Arquitecturas de papella reconstrucción del hecho represivo en los testimonios de posguerra

Abstract

The correspondence of prisoners during the Franco regime constitutes a source of information regarding their experience in the present, of their interpretation of their past and of their hopes for the future. The innate privacy of letters takes on another dimension in prison, where prisoners were subject to a strict regime which included oversight and censorship of their texts. The private and personal writing of prisoners was one of the most important umbilical cords linking them to the outside world. Thanks to this it took on overwhelming immediate significance for those jailed following the war. Such writing transmitted the most pressing needs for food and medicine, paper and ink. The immediate past, subjected to a double repressive filter, was present through the personal relations to which prisoners resorted in order to change the course of laws which were implacable toward the defeated. Hopes for the future circulated surreptitiously, between the lines, above the darkness of the moment. Correspondence was fundamental to the emotional stability of the prisoner and, for the same reason, the prison authorities turned it into an instrument of coercion with which to reinforce the isolation of the prisoner.