As the sister of a guerrilla leader, Emilia Girón was deemed unfit to bring up her son, who was taken from her days after his birth 70 years ago. “He was a boy and I wanted to call him Jesús,” she recalled in a recent documentary, The Missing Children of Francoism. “But they took him away to baptise him and I never saw him again. I don’t know who took him. I suppose it was a couple who were unable to have their own children but they never asked my permission. The anguish will last until I die.”
The Guardian on Judge Baltasar Garzón’s inquiry into what happened to the children of Republican fighters in the civil war. It’s estimated that anything between 12,000-30,000 children were “interned” by Franco in state or religious orphanages during the civil war. Now maybe some of those children who were considered lost forever by their parents may be reunited or at least, the truth might be told about what really happened to them.
