A walk through history

Being raised in New England, history was all around me. Our house was on an Indian burial field and we sometimes found an arrow head or two. The Parker Tavern, the oldest house in town showed what life was like in Colonial days, and we were just a short drive from the place where the shot fired around the world was fired. My family went back to the Revolution.

I loved history in school. In fourth grade when we finished our work we could take pamphlets about famous Americans. If I were good at the dentist I could buy a Landmark Book and thus learned about the Tudors, The Battle of Britain and more. It almost made me want to have cavities.

And what a thrill it was to stand in front of the tomb of Elizabeth I. It was as if I had a personal introduction.

But although the greats of history intrigued me I also wanted to know how people lived in different times not just the kings, queens and generals.

1. My daughter’s host father in Munich told of being on a hill and watching his town of Nurenburg burned.
2. A co-worker told of being a little girl and being urged by her mother to work faster as they did errands in Annemasse, France. She delayed and the Nazis grabbed her mother. The war ended days before her mother was due to be shipped to a concentration camp. The papers make it real.
3. A chapel in Garmish-Partenkirchen where I discovered on a hike with my cousins was covered with men from the town that were killed in WWII: Some were young boys and almost no wall showed. Each one represented pain for their mothers, sisters, daughters.
   

Thus today I was more than happy to hop into Spain to take another hike, this through a dense wood to see the house above. It was warm, the leaves smelled of fall, a hint of pine sprinkled the air and the ochre earth blended with the fallen leaves.

We came upon this wreck of a house, our goal. Sanchez Maas, a founder of the Fascist Falangist movement had hidden out after escaping a firing squad. His companions were deserters from the Republican movement, which made up most of Catalonia.

It was easy to see why it would be a safe haven through. Had anyone approached the occupants could slip into the underbrush and get away.

I tried to imagine what it must have been like to be in hiding, to live with the danger in your gut, to fight for the cause on either side, and mostly like in most wars to sacrifice your life for nothing. I wonder what the men on opposite sides talked about at night, what did they eat…etc.

A book and movie have been published released about this house and Maas. It is called Soldiers of Salamis.

We don't have to go to Spain to feel history. No matter where we are, something happened there before we stepped foot on the land. One era melds into another.

Perhaps that was brought back when we saw a man on a horse, his hair in a ponytail, looking like he could have been one of the Revolutionaries of the Spanish Civil War. The only thing that would be out of sync was he was talking on a mobile phone.