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.
