Image by Mika Baumeister.

Spanish antifascist Mercedes Núñez Targa’s memoir Bearing Witness: Prison Stories from a Woman’s Fight Against Fascism is a powerful and passionate read. Although essentially bereft of beauty because of the topic of its content, the book was recently released in English by Pluto Press. It was first published in fascist Spain by Ebro, the publishing house of the Spanish communist party in 1967. Targa died in 1986 and remained a lifelong fighter against fascism. The text includes stories from her time spent in Franco’s prisons after the fascist victory in Spain followed by what is essentially a journal from her years in the Nazi concentration camp system after her arrest by the Gestapo for her membership in the French resistance. Naturally, her testimony tells of the daily horrors of both penal systems: the beatings and torture by the Spanish fascists in Madrid’s Venta prison and the torture, death, brutality and fear in the presence of the gas chambers and crematoria at the Buchenwald death camp run by the Nazi regime.

Bearing Witness includes stories about........

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