Katarzyna Kobylarczyk is a Polish reporter and journalist who has spent years connected with Spain — a country that became the subject of her long-term work. She has published in Gazeta Wyborcza, Tygodnik Powszechny, and Dziennik Polski. The Scab is her most recognised book, winning the Ryszard Kapuściński Award in 2020. The author reached the families of Francoism’s victims, archaeologists and anthropologists conducting exhumations, lawyers fighting for judicial recognition of crimes, historians, and those who prefer to remain silent.

The reportage concerns a Spain that lived for decades in the shadow of a pact of silence — an agreement reached in the transition from dictatorship to democracy, under which the crimes of Francoism were not to be prosecuted or accounted for. During the Civil War (1936–1939) and through the years of the regime, hundreds of thousands of people were shot or murdered; their bodies were buried in anonymous mass graves scattered throughout Spain. Over the past twenty years, non-governmental organisations have opened more than eleven hundred such graves and recovered the remains of tens of thousands of victims.

Kobylarczyk accompanies families who after seventy or eighty years are searching for the bodies of their grandparents and great-grandparents. She describes the exhumations — painstaking, technical, painful — but also what happens to people when bones return to the light: how memory changes, how mourning changes, how the possibility of saying “this really happened” changes. She also follows resistance: political and familial, because not everyone wants the past to surface.

The title scab is a deliberately chosen and precise metaphor: the Spain of the Transición did not heal its wounds — it covered them with a thin layer of normality that was not to be disturbed. Kobylarczyk shows what happens when someone begins to scratch at it — and why, however painful, it is necessary.