Belgium

What is told here is a story of taking in: that of thousands of children, most of them from the Basque Country, who spent the war in the homes of Belgian families, with Basque priests and teachers watching over them, and that of their return, which more than a thousand never made.

Why Belgium

During the Spanish Civil War more than 30,000 minors were evacuated to France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, Denmark, the Netherlands, Mexico and the Soviet Union. Some 5,000 went to Belgium: only France took in more, and they outnumbered the “children of Russia”, who were around 3,000. Most of those who arrived in that period had left the Basque Country as Franco’s troops advanced.²

That so many Belgian families opened their homes had to do with the way the country was put together. Frank Caestecker and Víctor Fernández Soriano explain that Belgium was organised into three “pillars”, the Catholic, the socialist and the liberal, and that it was that structure, together with the echo of the war in public opinion, that moved people to act. There the rule was to take children into families, and not into centres and homes, as in the United Kingdom, Denmark or the Soviet Union. It was cheaper, and it answered motives that ranged from solidarity to the wish to adopt.²

The committees

The children did not come by a single road: each current had its own committee. By April 1937 the socialists already had a long list of host families, and they received the children through the Comité national pour l’hébergement des enfants espagnols en Belgique, working with the Republican authorities. The first groups came from France by train, with their teachers, and in the spring and summer of 1937 that committee took in several hundred children.² The communists joined in through International Red Aid and took in 292 in the summer of 1937.²

The Catholics came by another route. The Bishop of Vitoria, Mateo Múgica, sent the Belgian primate, Cardinal Van Roey, an appeal to take in children for educational and religious reasons, and the Belgian Church then founded the Obra Infantil Vasca (Œuvre des Enfants basques, Baskisch Kinderwerk). Over the summer of 1937 it took in 1,265 children, all from the Basque Country, accompanied by members of religious orders. It worked with its French counterpart, the Comité national catholique d’aide aux Basques, so the children who left with it passed first through French centres before going on to Belgium or Switzerland.²

Around thirty priests and twenty men and women teachers went with the Basque children, and besides looking after them spiritually they kept an eye on the conditions in which they lived. So that the children would not lose their language, outings and Sunday classes were organised, and Radio Flandes even broadcast a children’s programme in Spanish.²

The repatriations

The demand for their return came early. After the fall of the Basque Country in 1937, the Francoist authorities and the Falange insisted on the return of those they called “stolen children”. The first to go back were 109 sick children from the hospital at Gorliz, who had been taken in in France, and the regime’s propaganda made the most of their return. In Belgium, Vicar Jansen, who was in charge of the Obra Infantil Vasca, travelled to Bilbao in August 1937 with a list of the children in his care. The list was published in the Basque press, and parents were called to come to an office to arrange the repatriation.²

The great operation came in 1939. The Red Cross hired six trains, and a Comisión Neutral de Repatriación (Neutral Repatriation Commission) sent back to Spain a good part of those who remained. How many went is hard to pin down, the authors warn, because there were several committees, because the line between “Basque” and “Spanish” children is blurred, and because sometimes the reunion with the parents took place in France, in refugee camps. Even so, they estimate that 558 children of the Obra Infantil Vasca went back in 1939 and that the Comisión Neutral probably repatriated more than 2,660.²

More than a thousand, however, stayed in Belgium permanently.²