SPEAKER_03: Squarespace is the all-in-one platform for building your brand and growing your business online. Stand out with a beautiful website, engage with your audience, and sell anything-your products, content you create, and even your time. You can easily display posts from your social profiles on your website or share new blogs or videos to social media. Automatically push website content to your favorite channels so your followers can share it too. Go to squarespace.com slash invisible for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, use the offer code invisible to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. With no fees or minimums, banking with Capital One is the easiest decision in the history of decisions, even easier than deciding to listen to another episode of your favorite podcast. And with no overdraft fees, is it even a decision? That's banking reimagined. What's in your wallet? Terms apply? Visit capitalone.com slash bank, Capital One N.A., Member FDIC. Every kid learns differently, so it's really important that your children have the educational support that they need to help them keep up and excel. If your child needs homework help, check out iXcel, the online learning platform for kids. iXcel covers math, language arts, science, and social studies through interactive practice problems from pre-K to 12th grade. As kids practice, they get positive feedback and even awards. With the school year ramping up, now is the best time to get iXcel. Our listeners can get an exclusive 20% off iXcel membership when they sign up today at iXcel dot com slash invisible. That's the letters iXcel dot com slash invisible. This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. About an hour northwest of Madrid, an enormous stone crucifix rises 500 feet out of a rocky mountaintop. It's so big you can see it from miles away. Beneath the cross, there's a sprawling Benedictine monastery and a basilica carved out of the mountain. This place is called the Valley of the Fallen, and it's likely the most controversial monument in Spain.
SPEAKER_05: The valley is synonymous with Francisco Franco, the general who ruled Spain from the end of its bloody civil war in 1939 until his death in 1975.
SPEAKER_03: That's reporter Jennifer Omani.
SPEAKER_05: When Franco died, he became the valley's most notorious inhabitant. His body was buried under a huge stone slab.
SPEAKER_03: But as the decades passed after his death, anger about the monument grew. People began to push for the removal of Franco's body. They argued there was no place in a democracy for a monument exalting a man who had tortured and killed thousands of Spaniards in the name of fascism. And then in October of 2019,
SPEAKER_12: Now the Spanish dictator Francisco Franco died 44 years ago. Today his remains were moved from the Valley of the Fallen.
SPEAKER_05: Franco's body was disinterred, his coffin packed into a helicopter and then flown to a graveyard on the outskirts of the city to be reburied.
SPEAKER_03: Despite all his torturing and murdering, Franco still has fans in Spain. Some see him as the emblem of a traditional Spanish Catholic life, and some actually like his fascist ideology and would like to see it make a comeback.
SPEAKER_05: And so when his body was removed, hundreds of his supporters gathered at the new cemetery to wield swastikas and Franco-era flags and to perform the fascist salute in his honor.
SPEAKER_05: One of the protesters told me she'd lived for 19 years under Franco and that Spain was a marvelous country back then.
SPEAKER_05: She said the dictator's spirit would always be in the valley and in her heart.
SPEAKER_03: Even if you're not familiar with Franco, this story might sound familiar to you. You got your fascists, you got your anti-fascists, and there's this monument honoring a very bad man from the past that people are arguing about. But this story is different because the Valley of the Fallen isn't just a monument. It is also a mass grave.
SPEAKER_05: There are tens of thousands of other bodies still trapped in the basilica beneath where Franco used to lie. Many were ordinary civilians killed by Franco's security forces during the height of the Civil War.
SPEAKER_03: And for years, their families have been trying to get them out. The story of the Valley of the Fallen can be traced all the way back to the mid-1930s when Spain found itself torn in two different political directions.
SPEAKER_15: The Republic, Hernínea Bonita, the beautiful girl. Joyful demonstrations throughout Spain greeted the proclamation of the Republic.
SPEAKER_05: In 1936, the country was a new democracy, just a few years removed from monarchy when a group of left-wing, anti-clerical Republicans won the elections. This horrified the right-wing Catholics in the country. That included Francisco Franco, a general in the Spanish army.
SPEAKER_03: After the election, Franco banded together with other right-wing military leaders to carry out a coup. They believed they were on a divine crusade.
SPEAKER_15: What began as a military coup led to almost three years of civil war.
