Admitting The Past; New books and films take on the Spanish Civil War.

Byline: Liat Radcliffe

The silence has been broken. After decades of avoiding the subject of the Spanish Civil War, young Spaniards are at last confronting their nation's past through a spate of new books and films. In the late 1930s, 350,000 people lost their lives in the conflict; tens of thousands more died during the ensuing dictatorship of the victorious Generalissimo Francisco Franco. But after Franco's death in 1975, the right and the left, the victors and the vanquished, agreed to a national "pact of silence," urging the country to look forward to a demo-cratic future instead of dwelling on a war-riven past. Now that pact is being ripped up--largely by the grandchildren of Civil War veterans and victims eager to recover their buried history.

Suddenly it's nearly impossible to pass a Spanish bookstore, movie theater or museum without being reminded of the bloody conflict. Last summer the Prado put on its first exhibition related to the Spanish Civil War, a collection of photographs depicting efforts to protect Spanish masterpieces from the bombs and mayhem of urban fighting. "The Sleeping Voice," by Dulche Cachon, a book about women from the left who were imprisoned by Franco, quickly made the best-seller list. And Javier Cercas's "Soldiers of Salamina," a novel about a journalist investigating the unlikely escape of a top Falangist from a republican firing squad in the final days of the war, has been flying off the shelves, selling more than 500,000 copies since it was published in 2001. A movie based on the novel has been playing in local theaters for almost a year, and was chosen as Spain's entry for a best-foreign-film Oscar nomination this year. "When I was 25, I [didn't] think about the war," says Cercas, 41. "It was an old, primitive thing. We wanted to be Europeans, postmodern, ironic. Now we can look at it in a different way."

Too young to remember the fear of El Caudillo's dictatorship and inspired by truth commissions in South Africa and Latin America, Spain's younger generation is pushing the country to confront its past. There is a growing sense of urgency among young journalists to record the memories of those who survived the war before they die. "Today, almost 30 years [after Franco's death], many young people in Spain wonder why they know more about crimes against humanity in Nazi Germany, Bosnia, Argentina and Chile than in their own country," says Montse Armengou, 40, who has produced two ...