We went to Museo de la Historia de Catalunya.
V and I spent hours playing on this old trolley.
They had a lot of interactive activities for kids.
We dressed up in knights armor.
You would be surprised at how heavy it is.
Today was a very fun day.
The museum was more fun than I had anticipated.
This museum was founded in 1996 to inform and educate the public about the history of Catalonia. I was one of the many who needed to be educated.
The military coup d'etat in 1936 was the start of a cruel civil war that lasted three years. Franco's victory in 1939 signaled the beginning of a long dictatorship and the abolition of self-government. Those Catalonians who were able to escape to France then faced the Nazi invasion. Franco's dictatorship was characterized by repression of human rights. Execution by firing squad was common.
Following Franco's death, the new democratic constitution (1978) and the new statute of self-government (1979) signaled the restoration of civil liberties.
V, H, & I went out to dinner after our trip to the museum. We talked about what it must have been like to live through the civil war and Franco's subsequent rise to power. We imagined that if you were 10 years old in 1936 when the civil war began you'd be 85 years old now. We couldn't help looking at the crowd walking past our table and wondering as we saw grandmas and grandpas walk by... How did you do it? What was it like?
V asked, "What would we do? What if someone took over the US? Would we leave and live in Canada or Europe?" All I could manage was to answer with another question, "...or would you stay and try and help your country?"
What a great museum. But what a hard question. My answer is that at my age I would stay and help anyway I could, but if I had a young family (you guys) I would leave and could possibly help from afar. It's a really hard question and thankfully we have never been put to that test. Although I would like to send our congress to Syberia for a year! :)
ReplyDeleteWe are very lucky, aren't we, to have never had to put this question to the test. I suppose the closest we came was during the Civil War, when perhaps a few people might have left the country. Mmmmm, now I'm going to have to dig into this a bit more.
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