SPANISH HORROR

Te Awamutu Courier, Volume 55, Issue 3928, 19 July 1937, Page 7

SPANISH HORROR

BASQUE REFUGEES, k ARRIVAL IN ENGLAND. PITIFUL STORIES. London, May 26. For months the English public has heard and read sympathetically of the horrors of the Spanish civil war. The shelling and bombing of towns had been graphically described by pen and depicted by photographers and films. But it has remained for the arrival of 3800 Basque children refugees at Southampton to bring home forcibly I and realistically the desolation, despair, and suffering caused by the conflict. The response to appeals for aid have been remarkable, and everything is being done to care for the children and to help them forget the sadness forced on their young lives. A camp was formed at Southampton to receive the children. The voluntary workers included all sorts of persons from university professors to artisans, and Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and members of boys’ brigades. The children, on board the Habana, were met by Don Jose Ignacio de Lizaso, head of the Basque delegation in London, the Duchess of Atholl, M.P., and officers of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief. Travelling with the party were 200 women teachers, 50 priests, doctors, and nurses. For the first few weeks the children will be housed in the camp. About > 100 children who are unfit for camp life will be accommodated in a large house near Southampton. AU the children are over five and under 15 years of age, the majority being girls. Supplies of clothes have been collected, and arrangements have been < made for feeding them, including the supply of 1000 gallons of milk a day. Incidents which revealed only too clearly the terrors experienced by the children occurred during the voyage, and on the first few days in England. Every blast of the ship’s siren sent hundreds cowering to shelter, for the siren was the air-raid warning which they had learned to dread. At the camp, when one of the buses was discharging its load of children, some genius in a smart aeroplane conceived the idea of flying low over the camp. As the aeroplane passed over the bus a girl shrieked and hid her eyes. She went on crying a long time after the aeroplane had gone. A woman interpreter, soothing her, asked . her why she still cried. The girl * said: “My sister is still there.” She sat, curled in her tent, shoulders shaking. Some of them were tougher than others. A black-haired 15-year-old girl from Durando, talked calmly enough. Relating her experiences she said: “I was in bed at 7 o’clock and the rebel aeroplanes came and went away, then the church bells rang, and three tri-motors came again and they all dropped bombs together and eight houses were blown up at once. Nearly everyone went to the cemetery to see the dead buried, and while we were there the aeroplanes came again over the cemetery and dropped bombs and fired with machine-guns.” The Guernica children suffered too. Ricardo, aged 12, had been in a bombardment lasting hours. Aeroplanes came down low and shot people, he said. He ran into the fields with his father and mother. “Where are they now?” somebody asks, gently. Dry-eyed, he said he I did not see them again. In a flat little voice he explained, “Everyone is dead.” The questioner was silent. Thought Thunder Was Guns. When newsreel cameras were “aimed” at the children as their ship docked, they fled, believing them to be machine-guns. A violent thunder and lightning storm broke over the camp one night. Some of the children were scared—the younger ones thought the guns were near. The volunteer helpers organised the children, who were running around the camp, into queues, and marshalled them in marquees, where they were served out with macintoshes and sou’westers, most of which were new. They were so pleased with their new finery that the greatest difficulty was experienced in getting them into their tents. Throughout the night watchers patrolled the camp to pacify any frightened child. Hid Under Mattresses. All the children told much the same story. Salustiano Gomez an intelligent 12-year-old boy, who glanced fearfully at the sky when an aeroplane passed over, spoke of day and night air raids which had continued for three months. “Directly we heard the sirens we hid under the mattresses,” he said. “It is nice that we shall not have to do that any more. I liked the white bread we had this morning. We had only one small piece of black bread ; each day at home. Air raids have knocked down many houses in Bilboa, and one day I saw 60 people dead at ; once in the street.” A younger boy, Jose Gonzalez, was in tears. He had been separated either , ’from a friend or a relative at Southampton owing to the cleanliness regu- :

lations. “My brother, who is' 15, is fighting in Spain, but the priest says I shall go back and see him soon,” he said. “I do not know where my father has gone, but my mother is still at home. I am glad I am not at home because she would not let us go into the streets, and cried every time the aeroplanes came.” Waiting their turn to be examined were a family of six, with their mother, a well-dressed woman, but terribly thin and with haunted eyes. She said she was the wife of Senor Eguia, the Basque Government Propaganda Minister. She was nursing a baby two years old, one of the youngest children on board. The youngest was the two months’ old daughter of a doctor. Senora Eguia had 10 children, she said. Two boys of 19 and 20 were fighting. Two more were above the age limit of 15 imposed by the British Government and had been sent to France. For a fortnight, she explained, she and the other six children had been almost continuously in the airraid shelters at Bilboa. She hersell had lost three stone in weight since the civil war started.