Journalist Alienor Crespo pursues an intriguing and explosive story about the tons of gold shipped to the Soviet Union during the Spanish Civil War and the endangered children who made the same journey. When Alienor uses her second sight to connect past events with her present-day investigation of Spain's "stolen babies," she puts her life in danger. "Stolen Lives" begins during World War II on the Island of Rhodes and takes the reader on a suspense-filled journey through the decades to present day Spain.
“Libraries will want to recommend Stolen Lives to readers looking for a successful marriage between history and intrigue. Its ability to bring both to life against the backdrop of Spanish culture makes the tale compelling, educational, and hard to put down.” — D. Donovan, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
Journalist Alienor Crespo pursues an intriguing and explosive story about the tons of gold shipped to the Soviet Union during the Spanish Civil War and the endangered children who made the same journey. When Alienor uses her second sight to connect past events with her present-day investigation of Spain's "stolen babies," she puts her life in danger. "Stolen Lives" begins during World War II on the Island of Rhodes and takes the reader on a suspense-filled journey through the decades to present day Spain.
“Libraries will want to recommend Stolen Lives to readers looking for a successful marriage between history and intrigue. Its ability to bring both to life against the backdrop of Spanish culture makes the tale compelling, educational, and hard to put down.” — D. Donovan, Sr. Reviewer, Midwest Book Review
October 2019
“Careful now, take it slow.”
Under Celia’s watchful gaze, I swept the straw brush through the brown water, snagging all the loose fibers I could find. I pulled out the bristles and with a flick of the wrist gave them a good shake to dislodge any clinging cocoons. Then came the tricky part where I wrapped the captured silken filaments around my hand in one continuous motion, just like my cousin had taught me.
“Nice work, Alienor. Should I take it from here?”
Celia, whom I’d grown close with during the troubles that engulfed us when I first came to Spain, was a strict supervisor, as devoted to performing tasks in their correct order as she was to living in bib overalls and torn t-shirts.
“No thanks, Cuz. I’ve got this.”
I threaded the raw silk through the eyelets attached to the spinning machine and pressed the well-oiled foot pedal. Then I stood back and let the mechanism take over the repetitive work of unwinding the cocoons still floating in the water. The chrysalises within them would lose the final twenty-four hours of their life spans. I sympathized, given how in the recent past my own tenure on earth had come nerve-rackingly close to ending.
Aside from my empathy for the massacred pupae, I’d found that working amidst trays filled with Mulberry leaves and hungry silkworms provided the relaxation I needed to recover from my recent ordeal. How could I have known that on my first trip to Spain I would risk my life to protect a treasure trove of books?
Most every weekend I drove to Celia’s house from the apartment in Granada that Mico and I shared. He was working seven days a week for We Remember and frequently out of town.
Since my first solo collection of raw silk was to be the last batch of the day, Celia and I cleaned the equipment, tidying the shed before taking turns under the refreshing outdoor shower. Dressed in clean clothes, heads wrapped in bright towels, we shared a lunch of pan con tomate and beer, shielded from the sun by a red and yellow patio umbrella. We clinked our glasses before draining them and Celia smacked her lips.
Before she could protest, I reached for the new DSLR I’d treated myself to and took a quick selfie of the two of us. “The towel suits you and shows off your high forehead,” I kidded.
“Fine. But no f**g way are you going to post that photo on social media.”
It had taken me a while to get acclimated to the casual curse words uttered by my Spanish friends, who always enjoyed a good laugh at the consternation of the bewildered American.
“So tell me, what are you working on?”
So she did listen when I rambled on about upcoming assignments.
“On Monday I’ll be interviewing Fabiana Carrasco, the founder of Vidas Robadas—Stolen Lives.”
Celia frowned. “I didn’t know you were interested in the stolen babies.”
“Why? Is it a problem? Think about it, Celia. Thousands of mothers gave birth under anesthesia in clinics only to wake up to the news that their newborns were dead. How could they know that as they wailed and cried, their perfectly healthy children were being given away to families that were loyal to Franco’s regime? And then there are the infants who were stolen in more recent times by corrupt priests to sell to the highest bidder. It’s a huge story.”
Celia hugged herself, like someone chilled by dark thoughts. “That’s true, Allie. It’s also possible that Grandpa Ja’far died because he knew too much about the fate of those little ones.”
