How does one break a silence? Twenty years ago, almost nobody in Spain used the words “exhumation”, “disappeared”, “historical memory” to refer to our own dead people. Twenty years ago, a man decided to change his life and, by chance, he ran into the place from which all his silences were born. That man became the first person in our country who managed to do a public exhumation, with scientific methods, and who changed the way we talk about our past. You may have heard his name many times. But this is not the story of the public man: it’s the story behind him: the story of someone who managed to dig a hole in the silence.