Recuerdos: Basque Children Refugees in Great Britain. Niños wascos refugiados en Gren Bretana (review)

This collection of sixty-four memories of adults who were some of the four thousand children evacuated from Spain to Britain during the Civil War represents an exceptional document from many points of view. If testimonies of recipients of humanitarian aid are rare nowadays, recollections of those who were in such a situation in the past are almost impossible to find.

Written seventy years after the events, in English or Spanish, and published in both languages, these memories, as oral historians have alerted us, are inevitably colored by the subsequent histories of their authors. An additional bias comes from the fact that the texts, which arrived in far greater number and at longer length than expected, had to be edited by the author of this anthology, Natalia Benjamin, whose mother was one of the school teachers who accompanied the niños. Having said this, children undergoing traumatic experiences tend to make sense of their past around a few precise details, which have invariably proven to be accurate, and which remain central to their memory long after the fact. Thus, most children recall the frightening sounds of bombings, mourn the death of loved ones, and mention the imprisonment and torture of their fathers and brothers, as well as the exile of their mothers.

The children's flight to Britain meant first and foremost the relief that came with the absence of fear. Their parents and the welcoming agencies believed it to be paramount that the children "could at last live in a country at peace." All agreed to tell them that their exile would be "only for three months," four words that appear in the book as a refrain, and became, many years ago, the title of one of the first studies of their story. Most also recall, in strikingly convergent detail, the travails of the crossing on the Habana, in May 1937, the consternation at being processed en masse, tagged with "expedition numbers," and sorted by health officials with color-coded ribbons.

The return to some measure of regularity once the children arrived in Britain was a goal facilitated by the Basque government and a host of organizing agencies: Quakers, the Save the Children Fund, pacifists, the Salvation Army, and the Boy Scouts, among others. Organizers tried to keep siblings and friends together and to school the children, whenever possible, in their own language. Specialists in the rehabilitation of children of war have found that preserving the children's culture of origin was crucial to their recovery. Thus, humanitarians who organized readings of Spanish poems and literature might have helped more than they realized. The nature of such personalized welcomes, where adults tried to help children to forget as much as possible the events they witnessed at home, might have done much to help them resume their lives.

The Spanish Civil War was remarkable for the support it generated abroad. Thirty thousand children were evacuated from Spain, and sympathies for the Republicans, opposition to fascism, and the presumed political innocence of children all turned the niños into symbols of opposition to fascism. Trade unionists supported the relocation program by financial contributions, and the unions were the main initiators of the project. Still, the niños remember most vividly the middle- and upper-class individuals who appeared in their lives, characters unlike any they had encountered in their poor surroundings in Spain. Many children experienced warm, trustful, and lasting attachments, and most authors take Benjamin's initiative as an opportunity to thank their British benefactors.

We owe this book to an anniversary, the urgency of recording the niños's voices before they pass away, and the work of the child of one of their teachers. With the help of Civil War historian and author of Recuerdos's preface, Tom Buchanan, former evacuees organized a weekend workshop on the occasion of the seventieth anniversary of their arrival. At the end of their lives, many...