General Francisco Franco’s Spanish dictatorship stole children from the families of his left-wing opponents and gave them to his supporters or sent them to be brought up in convents or monasteries, according to a book published this week.
”They took my child to baptise him but they never brought him back,” said Emilia Giron (82), whose son Jesus was taken from her in 1941 because, as a member of a communist family, she was considered unfit to bring him up properly.
”It has tormented me all my life, because I know I gave birth. I wonder how many others were taken,” she told the authors of The Lost Children of Francoism.
Journalists Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis and historian Ricard Vinyes were unable to discover exactly how many children were snatched from their families by Franco’s social service zealots, but it seems probable that the number must have run into the hundreds, if not the thousands.
Many of the children had their names changed in registry offices and some may never have known that they were adopted.
The authors provided more than two dozen examples of cases similar to that of Giron. Many of their subjects had never spoken publicly about what now appears to have been a systematic campaign to eradicate future opposition to Franco by ensuring that children were not ”polluted” by exposure to left-wing ideas.
Some of those taken from their families were children who had been sent abroad to Britain, France, Russia or other countries for safety by their Republican parents during the Civil War. They were brought back without their families being told as part of a campaign by the international branch of the Falangist Party.
Florencia and Maria Calvo, 70 and 72, were repatriated from France after the war. They were separated and given up for adoption.
”When I arrived in Spain I asked a nun about my sister. She said, ‘They must have thrown her from the train’,” Florencia Calvo said.
She only found her sister 60 years later after an appeal on a television programme.
In some cases, according to Rafael Torres, the author of another new book, The Disappeared of the War of Spain, the Falangists forged papers to pretend they had parental permission to take the children back to Spain.
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