War time status during the Second World War

The wartime state of the Second World War is a condition of scarcity, political danger, and compromised memory in the novel. It follows the Spanish Civil War and overlaps with its unresolved violence: people are expected to move on while the consequences remain present in private lives, state power, and the streets of Barcelona.

Historical Setting and Everyday Life

In 1945, only six years after the end of the Spanish Civil War, its effects were still being felt, though people rarely discussed it openly. Public attention had shifted to the Second World War, which Nuria Monfort describes as having spread death across the globe. Barcelona’s recent conflict had already brought combat, bombardments, hunger, and social breakdown; the later war forms part of a wider atmosphere of want and misery rather than a distant, detached event.

The novel contrasts the silence surrounding the Spanish Civil War with the prominence of the new global conflict in conversation. That contrast does not mean the earlier war has passed: its bruises remain, and its violence continues to shape the lives of those who survived it. The wars thus occupy different places in public speech while pressing upon the same damaged society.

Political Violence and Its Continuities

The war’s violence is shown as inseparable from political power and policing. Fermín Romero de Torres recounts that after Barcelona fell, Javier Fumero took charge of a purge. Fermín was arrested at the port while trying to secure passage to France for his superiors, then held at Montjuïc Castle and tortured for information. He later says that he eventually gave up names, including those of people who were not among his superiors. The episode makes political persecution personal: survival under coercion could force a victim to endanger others, leaving consequences that outlast the immediate interrogation.

Fumero’s authority also persists in later encounters. When he confronts Fermín and Daniel at the Hospice of Santa Lucia, he invokes the threat of taking Fermín to headquarters and subjecting him to another session of torture. In another episode, Fumero displays his police identification to Daniel’s father and uses his position as chief inspector to threaten the bookshop with trouble over allegedly communist material. These moments connect wartime methods to the wider machinery of intimidation, showing how the threat of political violence can govern ordinary interactions as well as formal detention.

Silence, Memory, and Transmission

The novel presents silence as both a response to danger and a means by which the past is passed—or withheld—between generations. Daniel’s father explains that before her death, Daniel’s mother made him promise never to discuss the war with their son or allow him to remember what had happened. His hesitation about whether he was right to honor that promise shows the cost of protective silence: Daniel is kept apart from a history that has shaped his family, while his father is left to carry it without an easy way to explain it.

Nuria gives that silence a broader historical meaning. She argues that war feeds forgetfulness: survivors are encouraged to treat what they saw and learned as an illusion, and the people who could tell what happened gradually disappear. Her warning is not simply that individuals forget, but that silence can leave later generations unable to recognize old violence when it returns in a new form. The novel places this reflection beside the survivor’s experience, making memory an uncertain, belated account rather than a settled public record.

Testimony and the Afterlife of War

Nuria’s memoir becomes a deliberate act of transmission. She entrusts its pages to her father and asks that they reach Daniel if something happens to her. In doing so, she turns private recollection into testimony intended for someone who did not live through the events. Her appeal to Daniel to remember her gives this act an intimate purpose as well as a historical one: the record may preserve a person whom violence and silence threaten to erase.

The wartime state therefore continues beyond the battles themselves. It survives in political intimidation, material deprivation, family secrets, and the risks attached to speaking. Against these forces, the accounts of Fermín and Nuria preserve what public silence would conceal. Their testimony does not undo what happened, but it allows the next generation to receive fragments of the past and to recognize the human cost of forgetting.