Spanish Civil War Memory Project

Summary

Salas was born in 1925 in Madrid. Her father was a shoemaker, and her mother took in laundry to augment the family income. Though from a poor family, Adela says her childhood in pre-war Madrid was a very happy one. This changed dramatically with the Civil War. She describes the horror of aerial bombardments in the "zona rojo" where she lived in Madrid, including one instance when her building was hit by a bomb. Her uncle Andrés Castillejos, a Socialist, was detained and sent to a concentration camp after the war. Adela began working in a shoestore at age fifteen. She recalls the social repression of the Franco period in an anecdote about how she could not imagine holding hands in public with her boyfriend, even after nine years of dating, let alone allow a kiss in public. For Adela the years under Franco were marked by fear, and she describes several anecdotes from her daily life reflecting the repression of the time. She has lived in the same building in Madrid since 1936