Podcast: Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War
In fall 1982, Patricia Schechter, an eager first-year student at Mount Holyoke, took a class with Daniel Czitrom, who was then a second-year assistant professor of history at the College. Czitrom encouraged his students to find their own ways to make sense of the past as they tried to understand how it affected them, their grandparents, or even remote ancestors they’d only heard of through family lore.
Schechter and Czitrom fell out of touch after her graduation—until a cold call in 2022 brought them back together. By then, Schechter had become a history professor at Portland State University in Oregon and had just published El Terrible: Life and Labor in Pueblonuevo, 1887-1939 (Routledge), a study of the mining town in Andalusia where her maternal grandmother had lived. As it happened, Czitrom had just completed a book of his own, Kitchen Table History: Wrestling With My Family’s Radical Past (U of Illinois Press, forthcoming), which included the stories of three relatives who had volunteered to defend the Spanish Republic as part of the International Brigades.
Deciding that the serendipity was too obvious to pass up, Schechter came up with an idea for a podcast. “Family Secrets of the Spanish Civil War” premiered in October 2024. In six hour-long episodes, the historians discuss their ancestors, attempting to describe their family members’ possible frames of mind amid war. Each episode focuses on one aspect of their relatives’ stories: love, loss, war, secrets, and so forth.
The books and the podcast leave readers and listeners with a lesson Czitrom spent his entire career trying to instill in his students: History is about trying to create understanding, not placing blame. “History is not just about famous and powerful people,” Czitrom said in the first episode of the podcast. “I wanted to paint my family as full human beings, flaws and all.” “The magic in the podcast,” Schecter says, “is making the human connection across time, generation, countries. The most humanizing thing we can do is tell our stories.”
