Spanish Testament

Spanish Testament is a 1937 book by Arthur Koestler, describing Koestler's recent (at the time of writing) experiences during the Spanish Civil War, where he went as a correspondent for the British News Chronicle, and especially his traumatic period of incarceration by Francisco Franco's forces under a sentence of death.

A different version was published in 1942 as "Dialogue with Death".

Background

Koestler had taken an ill-considered decision to stay at Málaga in southern Spain when the Republican forces withdrew from it. Because of Koestler's outspoken Communist sympathies and affiliations, as they were at the time, Franco's men who occupied Málaga ignored his journalistic credentials and considered him "an international subversive agent". As was their practice in such cases, Koestler was detained, summarily sentenced to death and sent off to imprisonment at Seville - a large city which they captured at the inception of the Civil War and at later stages served as their main base in southern Spain.

The bulk of the book is devoted to Koestler's time in the prison, in the company of numerous political prisoners - most of them Spanish Republicans. Prisoners lived under the constant threat of summary execution without trial, without warning and without even any evident logic in the choice of victims. Virtually every morning, prisoners would wake to find that some of their number had been executed during the night.

Incongruously, however, daily routine in the prison until the moment of execution was quite comfortable, and in fact conditions were better than in many British jails at the time. As Koestler notes, the Seville Prison was established just a few years before, during the brief flowering of the Spanish Republic, when liberal reformers wanted to make of it a model for the humane treatment of prisoners. The Phalange on their taking over the city made little change to the prison regulations and routine which they found and even kept on much of the original staff - except for adding their execution squads in the prison courtyard.

The contradiction between relatively humane daily treatment and the constant threat of summary execution forms a central theme of the book. It seems to have created a feeling of dislocation and disorientation, and Koestler spent much of his prison in some kind of mystical passivity. He alternated between using the well-stocked prison library, to whose books he was given access, and going on hunger strikes.

After some time, it became evident to Koestler and his fellow-prisoners that he was after all in an exceptional situation and that his captors were reluctant to carry out the execution order against him - evidently, though he did not know it at the time, because the British Foreign Office was taking an interest in his fate.

Koestler quotes a message he got from three other prisoners, Republican militiamen: "Dear comrade foreigner, we three are also condemned to death, and they will shoot us tonight or tomorrow. But you may survive; and if you ever come out you must tell the world about all those who kill us, because we want liberty and no Hitler."

The three were indeed executed shortly afterwards. Koestler considered the book, written after he was at last released and returned to Britain, as their testament and that of his other fellow prisoners who did not survive.

A different version was published in 1942 as "Dialogue with Death".

Influence on later work

Koestler's real experience as a prisoner in a Fascist prison may have inspired his fictional depiction of life in a Stalinist prison in Darkness at Noon, published three years later and marking the radical shift rightwards in his political stance.