In Hiding

<i>In Hiding</i> 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<i> In Hiding</i> reminds us what the Spanish Civil War was really about.