“Your Grandma Luzia never found his grave, did she?” I asked. Celia’s grandmother was also my Great Aunt Luzia, sister to my grandfather, Aharon Crespo.
My cousin scowled. “It’s too late. They’ll never find him. Not after all this time. Although my mother did say she’d die happy if she could say a prayer at her father’s grave.”
“Is Pilar unwell?” I asked in alarm. I was one of a handful of people who knew that Celia’s mother, Pilar, was alive and residing in a nearby monastery where she took refuge many years ago from the wrath of her husband, Eduardo. Although he was no longer a threat to her, Pilar had stuck with her choice to remain a nun, living in the Carthusian Charterhouse connected by underground tunnels to the now-empty libraries of Zahara.
“I wish I had more contact with her,” Celia said. “They’re strict about visitors.”
“There are ways we can help Pilar fulfill her wish to honor your Grandpa Ja’far’s memory and put him to rest. With your permission I’ll ask Mico to present his case to We Remember. They can help you and the town of Almendrales apply for funds and an exhumation permit. But only if you’re sure you’re ready to explore the painful details of your grandfather’s disappearance.”
“You mean his murder,” she corrected me, waving a fork to emphasize the last word. “Even as a child I suspected Grandpa Ja’far was in the habit of risking too much. It’s amazing they let him live for so long.”
She was right. Luzia and Ja’far had smuggled hundreds of refugees out of France and across the Pyrenees during World War II. After taking refuge in Spain themselves, they’d continued to risk their lives by hiding the Loyalists who lost the civil war and protecting their orphaned children from the Franquistas.
I poured the last of the Alhambra into Celia’s glass since I’d be on the road soon and needed a clear head. “Do you think your grandparents kept records of the children they rescued, in case the mothers who survived came looking for them?”
“To be honest, Allie, if you dig too deeply you’ll discover for yourself why so many Spaniards embrace the pact of forgetting. There are those in our country actively opposed to digging up the past and some of them have a lot to lose. Can you blame me for being protective? We’ve only just found each other. I don’t want to lose you.”
The emotion threaded through Celia’s voice erased my fear of breaching her natural reserve and I reached across the table to grip my cousin’s hand. “Thank you for saying ‘our country.’ Now that I’m a Spanish citizen and free to do as I please, a significant part of me wants to stay here in La Alpujarra with you. I’d love to learn how to weave silken thread into cloth, take hikes through the meadows and spend my afternoons drinking beer and watching the clouds pass over the mountains. But I’m also a journalist unwilling to abandon my profession. And what about the stolen babies who are growing older every day? Are we to leave them in ignorance of the fate of their parents?”
I cleared the table and stacked the plates, waiting for Celia to make up her mind.
“Alright, then. Maybe Grandpa Ja’far kept some records. We can start by taking a look at what he and Grandma Luzia left behind.”
Celia rose and motioned for me to follow her into the house. We stopped in the kitchen to put our dishes in the sink and continued to the back bedroom, where my stomach fluttered at the sight of a wide-open trapdoor in the closet floor. Six months ago this entrance to Zahara was cleverly concealed by a colorful pattern of inlaid Islamic tiles, an invisible portal to an underground world known only to a few trusted librarians.
I followed my cousin down the ladder into what had once been an old salt mine. Flashbacks to last year’s raid by the Guardia Civil at the instigation of the Cisneros Society threatened to crowd out more welcome memories. Although we’d defeated the extremists and found a safe place for the books, our adversaries were still out there.
“Have you heard the talk about opening the Zahara tunnels to the public as an historical landmark? I can’t believe they would do such a thing. It might be for the best but it will feel like an invasion and I’m not ready for it—not by a long shot,” Celia said.
The lights flickered on, revealing wall-murals cleverly rendered to look like the red and black archways of a mosque, expanding into infinity. Every time I visited I experienced what it was like to walk back through time and I understood Celia’s discomfort at the thought of strangers trampling through these history-soaked passageways.
She pressed her thumb on the biometric lock securing the heavy rosewood door and we entered the Library of Tif’eret and Jamal, the words for compassion and beauty in Hebrew and Arabic. I could almost hear the empty shelves crying out for new occupants.
“I miss all of our books but I’m also grateful to the University of Granada for creating a safe haven for them as we prepare to move them to the Palacio de la Madrazah.”
