When Lilica Boal was a little girl in Tarrafal, a dusty colonial town at the northern reaches of the Cape Verdean island of Santiago, she could see a concentration camp from her home.
"The prisoners would arrive in trucks covered in black cloth so no one could see who was inside," she says. "Once they were in the colony there was almost total silence about their lives."
The inmates were Europeans, opponents of the dictatorship in Portugal, the colonial power. They couldn't see Lilica either – from within there was only a line of barbed wire, a deep ditch, the patrolled, crenellated walls and beyond the black and bare volcanic hills that must have seemed a long way from home.
Yet Lilica knew more than most and that knowledge would mark her life. Inside was a 16-year-old Portuguese communist, Guilherme da Costa Carvalho, whose family would visit regularly. As there were no hotels in Tarrafal, they would stay with Lilica's family. "We had a very close relationship," she recalls, now an elegant, watchful lady in her 70s. "His mother suffered greatly."
- Ikhide
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