Posted Monday evening, July 8, 2019.
The farmhouse at la Colonia de Víznar near the Andalusian village of Alfacar where the poet Federico Garcia Lorca was held prisoner the night before he was executed by a fascist firing squad in August 1936. His body was buried by the side of the nearby road in an unmarked grave that hasn’t been found yet although the search has been on for decades. Photo via Barbarous Nights.
On the dark field adjacent to the road, the soldiers told the prisoners to stop. The five men weren’t professional executioners. They had taken a side and now accepted their duties, some more zealously than others. One of the soldiers who would later brag in public about having shot Lorca in his “big head,” was the frst cousin of a man whom the poet had unflatteringly fictionalized in a new play. One of the other men had paced nervously earlier in the night, exclaiming, “This isn’t for me! This isn’t for me!” Another, the leader of the firing squad and a former chauffeur for the first prime minister of the Republic, had lost his ten-month-old son the day before.
The five men lifted their guns and fired.
---from “The Age of Disenchantments” by Aaron Shulman.
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