Ens van robar la joventut

Youth abducted tells the stories of the "baby bottles" who fought in the Ebro, teenagers who enlisted themselves voluntarily (in both the Republican and Franco's military), those who survived and (some) continued their fighting in the World War, those who were imprisoned and those who died on the battlefield. By the end of the Civil War, 27,000 boys born in 1920 were called up. They came to be known as the Bottle Shaft and many of them were not yet eighteen when they died in the bloody battle of the Ebro. The survivors ended up in Francoist penitentiaries and prisons, concentration camps or disciplinary battalions, and then had to perform a long military service. They all kept the terrible memory of a war in which they fought with espadrilles and without cartridges for life. Scabies, lice, thirst, walks, shrapnel. The broken voices of dying boys on the battlefield shouting to their mothers. The dead companions, buried in hundreds at the Sale of the Camposines. A nightmare repeated night after night, and for years, at the time of closing my eyes. The certainty that their youth had been stolen. Victor Amela has collected the valuable testimony of twenty-five survivors, and has carefully reconstructed the memory of these boys who lived in uniform at the age of seventeen. And these poignant human stories constitute - thanks to the author's journalistic rigor and his passion for storytelling - the necessary and meaningful homage to the anonymous heroes of the Bottle Bottle, as the centennial of his life has just been celebrated birth.