AEMI

52 AEMI JOURNAL 2015
Relief. This non-governmental committee
would be responsible for the care
and housing of the children from the
moment they arrived in England.
Eventually, in May 1937, approximately
3,861 children between the ages
of 5 and 15 were evacuated to the UK
on the ship Habana, accompanied by a
small number of adults. Uniquely this
was the only official evacuation to the
UK, thus all the refugee children of the
Spanish Civil War in the UK went together
on the same voyage. They became
a very easily identifiable group which
has been known to the present day as
the Basque Children, even though those
who are still alive are on their late eighties
and nineties.
Belgium did not seem an ideal country
to be approached in relation to evacuations.
Firstly, in comparison with the
great powers it was not perceived as a
key player in the political sphere. Secondly,
its distance from Spain, both
geographically and in the sense of how
little it was known, in addition to its
physical proximity to Germany, did not
make it an obvious choice. Finally, the
Belgian coalition government was also
deeply affected by strong internal divisions
with regard to the matter of helping
the Spanish Republic. Paradoxically,
both sides of this remarkably polarized
argument were defended most enthusiastically
by socialist leaders.
In the end Belgium decided to remain
neutral, but another paradox was still
on its way. Thanks to the enormous solidarity
demonstrated by Belgian families,
trade unions, humanitarian groups,
religious and non-religious people and
in spite of the governmental decision,
this country gave asylum to the largest
volume of children after France. More
than 5,000 children, of whom more
than 3,300 were Basque, settled in Belgium
exceeding all initial expectations.
As noted above, these children did not
travel directly from their towns of origin,
nor was Belgium their originally intended
destination; they had been taken
to France in the first instance.
The evacuations of children to the
USSR, and also to Mexico, were especially
significant, both because of the
volume of refugees and also because of
how the events developed afterwards.
An important point was that while other
countries were in a hurry to repatriate
the children from a very early stage, the
USSR and Mexico decided not to send
them back to a country ruled by Franco.
Helping the Republic was not initially
in the Soviet agenda. However, the open
support that Germany and Italy provided
to the rebels from the onset of the war
pushed the USSR, and to a certain extent
Mexico, to eventually support the Republican
Government. Thus, in addition to
any humanitarian intentions there was a
strong political agenda behind their decision
to accept evacuees. The fact that the
‘Catholic’ Basque Government sent children
to the ‘communist’ USSR created
much controversy and was used to fuel
the debate on evacuations and as political
propaganda by the insurgents. Indeed,
the Basque Government never intended
to send children to the Soviet Union and
it was the pressure from various sectors of
the Basque Socialist Party and the Communist
Party that finally made of the
USSR a recipient country. However, the
Basque authorities demanded from the
parents who were willing to send their
children to the Soviet Union a special