She took my father from my life oh
Took my sister and brothers oh
I watched her torturing my child
Feeble I was then but now I’m grown
Fire on Babylon
Oh yes a change has come
Fire on Babylon
Fire
Fire
Fire
She’s taken everything I liked
She’s taken every lover oh
And all along she gave me lies
Just to make me think I loved her
Fire on Babylon
Oh yes a change has come
Look what she did to her son
Fire
Fire
Fire on
Life’s backwards
Life’s backwards
People turn around
The house is burned
The house is burned
The children are gone
Fire
Fire
Fire on Babylon
Oh yes a change has come
Fire on Babylon
Fire
Fire, oh
Fire, oh
Fire on Babylon
Oh yes a change has come
Look what she did to her son
Look what she did to her son
Fire, haha
Fire, haha
Fire
Fire
Fire, aha
Fire on Babylon
Fire on Babylon
March 21, 2009
March 19, 2009
March 16, 2009
Nation of lost souls
TONY BOCK/TORONTO STAR
Marcia Martel calms herself as she tells her story to the Star in Timmins.
Mar 16, 2009 04:30 AM
Linda Diebel
NATIONAL AFFAIRS WRITER
TIMMINS – The last time Marcia Martel saw her mother at home, it was late summer and she was a chubby little Indian kid of 4. She doesn’t remember much because she was crying and clutching the tall grass as strange people pulled her away. She was scared of the police and didn’t understand why she was being taken from Beaverhouse First Nation on Lake Misema in northeastern Ontario.
Forced into a waiting boat, she sat down. She’d been taught “little children rules” for the water. She fixed her gaze on her mother standing alone against the house until the image was only a speck and then, nothing.
She couldn’t stop crying. She felt so worthless, she says, “I knew God Himself didn’t want me.”
Martel, now 45, is part of a multi-million-dollar class-action lawsuit filed recently in Ontario Superior Court against the Attorney General of Canada over the treatment of thousands of aboriginal children from 1965 to 1985. The claim alleges the federal government – with constitutional responsibility for aboriginal people, principally through Indian and Northern Affairs Canada– committed “cultural genocide” by delegating child welfare services to Ontario. As a result, it says, children (there are no precise numbers) were stripped of their aboriginal identity by being placed in non-native foster/adoptive homes.
A Justice Canada official referred questions to Indian and Northern Affairs, while an Indian Affairs spokesperson said officials are conducting “preliminary research” for a statement of defence. Meetings with a class-action judge are expected as early as next month.
Martel lived in foster homes until being adopted at 9. She thought her family didn’t want her. In an exclusive interview with the Toronto Star, she said of her childhood, “I felt like an (abandoned) puppy.”
She battled thoughts of suicide. She says her adoptive mother told her to eat off the floor like the “savage” she was and rubbed her raw to wash off her “dirty” brown colour.
Most Canadians think children are no longer being forcibly taken from aboriginal communities. They’ve heard about the “kill the Indian in the child” regime over the 150 years children were carted off to residential schools under the auspices of Canadian churches. That sordid story of abuse of tens of thousands of children has come to public attention through a $2 billion class-action settlement, a parliamentary apology to survivors by Prime Minister Stephen Harper and the creation of the Indian Residential Schools Truth and Reconciliation Commission.
But it’s not over, far from it.
The removal of aboriginal children from their communities dragged on with the “Sixties Scoop” described in Martel’s lawsuit and named for the practice of taking newborns from their mothers on B.C. reserves. It continues today.
Federal Auditor General Sheila Fraser reported in 2008 that 8,300 First Nations children, ordinarily resident on reserves, were in care nationally at the end of March 2007. That’s more than five per cent of all kids living on reserves and eight times the proportion of children in the general population.
Fraser’s report chastises Indian Affairs for, among other shortcomings, failing to monitor the “cultural appropriateness” of child care services for aboriginal children.
“We are still struggling with (child welfare) workers who come into our communities and take our children without consultation,” says Arthur Moore, chief of the Constance Lake First Nation, himself a church school survivor. “They have too much power and think we’re not capable of looking after our own children.”
Adds Chief Keeter Corston, of the Chapleau Cree First Nation: “Marcia’s story isn’t an isolated incident. They didn’t think of her as a person. It’s genocide in terms of breaking down a people morally and hoping they will just disappear.”