SPEAKER_03: The right-wingers gradually seized control of Spain. Their death squads rounded up suspected leftists and then paraded them through villages and shot them.
SPEAKER_15: For both sides, political opponents became enemies to be hunted down and killed. This is Porificación La Pena.
SPEAKER_05: Her grandfather Manuel and great uncle Antonio were among Franco's victims. When I met her, she showed me photos of them as handsome young men back in the 1930s. Manuel worked as a village vet, caring for the animals of local farmers.
SPEAKER_05: His brother Antonio was an iron worker. Both men had supported the leftists who won the elections, and both had joined a union, making them targets for the right-wing nationalists. Manuel was working in the field one day in July 1936, when a group of Franco's men rolled up in a truck.
SPEAKER_09: They grabbed Porificación's grandfather and the other workers and took them to a nearby
SPEAKER_05: jail.
SPEAKER_05: Her grandfather was killed and left in a ditch. Her great uncle was murdered a few months later. Over the years, word spread through the village that the ravine where Manuel was killed was filling up with bodies. But it would take a long time for the family to find out exactly what had happened.
SPEAKER_03: And they weren't the only ones left without answers. Something similar was playing out for families across the country.
SPEAKER_15: The Spanish Civil War, like any other, unleashed the passions of centuries of hatred. The killing was unrestrained.
SPEAKER_03: By 1939, the Civil War was over and Spain was in ruins. At least 400,000 people had died. Half of them were civilians who faced torture, assassination, and the unexplained disappearances of their family members.
SPEAKER_05: A network of mass graves now scarred the Spanish landscape. Some contained thousands of bodies. It's estimated that Spain still has 114,000 missing people dating back to that time.
SPEAKER_03: But Franco wasn't interested in what happened to the bodies of his enemies. At least, not at first. He was too busy consolidating his power. As the great superpowers of the world took up sides in World War II, he decided not to fight, focusing his energies on fully crushing his opposition at home.
SPEAKER_00: In an official declaration, Generalissimo Francisco Franco states that his government will not join the German-Italian-Japanese alliance against communism, but he says that he will extirpate communism in Spain.
SPEAKER_05: The country now had a single political party and protest was effectively banned. Franco became known as El Caudillo, the supreme leader. And in a very savvy move, he continued to cultivate the backing of the Catholic Church.
SPEAKER_13: Franco was not a particularly religious man, but he adopted the idea very cleverly that his war effort was a religious crusade.
SPEAKER_05: This is Paul Preston. He's one of the leading scholars of the Spanish Civil War and of Franco's regime.
SPEAKER_13: And this guaranteed him the support of the Catholic Church internationally.
SPEAKER_05: Which meant Franco could operate with relative impunity. He went about taking away many of the rights that Spaniards had gained during the 1930s. Women, for example, lost the right to divorce their husbands and have abortions, and they could no longer work outside the home without permission.
SPEAKER_03: Men, on the other hand, could kill their wives for adultery. The government banned regional languages like Basque and Catalan. The Catholic Church ruled over every aspect of most Spaniards' lives.
SPEAKER_13: The ideas of Francoism are being pumped out from church pulpits. They're being pumped out in schools. The people who, in principle, would not have supported Franco were basically forced either to accept these ideas or go into what we call inner exile. In other words, to go into a world of silence.
SPEAKER_03: And now that Franco had gained absolute power over the country, he wanted a monument to immortalize his great triumph. It is to be for him what the pyramids were to the pharaohs.
SPEAKER_05: Franco commissioned the Valley of the Fallen in 1940. The building, he said, would rival the grandeur of ancient monuments.
SPEAKER_03: And then because he was Franco, he went about building the monument in the most fascist way possible, relying on the forced labor of his political prisoners.
SPEAKER_14: The three camps were controlled by a brigade of the civil gods. We were counted every three hours to make sure that nobody has escaped.
SPEAKER_05: This is Nicolas Sanchez Albonoz. Back in the 1940s, he was a college student in Madrid, and he got involved in anti-Franco organizing. After getting caught handing out pro-democracy pamphlets, Nicolas was sentenced to work at the Valley of the Fallen.
SPEAKER_14: We had to sleep in barracks, and well, at seven or eight o'clock, we are supposed to be working.
