Hombrecino (the Little Man)

For more than 30 years, my grandfather kept a list in his wallet. It was a very carefully folded piece of paper which contained a typed list of names. Every time he read those names to me, he was deeply moved. These people were friends and neighbours from his and surrounding villages. They had all been snatched from their homes and executed during the war. Since then, nobody ever knew anything more of them. It was impressive to see how clearly he recalled each one of these people. In fact, they had never really disappeared; they had all been present in his memory throughout these years. One day, driven by the desire of telling the story of my grandparents and the list, I went to look for those names. I embarked myself in a voyage through the sites of the Spanish Civil War and the exhumations of people in common graves. In 2012, I went with my grandfather to his village. He had not been there for at least 15 years. There, we discovered that the persons in his list had been unburied some years ago by a committed major and had been honoured. A few months later, my grandfather lost memory of the list , and we discovered by chance that the list had disappeared. Hombrecino is a story of a reunion. Of an old man and his memory.