IT’S A LATE winter morning and we’re gathered in a Timmins conference room, chiefs, welfare workers and educators, to hear Martel recount her experiences to the Star. Regional aboriginal child services are based in this town, about 800 kilometres north of Toronto, and many of the 49 chiefs from Treaty 9 lands are here for a conference.
Martel, born Sally Susan Mathias, has a strong face, with high cheekbones, an aquiline nose and shiny black hair cut in choppy layers. She places sacred symbols on a table before her – eagle feathers, pouches of tobacco and herbs, a turtle rattle, rocks and carvings. She occasionally flashes an infectious grin. Mostly though, she fights back tears, her lips pursed and eyes squeezed shut behind wire-rimmed glasses.
She massages her temples or the bridge of her nose, pausing often. Elizabeth Babin, education director for Wahgoshig First Nation, fans her with an eagle feather to calm her; the air smells of burning sage, tobacco and cedar.
Martel speaks slowly in a flat monotone, as if describing a trip to the grocery store.
She wasn’t alone in the boat that day. Authorities also took her sister, Doris Lynn, about 6, keeping them together until Marcia went to another foster home. She wrongly believed her sister wanted her gone. (Five other siblings were left with their family in Beaverhouse.)
Martel thought her mother didn’t want her either, discovering only years later it wasn’t true. She describes a happy early childhood and never found out why she was taken. But her mother, when in her late 70s, said she was afraid if she had fought for her children, police would have shot her dead.
“That’s a normal reaction. Indian people are trained to listen to authority,” says Corston. “You’re not a real person and only a real person can question authority.”
Always, Martel wanted to go home. Instead, she bounced around foster homes suffering, she alleges, physical and emotional abuse. She once ran away and told her story to a police officer but he apparently replied: “Aw, it can’t be that bad.”
By 9 when she was adopted, she’d lost her Algonquin language and felt she belonged nowhere. Suicide wasn’t an option because: “God doesn’t like it if you kill yourself.”
She liked school but later saw a children’s aid file describing her as “slow” and not likely to progress beyond the mental capacity of a 10-year-old. Authorities apparently told her family she was mentally handicapped.
Over her protests, an Ontario family with four children adopted her. She says her adoptive father was kindly, if distant. When he died some 15 years ago, he left her a small inheritance. Her adoptive mother, she claims, was cruel.
Martel had been carting around a beloved stuffed tiger. One day, her adoptive mother told her to bring Tigger outside, where she’d lit a bonfire. The woman apparently claimed Tigger was full of bugs – Indian bugs – and made her thrown him into the fire. She says she was forced to watch him burn.
“Your people loved you but they didn’t know how to look after you,” the woman apparently said, as she incessantly went about her nightly scrubbings. In her adoptive father’s absence, Martel alleges: “I got beat until I was black and blue with everything – spoons, hangers, the vacuum cleaner tubing. … But she never touched my face.”
When the couple divorced, she stayed with her adoptive father. Then, the worst. “Okay, um … I would have been in Grade 9, I think … I was 16 and, uh … I got pregnant” by an unnamed boy. Martel went to live with her adoptive mother in Los Angeles, then moved with her to Texas. The woman wanted to keep the baby.
“I would not allow that. I knew enough about human beings that if you know bad stuff is happening and you’re not able to protect yourself, there’s no possible way you can protect a baby,” says Martel. ” So, I, uh … it was probably one of the hardest things I’ve ever done … I gave him up.”
Pause. She’s sobbing quietly. “He was a beautiful boy.” A nurse let her hold him briefly after birth and, “I never saw him after that.”
She has one photo. “Nobody in my family ever saw him … not even my Granny and my Granny loved me.”
A few months later, her adoptive mother took her to the Houston airport, handed her a ticket to North Bay, Ont., and put her on a plane. She was 17. All she had was the suitcase she’d arrived with at age 9, filled with little girl’s clothes.
An older sister met her in North Bay. Martel doesn’t know how her adoptive mother found her sister Nancy; by then, they were alienated and she’s forever lost other precious family connections. She tried to regain her Indian status but was told Sally Susan Mathias was deceased. She eventually won it back.