SPEAKER_03: Because of Nicolas' university education, he was put to work in the office, shuffling papers around for prison officials and filling in endless forms. But as he walked to and from his barracks each day, he saw men carving rock on pitiful rations of food and working with dynamite without protection.
SPEAKER_14: Very harsh work. And obviously, there were some people that were killed.
SPEAKER_05: The construction of the Valley of the Fallen took an enormous human toll. An estimated 40,000 prisoners worked on the project. Some died from exhaustion. Others inhaled pulverized granite and were killed by lung diseases many years later.
SPEAKER_03: Franco hadn't initially conceived of the Valley of the Fallen as a gravesite, much less a mass grave. But it would become one, thanks to Franco's twisted response to pressure from one of Spain's main allies.
SPEAKER_05: The Americans relied on Spain as one of their European partners during the Cold War. And when they heard about Franco's plans for the Valley of the Fallen, they started to get nervous.
SPEAKER_03: The monument was shaping up to be pretty confrontational and divisive. The Americans hoped Franco would dial it back a bit, to make it a place that memorialized all the country's war dead, not just the Catholic Crusaders.
SPEAKER_05: And so Franco declared the Valley of the Fallen to be a place of reconciliation. A place where the dead from both sides of the Civil War would be laid to rest.
SPEAKER_03: But then, once again, Franco went about making that happen in the most fascist way possible.
SPEAKER_09: Poroficación La Pena says that Franco ordered his people to bring him bodies from mass graves
SPEAKER_05: and cemeteries all over Spain. They dug the bodies up, without permission, and jumbled them together in boxes.
SPEAKER_05: Then they drove them to the valley, where they were reburied in the crypts near the basilica. Finally completed, the valley opened to the public in 1959.
SPEAKER_03: Nearly two decades later, when Franco finally died of heart failure, he too was buried at the Valley of the Fallen. He was laid to rest in a grand basilica above the bodies of the Spaniards he had tortured, killed, and then reburied in a mass grave, where their families couldn't find them.
SPEAKER_05: And with Franco gone, Spain suddenly confronted a new future without El Gaudío. Well, look, when Franco died, we were very happy to get rid of him.
SPEAKER_14: We were expecting that. And we had the freezer full of champagne.
SPEAKER_03: The three years between Franco's death and the signing of a new constitution became known as the transition. The country moved from fascist dictatorship to multi-party democracy.
SPEAKER_05: And starting in the late 1970s, Spain finally got to do what the US, Britain, and France had done more than a decade before. They got to have fun. A new revolutionary movement sprang up in Madrid and became known as La Movida Madrileña.
SPEAKER_02: La Movida has consumed Madrid, transforming the capital into Europe's new moveable feast.
SPEAKER_05: Only Spaniards could drink, dance, have sex outside of marriage, and make music about it. The transition seemed to have ushered in a new Spain, but the elation felt after Franco's death was temporary.
SPEAKER_14: It's only after several years that you realize that new democracy hasn't solved all the problems that were brought by the dictatorship.
SPEAKER_03: For one thing, there were reminders of the dictatorship everywhere. There were statues of Franco and his collaborators in central plazas all over the country. His name was on street signs. And of course, the Valley of the Fallen served as a colossal reminder.
SPEAKER_14: How can you have a democracy and at the same time have a huge monument to the glory of the dictatorship built by political prisoners?
SPEAKER_05: But perhaps the biggest hurdle to fully addressing what had happened to the country under Franco was an agreement that became known as the Pacto del Olvido, the Pact of Forgetting.
SPEAKER_02: As one politician said, the pact would be an amnesty for everyone, agreed to by everyone.
SPEAKER_03: At the heart of the Pact of Forgetting was legal forgiveness for all Franco era crimes. It was a deal agreed to by parties on the right and the left. It was a massive compromise.
SPEAKER_13: The whole process of transition to democracy was a transaction. It was a deal. It was a negotiation.
SPEAKER_03: Paul Preston again.
SPEAKER_13: So the negotiation, compromise, sacrifice was the only chance of getting even a glimmer of democracy.
SPEAKER_05: So that's the context. The left agreed to the pact because they wanted their political prisoners freed and their political parties legalized. They wanted to be able to live in this new democracy without fear of being tortured or murdered.
