switching identities

I came across this very interesting article in last sunday's NYTimes, about Franco's regime in Spain taking children away from dissident parents and switching their identities. I'm always fascinated by identity, by how some leaders sought to manipulate it, how human identity can be switched, erased, deleted entirely and replaced by something else that's a pure creation. Manufactured people? Sounds like a story from a novel, but it actually happened. Remember communist leaders deleting others from photographs when they fell out of grace? Remember reeducation camps? It's quite amazing, what human beings can do to others, how they can seek to engineer each other.

Families Search for Truth of Spain’s ‘Lost Children’
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/world/europe/01franco.html?scp=4&sq=spain&st=cse

LOMBILLO DE LOS BARRIOS, Spain — The truth, if ever it emerges, will come too late for Emilia Girón. For 65 years, Ms. Girón, a hard-bitten mother of seven, ached to know what had become of her son Jesús. Born in the early 1940s during the vengeful first years of Gen. Francisco Franco’s 36-year dictatorship he was taken from her to be baptized shortly after his birth. She never saw him again. (...) click on link above to read more.


And here is the rest of it.