TORONTO lawyer Jeffery Wilson, who’s handling the case with colleague Morris Cooper, stresses only Ottawa is named in the lawsuit, even though provincial Children’s Aid Society (CAS) agencies were the ones removing aboriginal children from their communities and placing them in care. They did so under the 1965 Canada-Ontario Welfare Agreement.
Provincial legislation in 1985 recognized all services to Indian and native people should be provided “in a manner that recognizes their culture, heritage and traditions and the concept of the extended family.”
However, Wilson argues: “That change (in provincial law) doesn’t correct what happened before. … It’s shameful. You think you can raise a child and that it’s in the best interest of the child to dispense with that child’s culture?”
He argues the federal government was “improper and unlawful” in handing responsibility for child services to Ontario in the first place, thereby ignoring its duty to act in the best interest of Indian children “who are particularly vulnerable.”
There’s a buzz around the lawsuit. Aboriginal leaders see it as potentially precedent-setting and a step toward their goal of ensuring autonomous child care services. Aboriginal child and family services already exist. But many argue the province routinely big-foots them.
Vicky Hardisty, executive director of Kunuwanimano Child and Family Services, based in Timmins, argues all too often the province takes aboriginal children independently, without consulting community leaders. It’s such a mess in the north, five Treaty 9 chiefs have banned provincial child welfare officers from their reserves.
Anne Machowski-Smith, spokesperson for Ontario children and youth services, says the law requires local CAS agencies to consult with bands or native communities in the apprehension and placement of aboriginal children. She adds: “We believe that, wherever possible, aboriginal children in need of protection, should be cared for in ways that recognize their culture and traditions.”
Hardisty counters: “They always say that and we always tell them it’s not happening. We ask them to provide us with proof of this compliance, but they don’t. … There’s a huge disconnect.”
For many aboriginal families, the lawsuit represents closure.
Once news of Star interest circulated, my phone began to ring with calls for help. Aboriginal adults in their 40s, 50s and older describe a nation of lost souls – Ontario’s own “disappeared” – as they search for brothers, sisters and children who vanished into provincial care.
“Can you help me?” asks James Wesley, over a scratchy line from the northern Mountbatten First Nation. One of four kids who were split up, he’s still looking for sister, Emma Lulu, and brother, Raymond Randy. “They kept moving me from home to home. … I pretty much got lost myself.”
Nobody places all the blame on Ontario’s child welfare system or suggests children should never be removed from parents. Robert Commanda, 49, a plaintiff in the class-action suit living in Peterborough, says CAS officials took him after his mother ran off and left her five little boys alone. The oldest was 5 and kept his siblings, including Robert, 2, alive on chips and pop.
“She left us to die,” says Commanda. “I sort of haven’t come to terms with that. … I’m a mess but I’m working on it. I just don’t feel I belong anywhere.”
The issue, rather, is about ensuring children in foster and adoptive homes don’t lose their identity. Aboriginal leaders don’t maintain all non-aboriginal families involved are terrible people. But they are fiercely adamant children receive “culturally appropriate” services and argue communities themselves, with their extended families, can best care for children.
MUCH TO her surprise, Martel found an inner strength. It nurtured her through childhood and, in her 20s, periods of homelessness. She says she never drank or took drugs and when, at age 28, her son, now 17, was born, “I realized survival wasn’t good enough. My life had to be about happiness too.”
She lays two photos on the table. In one, she’s a glowing bride in beaded deerskin, shown almost two years ago on a sacred rock near Beaverhouse after she married Raymond Martel. The couple – he a simultaneous translator, she a social worker – live near Kirkland Lake.
In another photo some 40 years earlier at the same site, a plump little girl with glossy hair holds tightly to her pet black cat. It’s Sally Susan at 3 with big sister, Doris Lynn. She’s smiling with a child’s confidence life will be wonderful.
In a roundabout way, that’s how it turned out. The Star’s Tony Bock photographed Martel against a snowy northern landscape. She’s cuddling another pet black cat and looks, well, happy.
She is, she says. Sally Susan Mathias has come home. And the best part? She believes the lawsuit at last shows her meaning in all those rough times.
