Cruel World (26 page)

The more liberal Popular Front government in France was kinder. By the middle of June 1937, when Bilbao fell, unleashing a further flood of unprocessed refugees into France, some 15,000 children, accompanied by priests and teachers, had left their families and been evacuated in a stream of vessels escorted by British warships. Edith Pye, a Quaker social worker, was deeply moved at the sight of the first groups to arrive in France, “crowded like ants into the landing barge, waving and singing and shouting ‘Viva la France.’ ” Though they were thin and undernourished, “they were all beautifully clean and tidy, hair combed and neatly clothed.”
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Soon other countries, sometimes grudgingly, joined in the rescue effort. In Britain the private National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief had been proposing the transfer of children to England for months. Despite the strong urging of the British consul in Bilbao, the idea did not take root until public outrage over Guernica convinced the Cabinet to authorize the entrance of children of the “noncombatant” ages of five to twelve, with the stipulation that no state funding would be provided. Pressure from social workers would soon convince the British authorities to raise the age limit to fifteen in order to protect young girls from rape. In the heat of the moment fund-raising was no problem. A British team in besieged Bilbao, working fifteen hours a day and constantly interrupted by air raids, had by mid-May processed some 4,000 children, who left for England on two ships.
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Belgium, Denmark, Mexico, and other countries either took more children or subsidized the colonies in France, and enthusiastic Communist parents would sign up for 4,000 to 5,000 children to go to the USSR.

Getting there was not half the fun; the well-meaning rescue workers had much to learn about small evacuees. The voyages, especially by sea, are repeatedly described as disastrous. The ships were jammed. Children slept everywhere, two or three to every available bunk, and even in the empty swimming pool on one vessel. One group going to Russia, on a ship manned by an inscrutable Indo-Chinese crew, was housed on old mattresses in a hold full of coal dust. In scenes that would be repeated again and again in such evacuations, fear and homesickness were rife and seasickness almost universal. Older children who had promised their parents that they would take care of younger siblings were often overwhelmed by their lonely duties:

These nightmares were dispelled for a time by the spectacular welcoming ceremonies put on in every country for the first arrivals. In France, white bread and milk were waiting on the dock for those disembarking: “They gave us hot milk … so hot it burned my tongue. I drank four glasses anyway. What a sensation of joy and satisfaction came over me.”

A group sent to Belgium by train was, despite cold and rain, met at midnight by a large, emotional crowd, “many crying for joy,” who showered them with hugs and candies. Those arriving in the British port of Southampton were amazed at the sight of enormous decorations covering the waterfront, which were left from the recent coronation of George VI but which the children assumed were in their honor.

The Soviet Union eclipsed all the rest with a three-day welcoming extravaganza that was exhaustively covered in
Pravda
. A crowd of thousands, here too waving handkerchiefs, greeted the ship as it docked in Leningrad. The 1,745 children, by now well coated with coal dust, were “bathed carefully by jolly nurses in such clean big white aprons” and allowed to choose new clothes from a roomful laid out for them. Once spruced up, they were housed at the posh Astoria Hotel, still one of St. Petersburg’s best. Here, serenaded by an orchestra much given to somewhat inappropriate repetitions of “La Cucaracha,” they were fed gargantuan meals. Eleven-year-old Juan Rodríguez Ania, who had made the trip
with his brother and two sisters, thought he had “reached Paradise after being in Hell.” The high-powered treatment went on and on. There were banquets and speeches put on in Leningrad and Moscow by Soviet youth organizations before the children, who all expected to be home for Christmas 1937, were distributed to well-appointed summer colonies in the south of the USSR. In time, two or three thousand more Spanish children would join this initial group. The Soviets, clearly hoping for a Communist takeover in Spain in which the Russian-trained children would eventually play an important role, continued to treat their young guests exceptionally well. In the fall, they were placed in special boarding schools. Supervision and structure in these institutions were both caring and strict. The elite treatment continued in extracurricular activities that were frequently conducted by Bolshoi Ballet dancers and top soccer players.
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To make the children feel more at home, teachers were brought in from Spain. For these adults, often fervently enthusiastic about Communist ideas, the realities of the USSR, from which the children were carefully shielded, soon made clear that there were problems in “paradise.” They were appalled by the abject poverty of most of the people, by the severe shortages of food, and by the “harsh political conditions.” Rosa Vega, expecting advanced and innovative teaching methods in Russia, was surprised to discover rigid and slow-paced classes evidently “designed for children with a slower learning rate” than the “more lively” Spanish children, who were expected to do much of their work on their own: “It was evident that there was considerable fear of individual initiative. In each of the older children’s classes one of the pupils was appointed as invigilator to walk up and down to ensure that the children were studying—a sort of policeman.”

