Episode 26 – The nameless ones: The child Who wept before the Inquisition

14/09/2025 5 min
Episode 26 – The nameless ones: The child Who wept before the Inquisition

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Episode 26 – The Nameless Ones: The Child Who Wept Before the Inquisition


This is, without a doubt, the most moving story in the series From Calatayud – Voices of Sefarad.

In the records of the Holy Office we find the testimony of an eleven-year-old boy, unnamed in the documents, interrogated by the Inquisition of Calatayud. A child turned into a suspect, torn from the warmth of his home and forced to answer impossible questions for his age, under the shadow of fear and threat.

Through his deposition we reconstruct not only his personal drama, but that of so many children who fell victim to the inquisitorial persecution. Sons and daughters of conversos, grandchildren of Jews, little ones who inherited suspicions and secrets they could barely understand, but which marked their lives forever.

This episode delves into the pain of families shattered by terror, of empty homes and broken memories. But it also rescues the voice of intimate resistance: that of a grandmother who whispered to the child in the dark, “Never forget who you are.” Words that traveled across centuries to reach us as a symbol of dignity and remembrance.

The Nameless Ones are all those who vanished from official history, reduced to numbers in a trial, to anonymous witnesses in an archive. Today, this chapter restores their place in collective memory, reminding us that the Inquisition did not only persecute ideas or beliefs, but also childhoods, affections, and dreams.

This episode is a tribute to the forgotten, to the children whose only “crime” was being born into families marked by stigma, and to all those in Calatayud and throughout Sefarad who became victims of silence and fear.

Inquisition, children, testimony, memory, family drama, grandmother, Calatayud, conversos, Sefarad, forgotten victims

Narrador by Rabbi Yehudá ben Shlomó Albilbilí
Direction and produced by Javier Bona

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