SPEAKER_03: But as time went on, they had to grapple with the fact that the amnesty applied to people on the right too. Fausto Canales was a left-wing activist back in the late 70s when the Pact of Forgetting
SPEAKER_05: went into effect. He knew back then that his father had disappeared during the civil war when Fausto was just two years old. And he says that instead of making sure people on the left wouldn't be persecuted for their political views, the amnesty law was primarily used to shield those on the right who'd killed civilians.
SPEAKER_07: Fausto says when he realized what had happened, he put his head in his hands.
SPEAKER_05: He felt he'd been tricked. The pact created a culture of silence around the atrocities of Spain's past. It suppressed conversations about the killing of civilians during the civil war and the long years of repression that followed. The pact basically said, let's just not talk about what happened. Let's move forward instead.
SPEAKER_03: And as for the Valley of the Fallen, it became something like a shrine to Franco. Fascists would visit it from all over Europe to pay their respects and would mark his death with flowers every year. Franco was remembered even as the pact ensured that his crimes were slowly forgotten and erased.
SPEAKER_05: For people like Purificación, the pact just didn't work. It was impossible to move forward without knowing exactly what had happened to her relatives. As time went on, her family and many others began to resist the taboo against speaking up. They began to talk about what they'd been through.
SPEAKER_05: Purificación says that during the 1980s, discussions that had long been kept quiet started to come out into the open.
SPEAKER_05: And even if people didn't want to listen, at least it was no longer unthinkable for families of victims to make their grievances known.
SPEAKER_03: And as families began to talk more about what happened to them, they also started to organize around an important goal. They wanted to find the bodies of their missing family members that had ended up in the mass graves around the country.
SPEAKER_05: And they weren't going to wait for the government to give them permission. They began hiring forensic specialists and archaeologists to help them find and dig up the bodies themselves.
SPEAKER_05: Miguel Angel Capape works for an organization called ARICO. It carries out private exhumations for families who want to find their murdered relatives.
SPEAKER_05: As Miguel showed me around the headquarters, I noticed a wall of boxes and asked what they contained. He told me that inside were skeletons, some broken into pieces by torture and the years spent underground, now waiting to be washed and identified.
SPEAKER_05: I asked him how families typically react to seeing these broken bodies emerge from the ground after waiting for answers for so long.
SPEAKER_05: It's everything, he says, especially when they've spent years trying to learn where their loved ones were buried. Having a real funeral makes a huge difference to people.
SPEAKER_03: For a long time, the work of people like Miguel happened below the radar and without support from the state. But then, in 2007, a new law went into effect that gave a boost to these efforts to uncover the crimes of the past. The new law was called the Historical Memory Law, and it broke the pact of forgetting. For the first time, victims of Franco-era crimes received official recognition. The law called for the removal of Francoist symbols from public places, and lots of new money flowed to the exhumation efforts happening at mass grave sites across the country.
SPEAKER_05: Porificación La Pena and her family seized their chance. They contacted Eduardo Ramf, a human rights lawyer who was helping to investigate crimes dating back to the Franco era. Eduardo started looking into the case of Porificación's grandfather and great-uncle.
SPEAKER_05: He learned that Porificación's relatives were not in a mass grave near the town where they'd been killed.
SPEAKER_03: Instead, they were among the bodies that had been moved to the Valley of the Fallen before it opened in 1959. They'd been jumbled together in boxes with other remains, and then transferred into the crypts of the Basilica. When reburied, their names had not been written down.
SPEAKER_05: And Porificación's family wasn't the only one hearing this. All told, around 33,000 bodies had been reburied at the monument.
SPEAKER_05: Porificación eventually banded together with more than 30 families. They filed a series of legal complaints that wound their way through regional, national, and European courts over the course of many years.
SPEAKER_09: And then, in 2011, the government asked a panel of experts to consider the future of
SPEAKER_03: the Valley of the Fallen.
SPEAKER_03: The panel recommended that Franco's body be removed from the Valley, a small victory for those who'd long said that the Valley was a monument to fascism. With Franco's body moved to another cemetery, at least the fascist pilgrimages would stop.
SPEAKER_05: But the panel also said that identifying and removing the tens of thousands of other bodies was not practical. Porificación was once again denied the chance she'd hoped for. It's been so many years, she says. She laments the fact that her father is 95 years old and has lost his memory. He'll never know what happened to his own father.
