At the beginning of the new Spanish graphic novel El abismo del olvido (The Abyss of Forgetting), a murdered man climbs out of his grave, lights a cigarette and takes stock of the past eight decades. “When western archaeologists opened the tombs of ancient Egypt, it was said that the souls of their occupants had been freed after millennia of silence,” he says. “In a way, the same thing is happening to us. All we did was wait in silence for more than 70 years.”
José Celda – Pepe to his friends – was shot dead against a wall in the small Valencian town of Paterna at five in the afternoon on 14 September 1940. The 45-year-old farmer, whose body was buried in a mass grave, was one of the thousands of represaliados, or victims of reprisals, who were murdered by the Franco regime well after the end of the civil war in April 1939.