March 3, 2009
Families Search for Truth of Spain’s Stolen Children
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Families Search For Truth of Spain’s Lost Children
LOMBILLO DE LOS BARRIOS, Spain — The truth, if ever it emerges, will come too late for Emilia Girón.
For 65 years, Ms. Girón, a hard-bitten mother of seven, ached to know what had become of her son Jesús. Born in the early 1940s during the vengeful first years of Gen. Francisco Franco’s 36-year dictatorship he was taken from her to be baptized shortly after his birth. She never saw him again.
“To her last, my mother bore the anguish of not knowing what had happened to Jesús. She yearned to meet the child that they had stolen,” said Antonio Prada Girón, 69, the oldest child of Ms. Girón, who died in 2007 at the age of 95.
Sifting through family documents and photographs in the slate-roofed cottage where his mother once lived, Mr. Prada said his parents were persecuted in the years after Franco took power by the police, who were hunting for his uncle, a fugitive guerrilla. Mr. Prada’s parents, who farmed the vine-covered hills around this northwestern hamlet, were jailed when he was 2. His mother gave birth to Jesús soon afterward.
The story is part of a dark and long overlooked chapter of the repressive decades under Franco that has drawn fresh attention since November, when Judge Baltasar Garzón ordered provincial judges to investigate the “disappearance” of children taken from left-wing families as part of an effort to purge Franco’s Spain of Marxist influence.
Historians and associations that represent Franco’s victims say hundreds of children were taken from families who had supported Franco’s Republican opponents during the Spanish Civil War from 1936 to 1939 or who were suspected of ties to left-wing groups. The children were adopted or sent to religious schools and state-run homes.
Some were baptized with new names, their birth records hidden or destroyed, they say. Others, sent into exile during the war by the Republicans and brought back by Franco, were given new identities.
“In a sense, this is the most symbolic crime of the Franco era,” said Emilio Silva, head of the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, an organization that has excavated the remains of hundreds of people from Franco-era graves. “To steal a child and take away his identity — that’s what Franco did to the country as a whole.”
In his 152-page court order, Judge Garzón wrote, “There was a ‘legalized’ disappearance of minors, who lost their identity, and whose number remains uncertain.” He suggested that there could be thousands of “lost children,” but historians say that figure is inflated.
“There were definitely kidnappings of children in prisons, abuses. But we really don’t know how many,” said Angela Cenarro Lagunas, a professor of modern history at the University of Zaragoza.
Ricard Vinyes, a professor of modern history at the University of Barcelona and the author of a book on female prisoners of the era, said documents and oral testimonies indicated that hundreds of children lost their identities when they were separated from their imprisoned mothers.
The case has some echoes of Argentina’s dirty war in the 1970s and 1980s, in which children of murdered dissidents were secretly stolen and, often, adopted by military families. Mr. Vinyes said Franco was open about his project to re-educate the children of his enemies.
Franco’s top military psychologist, Antonio Vallejo Nágera, claimed that Spain could be saved from Marxism by isolating children from Republican parents. A 1940 decree allowed the state to take children into custody if their “moral formation” was at risk.
“Their logic was that the solution lay in separating children from their mothers,” Mr. Vinyes said.
Catholic schools and the welfare system known as Social Aid became a machine for political reorientation. Social Aid children led a life of fascist doctrine, harsh discipline and Catholic ritual, Ms. Cenarro said.
According to Mr. Vinyes, nearly 31,000 children were registered as being in state custody at some point between 1945 and 1954, a majority of them from Republican families. For many, it was because their parents were imprisoned or executed; for some, it was because their families — partly as a result of Franco’s disastrous policy of autarky — could not support them.
Uxenu Ablaña, 79, said he was tormented because of his leftist background in the Catholic and welfare homes where he lived from 6 to 18. Mr. Ablaña, a retired machinery salesman who grew up in Spain’s north, in the Asturian village of Pravia, went into state custody after the police killed his mother and jailed his father for collaborating with the Republicans. He said that in the homes he was named Eugenio Álvarez, the Spanish version of his Asturian name.
“They called me ‘child of a red,’ communist, devil,” Mr. Ablaña said by telephone. He recalled being made to spit-polish 80 pairs of shoes in a broom cupboard. “It is as if my life ended the day I went to Social Aid.”