SPEAKER_03: And this is true for thousands of Spaniards. Of all those buried in the Valley, 21,000 could be identified. The other 12,000 people remain nameless. The only thing known is where their bodies came from in Spain, offering a small sliver of hope for families still searching for their loved ones. The efforts to address Spain's fascist past remain patchwork, not just at the Valley of the Fallen but across the country. There are still Franco-era statues and street signs, and recently more insidious reminders of the dictatorship have been reemerging in the country. A new far-right party, known as Vox, won seats in parliament last year.
SPEAKER_05: Their slogan? Áfere españa grande otra vez.
SPEAKER_03: Make Spain Great Again.
SPEAKER_05: Vox would never actually claim to be fascist, but their policies align with what Franco represented. They want a border war with Morocco. They want to take away the power held by Spain's regions in favor of national unity. They would deport all undocumented migrants, and they're totally opposed to a gender violence law that would tackle Spain's shamefully high levels of domestic violence.
SPEAKER_03: Their rapid rise has been driven by Instagram memes and YouTube videos. A recent election spot showed the party's leader, Santiago Abascal, striding through a Castilian landscape and talking about honor and national pride, and about refusing to live among traitors.
SPEAKER_03: Vox puts on events which attract a lot of young people who have never voted before, and many of them don't even know who Franco is. In a lot of ways, the pact of forgetting actually worked. European history isn't taught in Spanish schools, which means that young people are more susceptible to Vox's appeal. They don't understand the party's connection to Spain's bloody history.
SPEAKER_05: Fausto Canales, the left-wing activist, says his own father is believed to be in the Valley of the Fallen, but every attempt to get him out has been blocked. After living with the pain of his father's murder his entire life, Fausto has watched Vox's rise with increasing alarm.
SPEAKER_05: He says Spain is the country of amnesia. So much tragedy, a genocide, has been forgotten.
SPEAKER_03: After Franco's body was removed from the Valley, Vox accused the government of using the exhumation to score political points ahead of an election, drowning out the calls from families to take their own loved ones out of the monument.
SPEAKER_00: Meanwhile, pro-Franco protesters gathered at the Valley and sang Spain's old national
SPEAKER_05: anthem, which is peppered with fascist lyrics.
SPEAKER_05: The anthem was retired after Franco died in favour of a wordless melody you just nod along to. But now, they're singing the lyrics again.
SPEAKER_03: Opinion is now divided on what the future of the Valley should be.
SPEAKER_14: The government has been spending a lot of money to keep in good shape the monument. Stop it. Now that I'm more.
SPEAKER_05: Once all the bodies are out, Nicolas would leave nature to take its course. Just let the monument fall down.
SPEAKER_14: The only problem is that nature works, but it works very slowly.
SPEAKER_05: Pareve Gathion says the most important thing is to get the rest of the bodies out of the Valley, not just Franco's.
SPEAKER_05: He says, what I want is for every family with murdered victims in the Valley of the Fallen or thrown in ditches. I want them to dig up all of these people buried all over Spain, because Spain is a mass grave. My idea would be to exhume them all and for them to be given back to their families and dignified with burials in cemeteries where they should be. The story of what really happened should be known and taught in schools so that everyone knows the real history of what happened.
SPEAKER_03: In 2016, a judge ordered an exhumation of Pareve Gathion's family members. It was the first and only time that it happened in Spain.
SPEAKER_05: But it still hasn't been carried out. Pareve Gathion and Fausto were told that, with Franco's body gone, this might be the year. And while they're not getting their hopes up, it's true that in Spain, the dead have a way of surprising the living.
