Four years before Anne Frank first put pen to paper to write her diary, Encarnación Martorell had already captured the misery of war in her secret memoirs.

Aged only 12 when she started writing, she recorded her grim experiences during the Spanish Civil War for two years between 1936 and 1938.

Frank’s moving day-to-day account of a teenage victim of Nazi brutality went on to be read by millions. In contrast, Martorell buried her writings away to gather dust in a family attic, thinking nothing of them - until now.

Now 84, the so-called “Spanish Anne Frank” has now made her diaries public, encouraged by a writer.

Over 117 chapters, her book Through The Eyes of a Little Girl details the desperate hunger Martorell and her family suffered, how she was forced to give up school to help to forage for food in filthy clothes, and how she was robbed of a carefree childhood. The book is another example of the way Spaniards are increasingly coming to terms with the Civil War and Franco’s dictatorship.

After Franco died in 1975 Spain maintained a “pact of silence” about the dark chapter in its history.

But a growing reexamination of what happened has been symbolised in a controversial Law of Historical Memory, which guaranteed justice for the victims of Franco, and a succession of books and films.

In real life, two years ago, a former soldier from Franco’s troops anonymously directed relatives of a man killed by a firing squad to the mass grave where his body was dumped.

Martorell’s book, to be published next year, details the fear she felt during air raids, how she felt ashamed to wear shabby clothes and the overriding uncertainty of the period. “Rereading the diary, I relived what happened. It was a very sad era. No child should go through something like that,” she said. “We should have been playing, mucking around, going for a swim in the sea, not standing in a queue for a tiny scrap of bread.” She began writing on July 19, 1936, the day after General Franco staged an uprising against the left-wing Republican Government that led to Spain’s bitter Civil War. Then living in Barcelona, she carried on writing until 1938, a year before the victory of Franco’s troops.

Often her family was forced to live off olives and almonds as food shortages worsened towards the end of the war. “I wrote to escape from what was happening,” she says. “I was only 12 when I started but I knew what was happening would change the history of Spain. But I never thought what I was writing would interest anyone.

“I just wrote about having to give up college to line up in a queue to try to get a potato for dinner.”

Martorell did not suffer the same experience as Frank, whose family was forced to live in a secret annexe hidden behind a bookcase in wartime Amsterdam. Instead, she lived with her family in the heart of Barcelona, dodging air raids until the city finally fell to Franco’s troops. After the Civil War, as Spain tried to rebuild itself, poverty forced Martorell to give up her studies. She found work with a detective agency.

She never mentioned her diaries to her parents. The papers remained in the attic for decades until they were discovered four years ago through a chance conversation with the writer Salvador Domenech. He encouraged her to transform them into a book. “I had the sensation that I had discovered a treasure,” he said.

Martorell still lives in Barcelona.

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