Now that Judge Garzón has ordered the investigation into “lost children,” associations representing Franco’s victims say they believe that they may locate some of them. The judge instructed provincial courts in January to collect DNA samples from several aged or sick Spaniards searching for family members.
Fernando Magán, a lawyer for the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory, said judges could open adoption registers and lists of children in Social Aid homes and religious schools.
Mr. Prada, who settled in France in 1958 but returns each winter to Lombillo, said finding his brother would help close wounds.
“It has left a hole in my life, knowing that I have a brother, not knowing where he is, whether he was brought up by good people,” he said, fingering the yellowed family book, the official booklet in which the Girón family members are listed. Jesús is not registered there.
When Mr. Prada was about 10, he and his grandmother made the 180-mile trip to Salamanca, where his mother had been imprisoned, to look for Jesús. They found nothing, and guards at the orphanage threatened to send his grandmother to jail if she persisted in her search.
“To think, I might have walked by him once in the street without knowing,” he said, his eyes reddening. Even with the new investigation, he said, the chances of finding Jesús are minute. “It’s like looking for a needle in a haystack.”
March 3, 2009
From The Sunday Times
March 1, 2009
Spain’s stolen children
During General Franco’s reign, tens of thousands of children were taken from their families, handed over to fascist sympathisers and brainwashed. Now growing old, they are fighting to discover the truth about their past before it’s lost for ever. By Christine Toomey. Photographs: Clemente Bernad
Barcelona (Spain). 2009. Trinidad Gallego shows a photograph of her with her mother and her grandmother, all of them imprisoned.
The only memory that Antonia Radas has of her father has haunted her as a recurring nightmare for nearly 70 years; it is the moment of his death.
Antonia is a small child in her mother Carmen’s arms. Both are looking out through the refectory window of a prison where Carmen’s husband, Antonio, is being held. They see him lined up against a courtyard wall. Shots ring out. Antonia sees a red stain burst through her father’s white shirt. His arms are in the air. Another bullet goes straight through his hand.
After that Antonia believes she and her mother must have fled the prison. But Carmen and her two-year-old daughter were soon arrested. They had been arrested before. That was why Antonio had given himself up, thinking this would guarantee their freedom. But they were the family of a rojo or red — a left-wing supporter of Spain’s democratically elected Second Republic, crushed by General Francisco Franco’s nationalist forces during the country’s barbarous 1936-to-1939 civil war. As such they would be punished. These were the years just after the war had finished, and the generalissimo’s violent reprisals against the vanquished republicans were in full flow.
Antonia is now 71 and living in Malaga. Her memories of much of the rest of her childhood are clear, and many of them happy. “I was raised like a princess. I was given pretty dresses and dolls, a good education, piano lessons,” she says.
It is only when I ask what she remembers about her mother, Carmen, from her childhood that Antonia’s memory once again becomes sketchy. “I remember that she was thin and she wore a white dress. Nothing else. I didn’t want to remember anything about her,” she says with a steely look. “I thought she had abandoned me.”
This is what the couple who raised Antonia told her when she came home from school one day when she was seven years old, crying because another child had said that she couldn’t be the couple’s real daughter since she did not share their surnames. “They told me that my mother had given me away and that my real family were all dead. They said they loved me like a daughter and not to ask any more questions. So I didn’t.”
By then a culture of silence and secrecy had descended on the whole of the country, not just the south where Antonia grew up. These were the early years of Franco’s dictatorship, when loose talk, false allegations, petty grievances and grudges between neighbours and within families often fuelled the blood-letting that continued long after the civil war had finished. In addition to the estimated 500,000 men, women and children who died during the civil war — a curtain-raiser for the global war between fascism and communism that followed — a further 60,000 to 100,000 republicans were estimated to have been killed or died in prison in the post-war period.
Even after Franco’s death in 1975, after nearly 40 years of fascist dictatorship, few questions were asked about the events that had blighted Spain for nearly half a century. To expedite the country’s transition to democracy, the truth was simply swept under the carpet.
Franco’s followers received a promise that nobody would be pursued, or even reminded, of abuses committed. In 1977, an amnesty law was passed ensuring nobody from either side of the bloody conflict would be tried or otherwise held to account. A tacit agreement among Spaniards not to dwell on the past took the form of an unwritten pacto de olvido — or pact of forgetting, which most adhered to until very recently, when the mass graves of Franco’s victims began to be unearthed.