She was talking about the Convivencia Center Library, where the illuminated manuscripts and books of science and poetry rescued from the Inquisitor’s flames were housed in plain sight after centuries of being hidden right here, underground.
My cousin ran her hands along the back of a shelf and retrieved a key she used to open a large, wooden trunk. “When the books were moved, my mother insisted that our family’s personal papers and artifacts remain.”
She displayed the family heirlooms reverently, one by one. “This is Grandma Luzia’s Hebrew Bible that she carried with her all the way from Belgium. Here is Grandpa Ja’far’s Qur’an that he brought from Morocco—these were hidden away to conceal my grandparents’ true Jewish and Muslim identities when they pretended to be Catholics to get permission to marry.”
She carefully examined the Qur’an and shook her head. “I see no list of mother and baby names recorded by Grandpa. But he did write my mother Pilar’s birth date on the inside cover, and there’s something else.”
Looking over Celia’s shoulder I saw what she meant. Her mother’s secret Arabic name was neatly inscribed in both Arabic and Spanish: Jariya.
She slowly ran her finger across the page, caressing each letter. “A whole branch of our family represented by one name. If ever I doubted the reality of your Vijitas, Allie, this is the proof I would have needed to convince me.”
Celia was referring to my visits to the past. For many years I had resisted my talent for inhabiting the minds of my female ancestors. I preferred the just-the-facts approach of my chosen profession as a journalist. Not until my Vijitas connected me with an entirely new branch of my family tree—a diaspora of Jews and Muslims extending from Belgium to Spain, Morocco and beyond—did I begin to value and be grateful for my gift. Without the Vijitas, I would never have found the clues I needed to help Celia—and the Librarians of Zahara—protect the books in their care, many of which had been rescued from the fires of the Inquisition in the 15th and 16th centuries. Without the Vijitas we might have failed in our efforts to defeat a group of fanatics intent on destroying all evidence of multicultural collaboration in Medieval Spain. In the end, we succeeded in stopping them and my travels through time had stopped as well. Or so it seemed.
We expect to read about monsters in horror and some science fiction books, but the real monsters are those among us whose deeds are appallingly inhuman. There are the infamous barbaric leaders like Hitler and Stalin to whom others are compared. We hear less about Francisco Franco who ruled over Spain from 1939 to 1975 as a dictator, assuming the title Caudillo. There is no direct translation to English for Caudillo; however a definition of 'strongman' or 'warlord' is often used. He believed his dictatorship to be the will of God.
In STOLEN LIVES, Joyce Yarrow tells the story of babies stolen from their mothers immediately after they were born. The mothers, usually unmarried and considered degenerate, were told that their newborns died within hours of their birth. Imagine having a child that you never got to hold, maybe never even heard its first cry. This is real horror perpetrated by real monsters.
During Franco's rule, Spanish purity and Catholicism were paramount. Does that sound familiar in these fraught times? The Catholic church became complicit in the stealing of babies declared dead, and more specifically, it was the nuns. The children were given to good Catholic families, not only given, but provided with birth certificates naming the adoptive parents as the birth parents. All of this was done in hopes of nurturing the Red (Communist) Gene, inherited from their impure mothers.
STOLEN LIVES is historical fiction based upon fact. It is a narrative of the consequences of a male dominated society under a fascist regime. It is a story of mothers and daughters meeting after decades of separation where one cannot accept the declaration of a death as truth and the other must face the fact that she has been lied to all her life. These encounters can be psychologically damaging to both.
Inveterate reporter Alienor Crespo learns of the practice through her ability to become one with a female ancestor which allows her to 'live' her family history. The transition from one time period to one in the past is seamless. Suspension of disbelief is immediate. This use of magical realism adds to the poignance of the story.
The organization SOS Bebés Robados (Stolen Babies) that you will encounter in this book is real and still active today. Francisco Franco died in 1975 — nearly 50 years ago — yet there are still women searching for their so-called 'dead' children.
As historical fiction, STOLEN LIVES addresses so many issues with which we are dealing today — strongmen espousing fascist notions of ruling a country and its people, misogyny, and xenophobia are the bane of democracies holding onto freedoms and the rule of law.
Pick up a copy of ZAHARA AND THE LOST BOOKS OF LIGHT and follow it up with STOLEN LIVES… you won't be disappointed.