SPEAKER_03: Coming up after the break, Nicolas Sanchez Albernaz, the student who was sentenced to work at the Valley of the Fallen, well, he eventually escaped. And the story of how that happened is pretty wild. Stay with us. USA for UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency, responds to emergencies and provides long-term solutions for refugees in places like Ukraine, Syria, Afghanistan, Sudan, and many more. UNHCR supports people forced to flee from war, violence, and persecution at their greatest moment of need. Every day, displaced families struggle to meet basic needs, like providing meals and clean water for their children. For many, the last few years have been the hardest. The global repercussions of war in Ukraine, leading to steep rises in the cost of basic commodities like food and fuel, combined with the climate crisis and COVID-19, formed a triple threat. Because of the commitment of their compassionate donors, UNHCR sends relief supplies and deploys its highly trained staff anywhere in the world, at any given time. UNHCR is able to deploy within 72 hours of a large-scale emergency and jumpstart relief and protection assistance. Help deliver urgent aid. Your support can provide life-saving care and hope for a better future. Donate to USA for UNHCR by visiting unrefugees.org slash donation. The International Rescue Committee works in more than 40 countries to serve people whose lives have been upended by conflict and disaster. Over 110 million people are displaced around the world, and the IRC urgently needs your help to meet this unprecedented need. The IRC aims to respond within 72 hours after an emergency strikes, and they stay as long as they are needed. Some of the IRC's most important work is addressing the inequalities facing women and girls, ensuring safety from harm, improving health outcomes, increasing access to education, improving economic well-being, and ensuring women and girls have the power to influence decisions that affect their lives. Generous people around the world give to the IRC to help families affected by humanitarian crises with emergency supplies. Your generous donation will give the IRC steady, reliable support, allowing them to continue their ongoing humanitarian efforts, even as they respond to emergencies. Sign up tonight today by visiting rescue.org slash rebuild. Donate now and help refugee families in need.
SPEAKER_03: When you're working on the go, how can you make sure the confidential information on your laptop screen is safe from wandering eyes? 3M has the answer with the new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter. Using Nanoluva technology, 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filters deter visual hackers while providing a 25% brighter experience over other privacy filters. In fact, it's 3M's brightest privacy filter yet, the perfect balance of screen clarity and visual privacy. It's a new type of privacy filter built for an era where our screens are wherever we go. Try the new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter and stop worrying about confidential or personal information escaping your computer screen. Everything that appears in your screen is for your eyes only. Visit 3M screens.com slash brighter to get your new 3M BrightScreen Privacy Filter today and work like no one is watching. 3M screens.com slash brighter. So, as a reminder, Nicolas Sanchez Albernaz was the student who was imprisoned at the Valley of the Fallen for a few months during its construction. He didn't do hard labor. He worked in an office job there, but it was an awful place and a lot of prisoners tried to escape. It's estimated there were 50 attempted escapes between 1940 and 1959. But the only two escapes that succeeded were those of my friend and myself.
SPEAKER_14: The rest were caught.
SPEAKER_03: And how Nicolas did it is a pretty crazy story. So we wanted to bring back Jennifer Omani to tell us a bit more. And so, Jennifer, tell us what happened with this escape.
SPEAKER_05: So to begin with, there were a few things that made escaping from the Valley of the Fallen difficult. The Valley wasn't actually really heavily guarded, but it was set very deep in a forest. And if anybody managed to walk out, they'd get picked up as soon as they got to the nearest road. And in Spain at that time, the roads were really heavily policed and Spaniards needed special permission to just to travel around their own country.
SPEAKER_03: So if an escaped prisoner even made it out to the road, there was little chance they'd be able to make it any further because of all the guards.
SPEAKER_05: It would be very difficult. So Nicolas understood that context. And he reached out to a good friend of his, an architect, who drafted him some fake travel permits. And the next thing Nicolas did was write a letter to some of his friends who are exiled in Paris. And he asked them if they could help him get out of the valley. And those friends just happened to be connected to Norman Mailer. Norman Mailer, the author?
SPEAKER_03: Like, I mean, was he, was he already famous at this point?
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, this was just before his debut novel came out. So he wasn't quite famous yet, but he was just on the cusp of it. And he was one of a number of writers and artists from the US who'd got very interested in the anti-fascist movement in Europe. Fascism goes back to our infancy and our childhood, where we were always told how to live.
SPEAKER_04: We were told, do this, don't do that. No, no. Yes, you may do that. No, you may not do that.
SPEAKER_03: That's a very Norman Mailer take on fascism. So how did he get connected to Nicolas's friends?
SPEAKER_05: Well according to Nicolas, apparently Mailer was on holiday in France, and he'd had a chance encounter with his friends. Mailer mentioned he'd be going back to the US quite soon, that he'd bought a car and he was trying to get rid of it before he left.
SPEAKER_14: And our friend said, well we need your car. And he said, well, I give it to you, but I also will give you my sister to drive.
