights abuses.
He executed and imprisoned political opponents. He suppressed regional cultures and languages, particularly in regions like Catalonia and the Basque Country.
His regime resulted in widespread suffering and loss of life for many Spaniards.
For Spain’s current generation.. it’s been almost 50 years since the death of Franco and the end of his rule
And it’s been over 80 years since the end of the civil war. but this time period is still a delicate subject for Spanish people…
PABLO
Yeah, there is some kind of resistance. Some people they don’t want to share that their family was in that embassy or in any other embassy because they could get pointed at as Franco supporters. That’s a pity because it shouldn’t happen that way.
This is what happens, and I know I shouldn’t even be worried about it but in Spain, even though I am not aligned with the Left or the Right. If I say what the Left did wrong then the Left are going to eat me alive. But if I say something that the Right didn’t do well, I am going to be eaten by the Right.
NARRATOR
Whatever flack Pablo gets, it doesn’t seem to deter his passion for the project…
PABLO
I’m still open to collect more testimonies.
I want this to be shared across…
NARRATOR
If you want to follow Pablo’s research. If you want to check his embassy refugee lists for relatives. Or if you want to submit any testimonies, you can go to Pablo’s website he set up for the project at www.zurbano21.com
That’s Z-U-R-B-A-N-O, and the number 21 dot com.
This has been a story for Yarn Podcast dot com.
Produced by me, John Roche.
And huge thanks to Pablo De Miguel for talking to me.
And thanks to Pablo’s son Martin and his wife Sophia, who voiced the diary entries you heard.
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