This article argues against the idea that the Spanish transition to democracy was characterized by a pacto del olvido [pact of oblivion], insisting that lack of discussion in the public sphere is not the same thing as forgetting. It also argues against the applicability of trauma theory, which has been so important in Holocaust studies, to an understanding of the effects of the Francoist repression (during and after the Spanish CivilWar) on its victims and their relatives, suggesting that their refusal to speak about their suffering, and to pass its memory onto later generations, is best understood in political rather than psychoanalytical terms. The article draws on the work of the Italian cultural historian Luisa Passerini, taking up her invitation to ‘learn to listen to silence’. Through discussion of a number of personal case histories, it challenges the notion that silence necessarily represents a lack of memory or conformism, and examines the ways in which silence can itself represent a form of witnessing and commitment. The discussion is set in the context of the memory debates that have occurred in Spain in recent years, most notably around the passage through parliament in 2006–7 of the Socialist Government’s ‘Memory Law’ (as it became nicknamed in the media), noting the importance for these debates of the discourses about the violent past in postdictatorial Chile and Argentina.