While the majority of his nationalist supporters had long since been afforded decent burials, the bodies of tens of thousands of republicans — many subjected to summary executions — were known to be buried in unmarked pits.
In 2000, a number of relatives’ associations sprang up to try and locate the remains of missing loved ones. When the socialist prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero was elected in 2004, the agreement not to rake over the past was ruptured; during his election campaign he made much political capital out of the country’s left-right divide by repeatedly reminding voters that his grandfather had been a captain in the republican army and had been executed by Franco’s military.
To mark the 70th anniversary of Franco’s coup, Zapatero, in 2006, drafted a controversial “historical memory” law intended to make it easier to find and dig up the mass graves of republicans by opening up previously closed archives. In addition, the law — a watered-down version of which was passed after much heated political debate — ordered the removal of Francoist plaques and statues from public places. It also set up a committee to which former exiles, political prisoners and relatives of victims could apply to have prison sentences and death penalties meted out by the Franco regime declared “unjust” — not illegal, given the huge financial implications for the state in terms of compensation this could entail.
Since then, however, such issues surrounding atrocities committed by Franco’s henchmen have become bogged down in a legal quagmire.
Attempts last autumn by one of the country’s leading judges, Baltasar Garzon, to have Spanish courts investigate, as human-rights crimes, the cases of more than 100,000 “forced disappearances” under the Franco regime came up against a judicial brick wall when the country’s high court ruled it had no jurisdiction over such matters, given the 1977 amnesty law. While legal experts continue to argue over whether such crimes recognised by international law are subject to statutes of limitations, regional courts have been asked to gather information about those who disappeared — most of them killed — within their territory.
It is amid this current legal wrangling that one of the least-known chapters of Spain’s sad history has emerged — and it is not about the dead but the living. It concerns those like Antonia, who have come to be known as “the lost children of Franco”.
Both during the war and the early years of Franco’s dictatorship, it is now estimated that between 30,000 and 40,000 children were taken from their mothers — many of whom were jailed as republican sympathisers — and either handed to orphanages or to couples supportive of the fascist regime, with the intention of wiping out any traces of their real identity. Often their names were changed, and they were indoctrinated with such right-wing ideology and religious dogma that, should they ever be found by their families, they would remain permanently alienated from them psychologically.
While similar policies of systematically stealing children from their families and indoctrinating them with lies and propaganda are known to have been carried out by military regimes in Latin American countries, such as Argentina, Guatemala and El Salvador, in these countries trials and truth commissions have long since sought to expose and punish those responsible. But in Spain, the process of uncovering what happened to these children — like that of unearthing mass graves — is only now stirring intense and painful debate.
This is partly because the events happened much longer ago, making them more difficult to unravel. But also because the country’s tense political climate has turned what has become known as “the recovery of historical memory” into such a contentious issue that many argue it should be dropped from the public sphere altogether and remain a purely private or academic matter.
Where this would leave the “lost children of Franco” is unclear. Just how many are still alive and looking for their families is uncertain. But given their advancing years, at the beginning of January Garzon sent an additional petition to regional Spanish courts arguing that, as a matter of urgency, they should offer help to such “children” — now pensioners like Antonia — and families wanting to uncover the truth about the past before all traces of their origins are lost.
Garzon is requesting that DNA samples be taken from those searching for lost relatives — such genetic databases have long existed, for instance, in Argentina — and believes the cases of the “lost children” should also be treated as forced disappearances, ie, human-rights crimes without any statute of limitations. The DNA would be taken from those who are looking for missing relatives and matched with samples taken from those who believe their identity may have been changed when they were a child.
In many ways Antonia considers herself lucky. More than 50 years after she was separated from her mother in prison, the two were finally reunited, briefly — Carmen died 18 months later. Yet despite the apparent happy ending to her story, Antonia displays such deeply ambivalent feelings about her mother as we talk that it is clear that Franco’s aim of psychologically alienating the children of “reds” from their families was achieved. Even now Antonia does not like to be reminded of the name her mother gave her when she was born — Pasionaria, in honour of the civil war communist leader Dolores Ibarruri, known as La Pasionaria. She tuts loudly when her youngest daughter, Esther, writes it in my notebook.
