Authors: Lynn H. Nicholas
What little public focus there may have been outside Germany on its discriminatory policies toward Jews and their need for refuge was blown away in the summer of 1936 by the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War. Idealistic supporters of the leftist Spanish Republic came from all over the world to defend democracy as the military insurrection led by Army officer Francisco Franco gathered momentum with the support of Spain’s upper classes and Catholic hierarchy. Governments were less
enthusiastic. The democracies, afraid of a Communist takeover in Spain, soon agreed to a nonintervention pact and arms embargo, which prevented the elected Spanish government from acquiring arms from its neighbors. The French Popular Front, though sympathetic to the leftists, went along under pressure. Meanwhile, Germany, Italy, and the Soviet Union, all seeing an opportunity to bring Spain into their orbit, sent massive military support to the respective sides and promoted their radicalization. The world read with fearful fascination the press reports, written by such luminaries as Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell, of yet another confrontation between left and right, which became ever more extreme and in which the innocent would die by the tens of thousands.
At the beginning of the war, much of the fighting was concentrated in Spain’s Basque region. Hundreds of vacationing children from all over the country were stranded in the coastal resorts. For most there would be no school for a very long time, and some would not get home for twenty years. By August 1936, intense battles had pushed more than 40,000 Basque citizens over the frontier into France. The American Ambassador to Spain, summering in San Sebastian, where the Spanish government traditionally moves in July, witnessed the exodus:
I saw pitiful scenes. Hundreds, thousands of women and children and old men poured across the border from their ruined homes.… Penniless, friendless, they staggered into an alien land, bringing as much of their pathetically meager belongings with them as they could carry.… And all their faces were marked by tragedy and horror.… The men lifted toddling babies in their arms for a last kiss and then returned to the fighting.… A small boy with a harassed desperate expression sat on a coping, his arms around a loved dog.
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As international sympathy grew, committees from a number of countries sent in shipments of food and clothes. Representatives of established refugee organizations, such as the Quakers and the Save the Children Fund, were soon on the scene. In November 1936, under sponsorship of the French Popular Front, the Committee to Aid the Children of Spain was created to provide shelter for the young and get them out of the war zones. The French labor unions enlisted more than 5,000 working-class families as eventual foster homes, and twenty “colonies” were established for groups.
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They would all be needed. Even before the final defeat of the Spanish Republicans in early 1939, France would spend some eighty-eight million francs on relief.
Basque authorities, who had taken advantage of the war to declare their long-sought autonomy, were soon feeding 40,000 refugees a day in soup kitchens. A hundred thousand homeless were billeted in requisitioned apartments and houses in Bilbao, and the flow only increased as the fighting resumed after a brief lull. These efforts were well organized, but lack of food would soon overshadow all else. Save the Children representatives inspecting a home for 200 babies saw “bottles … being prepared with water and a little flour.” Older children lived on tasteless black bread, lentils, and fifty million pounds of chickpeas shipped in by the Mexican government, and spent a great deal of time wandering the streets to find more food. Every crumb was precious: forty-three years after the fact, a woman remembered with anguish the day she had, as an eight-year-old, broken a bottle containing her family’s ten-day ration of olive oil.
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Quaker help organizations soon reported appalling conditions in other regions of Spain. More than 4,000 people, forced to flee the fighting in Málaga, were housed in a camp near Murcia, where they were given one meal a day. At this early date the Quakers had little more to offer than condensed milk and cocoa. The future looked daunting: 137,000 more refugees were scattered in the vicinity and in Málaga itself. One woman had lost her two smallest children in the chaotic flight. Everywhere there were sick and dying babies and overwhelmed services. Soup kitchens in Barcelona were feeding 2,000 children daily, and even the men of the International Brigades were sharing their food with thousands of children in eastern Spain.
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By June 1937, Franco’s Auxilio Social, which was modeled on the Nazi NSV welfare organization, was also feeding 30,000 children, including many from Republican families, and desperately needed funding to feed thousands more. At this early stage, Quaker worker Wilfred Jones found the care being given exemplary and full of “genuineness, of helpfulness, cheer and brotherhood … regardless of the sympathies of the parents of the children.”
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To this misery was soon added a new element: the bombing of civilian targets. By November 1936, Italian and German air squadrons supporting the Franco rebels and Russian planes supporting the Republicans were raiding defenseless villages and cities daily. The Spanish government had few antiaircraft guns, and none would be supplied by the determinedly noninterventionist democracies. In the north, valiant resistance by the ten-plane Basque Air Force, led by one nineteen-year-old ace who shot down nine German fighters before being killed himself, was of no avail.
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Children found themselves in a surreal new world:
I was only nine then. Our days were lived around the air raid sirens, the race to the shelters. Our first shelter … burned after a direct hit. We took to the train tunnels.… The hours and days we spent in the refuges were endless, and we never knew what we would find when the raid was over.
They would find terrible things, as the experience of one twelve-year-old demonstrated: “I volunteered to help clear away rubble from a few houses in my barrio, which had been hit. Till I die, I’ll never forget the horror of finding pieces of the children who lived there among the bricks and debris.”
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On March 31, 1937, German planes bombed the Basque town of Durango, blowing into small fragments some 400 civilians, most of whom were at church.
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This was followed by the now legendary attack on Guernica, where the German Condor Legion had the opportunity to experiment with the new incendiary bombs that would be so useful later over London. The Nazis had chosen their moment well. It was market day, and at four-thirty in the afternoon the center of town was full of people and livestock.
The people were terrified. They fled, abandoning their livestock in the marketplace. The bombardment lasted until seven forty-five. During that time, five minutes did not elapse without the sky’s being black with German planes.… The planes descended very low, the machine gun fire tearing up the woods and roads, in whose gutters, huddled together, lay old men, women and children.… Fire enveloped the whole city.