SPEAKER_05: So that would be Mailer's sister, Barbara, who had also been in France. And she was also interested in the anti-fascist movement. And she began corresponding with Nicolas via his friends. They wrote letters back and forth, and eventually they agreed on a date and time when she'd come to the valley in Norman Mailer's car, driven by one of Nicolas's friends to take him away.
SPEAKER_03: That all sounds kind of surprisingly easy. Yeah, so the fact that Barbara was an American and the fact they were in a car, in a strange
SPEAKER_05: way, it meant they aroused much less suspicion. It seems kind of like the benefits of being an American in that situation.
SPEAKER_03: Yeah, well at this time, almost any foreigner really had a certain amount of privilege in
SPEAKER_05: that respect. So on the appointed date, Nicolas and a friend of his from university who was also jailed for pro-democracy activities snuck out of his barracks and found Barbara waiting for them with their mutual friends. They were just parked there in front of the monument. They were just like sitting outside, they'd beep a couple of times and make them run out.
SPEAKER_05: Yeah, according to how he tells it, Nicolas and the fellow prisoner hopped into the car and then Barbara drove them to northeastern Spain and dropped them at the border with France. Then there was a hard part. Nicolas had to hike with his friends through the Pyrenees Mountains for three days, walking only at night and hiding out or sleeping during the day to avoid police. They were trying to be as inconspicuous as possible. And finally, on the third day, they saw a road sign written in French.
SPEAKER_14: It was written in French and we found an old Frenchman with a long mustache that we began to talk with him and he said, oh no, you are safe, you're in France.
SPEAKER_03: And so was it typical for people fleeing Franco-Spain to go into France seeking safety? I mean, like, were there lots of people hiking through the Pyrenees just as Nicolas did?
SPEAKER_05: Well, Nicolas was following a route established by hundreds of thousands of political refugees, actually, when the Republican forces lost their last battle to Franco's nationalist army in 1939. So at that time, men, women and children made their way into France through the mountains. But by the time Nicolas made that journey, it was a lot less common. I mean, Spain wasn't a totally closed country like North Korea, but he was a fugitive. So it was a bit different for him.
SPEAKER_03: And so what did Nicolas do once he got into France?
SPEAKER_05: Well, as any of us would, I guess he got in touch with his family and his father, a diplomat who was in exile for his own safety, told him to come to Argentina. So Nicolas flew out and reunited with his family there and he wouldn't return to Spain until Franco's death.
SPEAKER_03: That's such a cool story. Thanks so much, Jennifer. I appreciate it.
SPEAKER_05: Thanks a lot, Roman.
SPEAKER_03: 99% Invisible was produced this week by Jennifer Omani and edited by senior producer Delaney Hall, mixed by Bryson Barnes, music by Sean Real. Kurt Kohlstedt is the digital director. The rest of the team is Vivian Lay, Chris Berube, Joe Rosenberg, Emmett Fitzgerald, Katie Mingle, Abbie Madone, Sophia Klatsker and me, Roman Mars. We are a project of 91.7 KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row, which is now distributed in multiple locations around North America, but in our hearts will always be in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. We are a proud member of Radio-Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative, listener supported, 100% artist owned podcasts in the world. Visit them all at radiotopia.fm. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99pi.org or on Instagram and Reddit too. You can find out how to pre-order the 99% Invisible book that we announced last week at 99pi.org slash book. And for all your other 99 PI needs, look no further than 99pi.org.
SPEAKER_03: Great sleep can be hard to come by these days and finding the right mattress feels totally overwhelming. Serta's new and improved Perfect Sleeper is a simple solution designed to support all sleep positions. With zoned comfort, memory foam and a cool to the touch cover, the Serta Perfect Sleeper means more restful nights and more rested days. Find your comfort at Serta.com.
SPEAKER_01: At Discount Tire, we know your time is valuable. Get 30% shorter average wait time when you buy and book online. Did you know Discount Tire now sells wiper blades? Check out our current deals at DiscountTire.com or stop in and talk to an associate today. Discount Tire.
SPEAKER_11: You might not think that a few simple words could make you crave McDonald's breakfast sandwiches, but if you listen closely to the sound of me saying McRiddles, McMuffin, you might be wrong. Ba da ba ba ba. Ba da ba ba ba ba.