“I believe if she [Carmen] had really wanted to find me when I was still a child, she would have,” Antonia says bitterly, ignoring the fact that when her mother was released from prison in the mid-1940s, like other former republican prisoners, she lived a life of penury, her freedom to work, move and ask questions severely limited.
Mother and daughter were reunited in the end through the efforts of one of Carmen’s older daughters, Maria, who, together with another daughter, Dolores, and son Jose, both then in their teens, had been left to fend for themselves when Carmen was imprisoned with their baby sister. Determined that her mother should see her lost child before she die, in 1993 Maria appealed for information about her sister on a television programme dedicated to locating missing relatives, which Antonia saw, by chance.
It was only then that Antonia learnt that her mother had signed a document handing her daughter into the care of a fellow prison inmate about to be released — prison rules dictated that no child over the age of three be allowed to remain with their mothers — on condition that the girl be returned to her when Carmen herself was freed from jail. Instead, her infant daughter was given, or sold, to the couple who raised her — devout churchgoers who took her to live in Venezuela for some years when she was a teenager, which was when they finally changed her surname to match their own. Carmen had already changed her daughter’s name to Antonia when she was a young child to try and protect her from the wrath of anti-communists.
All this Carmen was able to tell her daughter in the short time they had together before she died. The couple who raised Antonia were already dead by the time of the reunion, but she seems to bear them no grudges, realising they gave her a more comfortable childhood than her siblings had. The deep rancour this still causes between Antonia and her eldest sister, Dolores, is evident, as I see the shadowy figure of Dolores stand briefly outside the window of the downstairs room where I sit talking to Antonia in a rambling house in Sarria de Ter, Catalonia, where she is visiting her daughter, grandchildren and other members of her natural family. Dolores looks in at us, glowers, then walks off, shaking her head. She does not like her sister talking to strangers about the past, and jealously guards her own family secrets. She will not tell Antonia, for instance, where their father’s body is buried — though Antonia knows she carries the details on a piece of paper in her purse — believing that only she, who suffered a life of poverty and misery during and after the civil war, has the right to place flowers on his grave.
Such complicated emotions between siblings and other relatives concerning the events of the civil war and its aftermath are mirrored in families throughout Spain. It is one reason why this period of history was so little discussed for so long. “It is astonishing how many families are from mixed political backgrounds, with maybe a husband on the left and a wife on the right, which meant such things were not discussed over Sunday lunch,” says the historian Antony Beevor, author of the definitive history of the civil war — The Battle for Spain. Beevor believes that public debate about such events is long overdue. “The pact of forgetting was a good thing at the time, but it lasted too long. When you have deep national wounds and you bandage them up, it is fine in the short term, but you have to take those bandages off fairly soon and examine things, preferably in a historical context rather than in a completely politicised one.”
Like many others, Beevor believes Garzon’s attempts to bring such matters before the courts have turned them into a political football that is now being kicked about both by the right and the left for their own ends at a time when Spain can ill afford such bitter polarisation. The country is still grappling with the aftermath of the 2004 Madrid train bombings, carried out by Islamic fundamentalists, continuing terrorist attacks by Eta, growing demands for more regional autonomy, and the fallout of the global financial crisis.
“Why try to drag all this through the courts now. Who are they going to put on trial after all this time? Ninety-year-olds who are beyond penal age?” says Gustavo de Arestegui, spokesman for the country’s conservative Popular party. “Those at the top of the hierarchy of the Franco regime are all dead. Let history be their judge.”
But such arguments miss the point, says Montserrat Armengou, a documentary-maker with Barcelona’s TV channel, who both wrote a book and made a film about Franco’s “lost children” with her colleague Ricard Belis and the historian Ricard Vinyes. “There never has been and never will be a good time to uncover the truth about this country’s past. But the longer we wait the more difficult it will become, because those who were directly affected and know what happened will have died.”
Another part of Garzon’s petition to the courts at the beginning of this year regarding Franco’s “lost children” was a plea that regional magistrates urgently order statements be taken from surviving witnesses to how children were separated from their mothers in Franco’s jails before their testimonies are lost. One such witness is Trinidad Gallego, who we meet in her small apartment in the centre of Barcelona. Aged 95, she talks lucidly, and in a booming voice, about the things she saw when imprisoned with her mother and grandmother in a series of women’s jails in Madrid after the end of the civil war.
