Out of the mouths of babes

Until I saw my chil­dren for the first time (14 years ago and count­ing) I had taken it as given that noth­ing was sa­cred, but at that mo­ment had to cor­rect my­self on the spot: chil­dren are un­mis­tak­ably sa­cred, every last mother’s son and daugh­ter of them. Which was why, in 2013, my ears pricked up un­pleas­antly when I read about one María Gómez, a nun who had been for­mally in­dicted for steal­ing new-borns from moth­ers con­sid­ered ’morally un­suit­able’ and pass­ing them on to good ultra-Catholic fam­i­lies. Un­for­tu­nately, Sis­ter Gómez popped her pious clogs be­fore she could face charges. The news items about this de­vout baby-snatcher unan­i­mously hinted that she was merely a cog in a far larger ma­chine that had been put in mo­tion as early as 1938, the year in which Franco’s self-pro­claimed Cru­sade was on the brink of total vic­tory. Only re­cently has the truth fi­nally emerged, as Magda Casamit­jana, an MP in the Cata­lan par­lia­ment, ex­plained re­cently to the on­line mag­a­zine Es­guard. Be­tween 1938 and 1996, she says, no less than 300,000 ba­bies van­ished from hos­pi­tals all over Spain. The moth­ers were in­vari­ably ei­ther sin­gle or under-age or pros­ti­tutes or an­ar­chists or left­ists or sep­a­ratists or dead (ex­e­cuted in the post-war reprisals). Their ba­bies, as men­tioned, were given up for adop­tion to pro-regime fam­i­lies (prob­a­bly for a fee). Some of these fam­i­lies brought them up as their own chil­dren, but oth­ers used them as vir­tual slaves (on oc­ca­sion, of the sex­ual kind). There are re­ports that some of them were ac­quired solely to pro­vide or­gans for the bi­o­log­i­cal chil­dren of the adopters. Under the dic­ta­tor­ship, the moth­ers of these traf­ficked in­fants were told by the hos­pi­tal that their off­spring had died from this or that (re­quests for fur­ther in­for­ma­tion or even proof were turned down flat). After Franco’s death and the cack-handed ’Tran­si­tion’ that fol­lowed, the med­ical ’ex­pla­na­tions’ be­came more so­phis­ti­cated and moth­ers, if they wished, were al­lowed to see the ’ca­daver’ (any dead baby that hap­pened to be in the hos­pi­tal morgue: it seems that the same corpse was often dis­played to dif­fer­ent par­ents). The Cata­lan gov­ern­ment, with Ms Casamit­jana in the lead, is now de­ter­mined to get to the bot­tom of all this, and is work­ing with an as­so­ci­a­tion of moth­ers whose ba­bies were dis­ap­peared, as well as an Ob­ser­va­tory for Forced Dis­ap­pear­ances of Mi­nors based in a major uni­ver­sity in Tar­rag­ona. DNA test­ing has al­ready brought to­gether a hand­ful of stolen chil­dren and their bi­o­log­i­cal par­ents; Casamit­jana and her team is draw­ing up a law that will en­sure full sup­port be pro­vided to vic­tims, and that, even­tu­ally, those re­spon­si­ble be brought to jus­tice. No small feat, given that many of the key hos­pi­tal records were de­stroyed or fal­si­fied. Serendip­i­tously, the EU has also ap­pointed a com­mis­sion to in­ves­ti­gate this mat­ter; it vis­ited Madrid at the end of last month, and was es­pe­cially in­ter­ested in talk­ing to cer­tain mem­bers of the Span­ish Epis­co­pal Con­fer­ence (the board of di­rec­tors, as it were, of the Span­ish Catholic Church). Only if one was hope­lessly in­gen­u­ous, would one won­der why.