The war started in July 1936. My in-laws lived there for decades, leaving in the 1960s for economic, not political reasons. They understood what Franco saved them from; their families in Spain through the 1960s were spared the mess occurring elsewhere in Europe and the US.
By 1938, the writing was on the wall for the communists - they had lost the north completely, and were slowly losing ground in the east. Nobody believed in 1938 that Franco wouldn’t win; to the end the communists’ only hope was that the western allies would intervene...
There is a book including such an escape by the very prominent Reichmann family. The senior Mr. Reichmann was from Hungary and had created an egg cartel among all the egg farmers in Central Europe. His wife was from Germany and a member of the Gestetner office machine family. Tey lost at least one son to the Holocaust when he was summarily shot for receiving by mail some chocolate from his mother. The family fled Europe through Spain to Spanish Morocco where they stayed to the end of WWII expending a large amount of money to free fellow Jews and facilitate their escape through Spain. The Reichmanns went to Montreal to live, created a great construction company Olympia and York and made great success by delivering their buildings earlier than agreed, better quality than agreed and for less money than agreed. I am sorry that I do not remember the name of the book. It was written by an apparently non-political business reporter for the Toronto newspaper. There are probably thousands of untold similar stories of those who escaped through Franco Spain.
The treatment of Franco's memory in the West has been a rank disgrace and injustice.