As a nurse and midwife, Trinidad was present at the birth of many babies in prison, though few records — either of children brought into the prison or born there — were ever kept.
“I saw some terrible things in those prisons,” she says. “Mothers were kept separated from their children most of the time and all mothers knew their children would be taken away before they were three years old. The priority was to brainwash the children so they would grow up to denounce their parents.”
From the early 1940s onwards, many children of prisoners were transferred into orphanages known as “social aid” homes, said to have been modelled on children’s homes established in Nazi Germany. Their parents were not told what happened to them after that; a law was passed making it legal to change the names of the children, who, thereafter, had no legal rights. The historian Ricard Vinyes has described the orphanages as “concentration camps for kids”. Those who spent time in such places have spoken about how they were made to eat their own vomit and parade around with urine-soaked sheets wrapped around their head.
Victoriano Cerezuelo was registered simply as “child number 910 — parents unknown” when he was placed as a baby in the maternity ward of an orphanage in Zamorra at 8am on April 15, 1944 — the day recorded as his birthday, although he was already weeks or maybe months old by then. When he was five, Victoriano was adopted by a farming couple, but was returned to the orphanage seven years later when the wife, sick of being beaten by her husband, threw herself down a well. “After that I placed an advert in a local paper trying to locate my real parents. As a result, I was beaten to within an inch of my life by a priest, while a nun at the home told me “the more you stir shit, the worse it smells”, recalls Victoriano, 64, as he sits in his Madrid apartment fingering a small black-and-white photograph of himself as a boy. “I would just like to know who my parents were before I die.”
Uxenu Ablana, who spent most of his childhood being transferred from one orphanage to another in Asturias, northern Spain, knows who his parents were. His mother was tortured to death by nationalist forces to extract information about his father, who had been jailed for lending a car to republican officials during the civil war. Uxenu can still recite by heart all the fascist
Falange anthems that were drummed into him in these homes, together with so much force-fed Catholic dogma that, initially, he quibbles about meeting me when I tell him my first name is Christine, so much does he still hate religious reminders. “I have no words to describe all the pain I went through. We were domesticated like dogs, beaten and humiliated, made to wear the Falange uniform and give fascist salutes,” says Uxenu, 79, when we eventually meet in Santiago de Compostela, where he now lives.
“I am not a lost child of Franco — I am dead. They killed me, what I could have been, when I was put in those homes. They brainwashed me against my father and true Spanish society.”
When he was able to leave the orphanage at the age of 18, Uxenu, whose name had not been changed, was tracked down his father, who by then had been released from jail. But the two were strangers and quickly lost contact. “I had to keep quiet for so long about what happened to me, and I still feel like a prisoner in a society that does not want to talk about the past,” says Uxenu, whose wife is so opposed to him recalling his childhood experiences we have to meet in a restaurant.
The problems that Uxenu, Victoriano, Antonia, and who knows how many more, have faced and continue to face regarding their past as Franco’s “lost children” is justification enough in the eyes of Armengou and others for Garzon to pursue his attempt to get what happened to them classified as a crime against humanity. Fernando Magan, a lawyer for a group of associations representing Franco’s victims, vows he will take the case to the European Court of Human Rights and the United Nations if Spanish courts fail to properly address the issue. “Justice is not only about prosecuting those responsible for crimes, it is about helping victims uncover the truth about what was done to them or to their loved ones — in this case in the Franco era,” argues Magan.
To those who say it is time Spain turned the page on this period of its past, Uxenu voices what many feel: “Before you can turn a page you have to understand what was written on it. Unfortunately here in Spain, we are still at war — a war of words and feelings.”
February 27, 2009
http://mystoryrelated.com/
It’s an interesting new (to me at least) site about people’s stories and relations.
February 14, 2009
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January 23, 2009
When an adoptive mother Always cries on her adopted daughter’s birthday?
She’s so happy to have her?
Does it remind her that she did not give birth to her?
Does she think about her mother?
Is she sad? Angry? Jealous?
January 12, 2009
December 3, 2008
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