Disaffected (meaning literally not fond of, or not loyal to Franco’s regime) were those young people whose political sympathies and activities hadn’t been finished off by the Falangist death squads…”Arbeit macht frei”(German for: “Work will free you”)was the motto commonly seen on the entrances to the nazi concentration camps…
After defeat in the Civil War, hundreds and thousands of “suspicious” men and women were militarized and forced to work in the building of a “free and great Spain”. In work battalions made up of people enslaved within inhumane conditions, and which went on right up until the beginning of the nineteen sixties.
Between 1939 and 1941, more than 2,000 of these socialists, anarchists, communists and nationalists constructed a road to link the eastern most valleys of the Navarran Pyrenees: Zarautzi (Salazar)and Erronkari (Roncal). All at gunpoint.
We want this brief story to serve, more than anything as a tribute to those people, whose collective dignity is still yet to be restored to them as they deserve.
This is for all of you.