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Göring, welcoming the triumphant Condor Legion home from this exploit, noted happily that the Luftwaffe had gone to Spain because it had “burned to show what it could do.”
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The Italian Air Force, not to be outdone, later bombed Barcelona continuously for forty-eight hours with its experimental “super bombs,” which could destroy whole blocks at a time.
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By now children in all of Spain were faced not only with the normal horrors of civilians in a combat zone, but also with the terrible scenes unique to civil war. In the “insane hatred, the mad-dog spirit of the rank and file on both sides,”
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all restraints had gone; personal and class hatreds surfaced and executions and counterexecutions initiated on the slightest pretext decimated entire towns. All over Spain women and children were held hostage for their husbands and fathers, and many perished. There were public executions. In some places so many spectators came to watch
these events that soldiers had to be called in to hold back the crowds and send away the staring children.
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Troops and militiamen from the various factions killed on sight whoever they thought might be an enemy. They were often mistaken.
Carlos C., a thirteen-year-old boy from a nonactivist monarchist family in San Roque, near Gibraltar, lost three uncles and a cousin in one day as a battle raged for control of his town. Anarchist militia took the uncles from the house and shot them. When the family was told, Carlos rushed out to find one of them who was said to still be alive. The boy found him on the floor of a hospital corridor, where the uncle soon succumbed to the twenty-one bullet wounds he had sustained. On the way to the hospital, Carlos had seen another uncle’s body being carried away; on his way back, he found the bodies of his other two relatives in the street. Later, Carlos remembered with surprise that when he got home he had felt no emotion:
I didn’t feel what had happened as a great personal tragedy. Rather, as I related what I had seen, I felt something of a hero. No one at home dreamt of eating anything, but I was hungry and slipped away to the kitchen. All I could find was a tin of condensed milk which I gulped down.
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Carlos was not unusual. Most of Europe’s children would, in the next years, develop a self-protective shell of voyeurism and casualness toward the monstrous events around them. Observers noted that, after a time, children in Madrid, which was under artillery fire for months, did not even stop playing when the shells began to fall, and that collecting hot shrapnel fragments, often from streets strewn with corpses, was all the rage. In Barcelona, when leftist elements dug up the remains of nuns and priests and displayed them in the streets, groups of thirteen-year-olds made fun of the grotesque exhibitions: “When we got bored looking at the same ones in my neighborhood, we’d go to another barrio to see the ones they’d dug up there.… We kids would make comments about the different corpses—how this one was well-preserved, and that one decomposed, this one older.”
The children’s coolness was not always as real as it seemed. Five-year-old José Antonio Pérez, who, with his little brother and mother, spent an agonizing last night in jail with his father, who was to be executed by a firing squad the next morning, believed for many years that he had not actually been there but had only heard the events vividly described by his mother. It was not until he happened to visit the prison much later in his
life that he recognized the room where they had all been together and knew that he had actually “lived through that night.”
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By the time of the attack on Guernica, the Spanish Republican government had already begun to encourage the evacuation of children from its besieged cities and towns. This project, though worthy, was also quite partisan. Eligibility for evacuation was determined not only by loyalty to the government, but also by the political affiliation of each family. The Spanish Republican government was a coalition of parties, which included Communists, socialists, anarchists, and, to make things especially complicated in the Basque region, Catholic separatists. Places in the groups to be evacuated were, therefore, allotted according to the percentages each faction had garnered in the last election. The process began in the Basque areas. Parents were required to go to a central office to request evacuation for their children. The first groups, aged five to twelve, were carefully screened and given medical examinations. There was considerable publicity, and even a reception at which the candidates were shown a movie of the French workers resort that would later house them.
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After the bombings began, Basque government officials, desperate to save their own families, were not above a little blackmail: foreign diplomats noticed that permission to evacuate their own nationals included pressure to take refugees. The American consul in Bilbao, when reprimanded by the State Department for even discussing the admission of 500 Spanish children to the United States, indignantly cabled back: “I made suggestion concerning Basque children to be able to evacuate our nationals.… Less tactful cultivation of officials in power probably would have resulted in disaster rather than the excellent success achieved entirely within our policy.”
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For the young Spanish refugees, access to the United States, “within our policy,” was far less possible than for the German ones: the Spanish yearly quota was 252.
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The Basque attempt to send 500 children to the United States was, therefore, no more successful than the earlier Jewish program. Sympathy for the children was strong in many quarters, and the Roosevelt administration had authorized the consul in Bilbao to waive visa restrictions if the children could be certified by the Department of Labor as “bona fide temporary visitors.” Yet, despite offers by many members of the Basque community in the United States (and by some 2,700 other families) to take in the children, the plan, once again, was torpedoed by the fierce combined opposition of a few powerful congressmen, the Sons of the American Revolution, and, most importantly, a number of major Catholic organizations, notably the Knights of Columbus, whose leader indignantly wrote that “the attempt … to bring Basque children to the
United States is an unholy exploitation of children for Communist propaganda purposes.”
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There would not be direct financial aid for the children from the U.S. government either. All funds had to be funneled through private organizations, which were carefully tracked to make sure that there were no violations of American neutrality. It was not until two years into the war that U.S. authorities, having been informed by the Spanish government that more than three million people, of which one million were children, had been driven away from their homes and that the food situation for them was “desperate,” gave permission to the Federal Surplus Commodities Corporation to supply 250,000 bushels of wheat to Spain. Even then, arrangements for the handling and distribution of the food had to be made through private charities. Finally getting into the spirit of things, the United States prodded the Brazilians to send surplus coffee to Spain, and in December 1938 upped the available wheat shipments to 500,000 bushels a month.
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