From Spain to the USSR with love – when children were evacuated from wars
The filmmaker’s mother is now 92, so telling the story of her evacuation to safety was urgent for her daughter. Those children who went to the USSR remained there for 20 years, for political reasons, returning as strangers to families that had lost contact with them. Post-memory trauma affects the next generation and is well-known in Spain.
30,000 Spanish children – the Niños da Guerra – were evacuated in 1937 from Spain to save them from the Spanish Civil War. They went to the many countries that were willing to take them: France and its North African colonies, the UK, Belgium, Switzerland, Denmark, Norway and Mexico. Britain even sent a gunboat in case Franco thought of stopping them,
Ana Perez-Quiroga made the film ¿De Que Casa Eres Tu? (Which house were you from?) because her mother, Angelita and her aunt, Conchita were two of the 2,895 children, mostly from Northern Spain – Pais Vasco, Asturias, Cantabria and a few from other parts – who went to the USSR. And because time passes.
The title of the film is a question that the children asked each other, referring to the boarding schools they were sent to, but for Ana it has the second meaning of referring to problems of personal identity for people who are treated as strangers in both of the countries they have lived in.
These children remained in the USSR until 1956, for political reasons, unlike the others who returned when the Civil War ended. Their isolation from Spain was so complete that Angelita was only told her date of birth in a letter from her aunts when she was 17, and this was only possible because the aunts were not living in Spain, with which country the USSR had no diplomatic relations.
I spoke to Ana for The Prisma after her film was shown at Indielisboa last month. The full interview was first published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper, where it can be read in full accompanied by film stills:
https://theprisma.co.uk/2025/06/09/when-children-were-evacuated-from-wars/