The children were not the only ones who were watched. Spanish-speaking Russian supervisors monitored the classes and subjected the visiting instructors to “self-criticism” sessions on weekends. The monitors’ job was not to be helpful but to ensure that no one made remarks hostile to Communist orthodoxy. “There was a lot of terror, a lot of fear; it was the height of Stalin’s show trials.”
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Luckily for her, Rosa Vega fell ill and returned to Spain, for, at the triumph of the Fascist Franco regime in 1939, most of her Spanish colleagues would either be imprisoned or sent to work in factories, thus leaving the children entirely in the often brutal hands of the Soviet authorities.
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In the West, despite the demonstrations of affection upon arrival, subsequent events were also not always so cheery. In France and Belgium
most of the children were placed in foster families. In order to expedite matters, the boys and girls were taken in groups to a location such as a schoolroom, where the families who had volunteered to take “a child” would choose which one they wanted. This was standard procedure worldwide when dealing with orphans and homeless children. Although some families were touched by the little groups of siblings and took two or three, most could take only one. Few experiences seem to have been more traumatic for children than this. “Families would take one child only. My brother was taken by a rich-looking family. I clutched my little sister’s hand to await our luck. My father was dead, my mother in France. I was her sole protection in the world. But she was led away sobbing.” Even worse for self-esteem was not being chosen at all; but this at least sometimes allowed siblings to stay together. “We were divided by numbers, like pieces of meat. Everyone was claimed but us. My sister was crippled and no one wanted us three, so the Red Cross had to put us in an orphanage.”
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In England the Spanish children were given physical exams immediately upon arrival, after which red, white, or blue ribbons were tied to their wrists indicating that they were either “verminous,” “clean,” or “infectious.” The poor reds had all their clothes destroyed and were given hand-me-down English outfits, which, of course, marked them for good as having been louse-ridden. Red, white, and blue siblings were separated from one another, thereby destroying the comfort given by what remained of family life. From festive Southampton the 4,000 children were taken to a huge tent city set up and furnished by a host of generous volunteers and corporate donors. There they would be gradually sorted out and distributed, not to families, but to some ninety smaller colonies. The British, thinking in Boy Scout terms, were not well prepared for children who had been politicized and made streetwise by their life in a war zone. Nor did the caretakers have any idea of Spanish language or food. From the beginning, there were problems. The first meal of beans and “whole boiled Spanish onions,” which bore no resemblance to anything ever consumed by the children, was a disaster. The refugees also had never tasted margarine, ubiquitous in England, and were puzzled by the constant cups of tea, used at home only for illness.

Once again, the lack of a structured program led to mischief and vandalism, and resulted in the imposition of reform-school-like measures in some institutions and the expulsion of some older boys to Spanish refugee colonies in France. Within the tent camp Catholics and differing socialist
factions soon got into fights and had to be segregated. The Catholic Church agreed to take 1,200 children into various homes and orphanages, but only after careful screening of the children for their religious beliefs. The Catholic homes were not cozy either: pro-Franco nuns and priests were frequently suspicious of the “left-wing” Spanish children, and the little families of siblings who had sailed away together were further diminished by Catholic insistence on separate-sex facilities. All these problems were reported with much drama in the press and soon led to lobbying for repatriation of the children and a falloff in funding, which shrank even more as it became clear to business donors that the Franco regime was winning and would soon control Spanish commerce.
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As Franco’s position became stronger and his regime was recognized by other nations, pressure to repatriate the children continued to grow. The Spanish Fascists regarded the presence of tens of thousands of children in camps abroad as a public embarrassment and a source of future opposition. With the exception of the USSR, from which most of the young refugees who survived their stay would not return for twenty years, the governments of the countries of refuge were anxious to be rid of the children. But the civilian committees sponsoring them were rightly suspicious of the promises and documentation produced by the representatives of Franco and the Spanish Church, which, recent research has revealed, were often falsified by the government. Before allowing repatriation, the caretakers demanded that proof be given that the children’s families had requested their return and could care for them, but verification was often impossible. By the end of the Civil War, more than half of the young evacuees had gone back to Spain. Of these, it is certain that many whose parents were political prisoners went into children’s homes run by Franco’s Auxilio Social, where they were subjected to Nationalist indoctrination. But hundreds of children, their civil status unclear, would remain alone in their various nations of refuge, dependent on the rescue committees, forced to lead precarious and nomadic lives in and out of institutions and foster homes, seizing whatever educational and employment opportunities came their way, and destined never to return to Spain.

The victory of Franco’s forces in Spain would add exponentially to the number of refugees of all ages. By early January 1939, in terrible winter conditions, some half-million Spaniards and their foreign supporters were in flight toward France, but this time the French, already burdened with tens of thousands of German and Spanish refugees, were less welcoming and closed the border. In late January, with several hundred thousand
men, women, and children hovering at the frontier, dying of starvation and exposure, the French relented and opened their borders to the wounded and civilians. Noel Field, an American member of the International Military Commission of the League of Nations, reported:

The camps to which Field referred, hastily improvised by the French, could, at first, hardly be dignified with the name. An American embassy official transmitting a report to Washington wrote that “the conditions portrayed are shocking almost beyond belief.” Already routine in the USSR, such scenes, and worse, would become all too familiar to millions in the next five years:

The conditions were bad enough for soldiers, but for the thousands of women and children among the refugees survival was not easy. Freezing winds swept the beaches and drove sand and refuse into eyes, clothing, and food. Torrential rains in late February drenched everything, creating “by this added nightmare, indescribable misery.” No tools, building materials, bedding, or even straw was provided for weeks. People dug holes in the sand, but these soon filled with water. A few managed to make reed huts. For some days there was no food at all, “then truckloads of bread were brought … and thrown across the barbed wire fences as if in a zoo.” Sanitary provisions were completely lacking: