Las batallas del bisabuelo

Synopsis

In a village in La Mancha—Villanueva de los Infantes, 1907—Pablo Hernández Jiménez is born to a family of day labourers, grandson of a founding socialist who bequeaths him, without knowing it, the book that will shape his life: The Communist Manifesto. Raised between his father's cruelty and the hardship of the land, Pablo leaves his village at twenty-one and walks to Valdepeñas, a town thriving on the wine trade, in search of work that will not break his back for the local boss. At Ramiro Moreno's bodega he leads his first strike alongside Sergio Gómez, forging a brotherhood that will last the length of the novel. Around them a core of comrades gradually forms—the timid former priest Julián, the mixed-race Elena, the battered Jimena, the disciplined Tomasa and, later, the Jaén-born Manuela—who will organise together in the Valdepeñas communist cell, through strikes, Party-funded robberies and the relentless pursuit of the Civil Guard and local landowners. With the arrival of the Second Republic, Pablo and Sergio are elected to the town council; their chosen family will take on positions of responsibility when the Popular Front wins the Ayuntamiento in 1936. The Civil War takes them to defend Valdepeñas against the fifth column, to fight at Teruel under Enrique Líster's command and to survive the siege of Madrid, before they are captured and sent to the dreaded Fuerte de San Cristóbal in Pamplona. There, alongside some seven hundred fellow prisoners, they take part in the largest escape in Spanish penitentiary history, surviving bullets and the cold of the Pyrenees until they cross into France. Exile is no ending: the French concentration camps at Argelès push them on to the Soviet Union, where they work in Moscow factories before enlisting, on forged papers, in the Red Army to fight fascism from the siege of Moscow to the fall of Berlin, by way of Leningrad and Poland. The war will take more than one comrade from them, but not their conviction. When the Third Reich falls there is no reward for the Spanish antifascists: no Allied power is willing to liberate Spain from Franco. The Party decides to infiltrate Pablo and his companions—under code names and false passports—into the anti-Francoist guerrilla operating in the hills of Ciudad Real, where they will fight as maquis for years until the Civil Guard hunts them down. Drawing on more than a decade of research in official archives, private documents and oral testimonies gathered in Valdepeñas, Las batallas del bisabuelo reconstructs, in the speech and customs of La Mancha, the silenced history of those who fought across two wars, four countries and thirty years, with no homeland but the freedom of their own people.

Machine translation, pending review.