10 I had never visited a concentration camp. We arrived at Westerbork without any preconceived notions, open to almost everything. To almost everything except for what I found. I expected, perhaps, a scream, a wound, a smell, a different silence. There are spaces of memory where it seems you can still hear the heartbeat of those who lived there. In Westerbork, I did not feel any of that. Trees, grass, paths, silence. A space so clean and pleasant that it seemed like a bucolic place to go with children to spend a Sunday evening.

]]> These days mark the fiftieth anniversary of Franco's death, one of the darkest moments in Spain's recent history because, when you think about it, it's undeniably sad when a dictator dies. Don't misunderstand me: I'm not advocating for the immortality of dictators, but rather the fact that none of them should die as a dictator, or, at the very least, that their death should bring an end to the dictatorship. Because unlike Hitler, Mussolini, or the dictatorships of Portugal or Greece, Franco was never defeated, and for that very reason, we can say that he died undefeated. This circumstance is not merely anecdotal; it has had many implications. The first is that Franco's death never meant the end of the regime. The next day, Spain was still a dictatorship, although this didn't prevent the process toward the democracy we have today. But the end of the dictatorship, which we can date to around 1977 or 1978, didn't imply the disappearance of Francoism either.

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