Dedicated to LEE4 girls!

http://youtu.be/UdITqp3EmHI

“This boy was 8 when his village in Darfur was attacked in 2004. His
drawing describes this attack"

Manuel Bravo. The gentlemen and the comrades. 160 x 221 mm.
Valencia. Residencia Infantil Colonia El Albal, Onteniente. BNE
Dib/19/1/681.

Jesús Martín. [Scribbles with a man]. 156 x 217 mm. Castellón.
Colonia Escolar Oropesa. BNE Dib/19/1/151.

Cerillo, Rafael. 13 years. Bombardment of the queue for milk.
172 x 238 mm. Teruel. Colonia Escolar Germán de
Araujo. Alcañiz. BNE Dib/19/1-524.

Barrio, Jaime. 12 Jahre. A Street in Madrid: Scene of the Child before the
War. 171 x 232 mm. Alicante. Residencia Infantil nº 6, San Juan.
BNE Dib/19/1/82.

"Through little eyes"

ISFD 41

LANGUAGE AND WRITTEN EXPRESSION 4

Paper's Topic: “Through little eyes”, Spanish Civil War

Student:Irusta M. Soledad                         

Teacher: Saubidet, Stella

“Through little eyes”, Spanish Civil War

The Spanish Civil War was fought from 17 July 1936 to 1 April 1939 between the Republicans, who were loyal to the established Spanish Republic, and the Nationalists, who were a rebel group led by General Francisco Franco. Spain was thus left militarily and politically divided. These two different groups fought for the control of the country. Death totals still remain debated, but it is believed that Franco's ensuing 'white terror' resulted in 200,000 dead people and that the 'red terror' killed 38,000. Beyond the conflict itself human suffering and loss will never be restored, many atrocities were committed; many children were killed and tortured. The children who survived had contact with pain, cruelty and death, thus examining this confrontation from their testimony, we will be able to reaffirm war worthless insights, the way it destroyed and transformed victims’ life, as well as compare it with modern infants.    

During the war Spanish government tried to protect the weakest members of the society for that reason they organized the evacuation from war zones of non-combatant population, especially children aged five to fifteen, resorting to a system of school colonies, on its own territory as well as in foreign countries. During the time they spent in colonies children reflected their feelings about war in drawings: bombardments, the separation of the country, the separation from their parents, their loneliness, anxiety and many more. We would have to analyze each of them in order to comprehend them individually. In addition these documents are valuable because on the one hand, they contributed to help their authors confront psychological traumas and on the other hand, they offer a pictorial narration of the events during the fight.

Most of these productions dialed with themes that referred to life before the war, the evacuations and humanitarian support, war experiences and the life in the colonies. The evacuations are often represented in the drawings. Buses and trains full of children and their guardians, who travel from the endangered areas to other regions, while they are being bombarded, are seen in these drawings. Sometimes, the buses and trains with children suffered air attacks. Possibly, the children chose this subject so frequently, because the evacuation was a traumatic experience in their lives, which they confronted with conflicting feelings. On the one hand, they may have felt happy to leave the dangerous, badly supplied combat zone, and experienced the evacuation as an exciting adventure.   On the other hand, they were separated from their parents for the first time and apart from the grief of separation, they were afraid of the new and unknown situation that awaited them in the school colony. 

Furthermore most children reflected anxiety in their creations, which in psychoanalysis, is the feeling of fear whose cause is unknown to the individual. Sigmund Freud explains that ‘anxiety is the affect for which all “repressed” affects are exchanged’  and Jacques Lacan further claims that anxiety is ‘the central affect, the one around which everything is organized’   and it is ‘the only affect that does not deceive.’ In the case of children who were separated from their parents were forced to begin an unknown new life as the only possibility to save their lives. Their lives were marked since then though if they wished to recover they would have to work on approaching their own trauma and understand past memories to bury the painful ones. Indeed these representations must be worked through over time in order to afford the trauma and create a better future. Elaboration is needed to do it thus these drawings symbolize the real psychic reality which at the same time cannot be explained logically but indeed express children´s innocence facing the most senseless and cruel disastrous of human misery, that is war.

Unfortunately a certain propagandistic value of those drawings, which took up the topic of the evacuations that were exhibited outside Spain, cannot be denied. Teachers in schools and school colonies of the Republican zone collected them, converting them into historical documents.  Moreover these drawings were used during the war as propaganda, which informed the international opinion about the situation of the children inside the territories governed by the Republic with the purpose of raising funds in countries that sympathized with Republican ideas in order to finance school colonies themselves.  In other words they were used to show that the administration of the Republic was well organized and knew how to evacuate the weakest members of society from the endangered zones. The Republic proved with these drawings that the aid proceeding from foreign countries was spent meaningfully, and at the same time, served as an implied request for further donations.

In the end of the war Nationalists prevailed, and Franco ruled Spain for the next 36 years, from 1939 until his death in 1975. For over 100 years, children’s drawings have been the object of educational and psychological research and they were used for the first time in the Spanish Civil War. We conclude that the deep impression that war machine and the devastating and deadly effects caused in children is painfully present in nearly all drawings.  War drawings reflect real perceptions of the effects of bombs, attacks, air bombardment, loneliness, cruel evacuation, anxiety and many more, which destroyed children entire minds and devastated their futures. In contrast to our actual children their closest contact with such violence could be through reading magazines, viewing movies or listening to stories of adults, who lived during war time. Though luckily it is impossible to reconstruct the exact situation children experienced during the Spanish civil war, each single testimony, evacuations, separation from their parents, anxiety, and unreachable elaborations they contribute to complete the existing traditional historical consideration about war, and help humans to avoid being indifferent to war, which is “always destructive”.

Sources:

·         Roith C. They Still Draw Pictures: The Spanish Civil War Seen with

Children’s Eyes.

http://www.ual.es/~chroith/pdf/CDCW.pdf

·         Kasten J.  Campos de Heridas: Castile as Trauma Space in Post-Spanish

Civil War Cultural Productio.

http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/wp-content/uploads/2013/02/kastentrpaper.pdf