On 5 November 1936, Patricio Escobal was moved from the Logroño Industrial School, where he was detained, to the State Prison in La Rioja capital. Moments before he ventured into an improvised search for notes from his captivity, he realized he carried diaries recounting experiences of fellow prisoners and, most crucially, references to executions. He learned that extrajudicial killings occurred every night and that the names of the executioners were recorded. Fearing that discovery would mark him for a broader purge, he burned the notes inside the prison service area and flushed them down the toilet.
Escobal could not continue writing these memoirs through 1937. Even after leaving Spain for the United States in 1940, he did not bring the manuscript with him. He worried about border controls and decided to leave the manuscript in Spain with a trusted associate who later arranged its shipment to New York. By around 1948 the author had completed the text in his own hands, but the book would not be published for two more decades, in an English edition titled Death Row: Spain 1936. The Spanish version would not appear until 1974, long after the dictator’s grip on the country had loosened but still lingering in memory as the regime endured in the background.
The author’s fate is tied to the place where these events occurred. Patricio Escobal was imprisoned in the School of Arts and Industry, which is now the La Rioja School of Higher Design, a site that served as a prison during the Civil War. This detail anchors the narrative in a concrete locale, giving readers a sense of the intimate geography of repression during that era.
To the question of how this book came to light, a late Spanish edition emerged in the mid 1970s. The work circulated by word of mouth among those who rejected Francoism, and it offered a window into the war era, particularly in a provincial city such as La Rioja. Jesús Vicente Aguirre, a scholar who has studied Patricio Escobal and his imprint on Francoist Spain in La Rioja, published a work in 2008 that began with Escobal’s memoir and grew into a broader examination of the region in 1936. The book by Aguirre emphasizes that Escobal’s account, though remarkable for its memory and candor, sometimes contains inaccuracies about events in the region, which is understandable given the chaotic nature of the time and the difficulty of obtaining precise figures. Still, the memoir remains a valuable document of repression, prisons, marches, and the way daily life looked under a provincial shadow of war and fear.
Bernabéu’s companion, condemned to death
Born in Logroño in 1903, Patricio Pedro Escobal pursued studies and engineering alongside the Jesuits in Madrid’s Chamartín district. Santiago Bernabéu, known for his role with Real Madrid, was selected to represent Spain as a team captain at the 1924 Paris Olympics and later earned his engineering degree. For the rebels, however, these achievements were tainted by his political alignment with the Republican Left and his associated Freemasonry. Although the masonry accusation was not definitively proven, archives of a lodge were destroyed to avoid reprisals. The hard political climate led to Escobal’s arrest in Logroño and his imprisonment in several city locations, amid ongoing extrajudicial executions.
Escobal did not passively record documents that did not exist. He created his own narrative, crafting memoirs that show remarkable recall and honesty, though some details are not perfectly precise. For instance, he mentions the Barranca de Lardero and notes that four men removed bodies, while other sources place dozens of victims in that region. An expert on the era, Jesús Vicente Aguirre, notes that Escobal’s numbers are not exact, but the broader point remains clear. The region of Navarra and La Rioja endured mass killings, with thousands here and there. The magnitude is undeniable, but the exact tally is still debated. The essential takeaway is that the repression during those nights was relentless, and Escobal’s account helps illuminate the human impact of those events. He describes the oppression experienced by many under Franco’s forces and the dark realities faced by people in the backwaters of the Civil War.
Forty years pass by in a single breath
In a passage from the book, Escobal speaks with a person whose relatives were executed, offering reassurance that justice would come, even if it took forty years. Nearly ninety years after the Civil War, that accountability remains a work in progress in many communities. The author’s reflections also touch on the transition years and the late dictatorship, viewed through the eyes of anti-Franco activists who continued to resist, often clandestinely. Although protests filled the streets, some policies and police power remained tightly controlled. A scholar, Aguirre, recalls that many prisoners released under amnesty later faced the very torturers and murderers who had once terrorized them.
During the 1980s, there was debate about how to address unresolved issues from the Civil War, and how to compensate those harmed. The discussion moved slowly and unevenly under successive governments, with reparations and truth-telling becoming focal points. The question of what can be done with lingering grievances remains central to public memory. Advocates argue that action is necessary to establish a shared, honest story for the nation, and to bring formal recognition and accountability to the crimes committed during the war. Even when prosecutions are not possible due to the absence of defendants, efforts to determine what happened and to acknowledge victims can still move society toward justice and some degree of material and symbolic redress. The dialogue continues as communities seek to reconcile with a painful past and build a more transparent historical record for future generations.