In Hiding is the spellbinding story of a man who spent thirty years holed up in his own home to escape execution. Manuel Cortés was a Socialist Party member, an activist in the Republic’s land reform movement, and an organizer in the farm workers’ unionization struggles. As Mayor of Mijas in Andalusia, he became caught up in the ferment of revolutionary Spain in the late 1930s.
A marked man, he evaded Franco’s execution squads to survive in hiding through a generation of persecution and terror until amnesty was decreed in 1969—a period of thirty years. With his wife and daughter, he attempted to escape to France, but failed. In this absorbing narrative, based on numerous interviews with the mayor conducted by Ronald Fraser, a master of oral history, Cortés’s truly awe-inspiring ordeal is supplemented by his family’s life histories and experiences during the Civil War.
A haunting tale and a monument to the art of the oral historian, In Hiding reminds us what the Spanish Civil War was really about.
- ISBN10 0394738454
- ISBN13 9780394738451
- Publish Date 1 May 1980
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 18 March 2014
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Pantheon Books
- Format Paperback (US Trade)
- Language English