Ana Belén del Pozo

In mid-November 1936, a group of children left Madrid and their families and headed to Valencia. They were only a few of the thousands of children evacuated by the Republican government to protect them from the Francoist bombings of the city. Among them, not really knowing how their journey would end, were three siblings: 12-year-old Maruja del Pozo, 10-year-old Antonia, 8-year-old Ángel. At 14, their oldest sister Pilar was considered too old to  evacuate. I am Ana Belén del Pozo. Ángel is my father and he can still recount those events and show the photograph of the three that was taken a few days before they left. 

My father and his siblings boarded the train not knowing if they would see their parents again. After a journey of many hours, and very many stops, they arrived at Utiel, a town about 80 kilometres from Valencia. It seems that the reception of the children was chaotic, and despite having told them that they would all be sent to a hostal, they were divided among families who were willing to take them in and who went to the town hall to collect them. Now that there is research demonstrating the overcrowding and unhealthy conditions of the buildings that had been turned into “colonies”, one can say that they were “lucky” that the original plan wasn’t realized. 

In Utiel, the three siblings stayed in the house o Pedro Zafrilla. It was a provisional placement, since my grandfather, Felipe del Pozo, a wholesaler in the main Madrid market, had contacts in the agricultural villages of Valencia who he could ask to take care of his children. 

In this way, they ended up in the house of Luis Polit, a fruit and vegetable merchant in Beniparrell. Maruja quickly returned to Madrid, which shows how improvised and little thought out her departure had been. Antonia remained with the Polits until the end of the war. Her children have her letters from this period, letters that were never sent and must have been a kind of diary that my aunt wrote to deal with the lack of communication with her family. 

My father wound up in the home of Vicente Pascual and Elvira Tarazona, a childless couple from Paiporta who treated him with great kindness until the end of the war and with whom he maintained good relations. Far from the misery of Madrid, his only bad memory of this period was not being able to see his parents. He recounts that at one point he nearly died of tetanus and, to keep him entertained during the weeks he spent in bed, they gave him a copy of the Thousand and One Nights, a book of 700 pages of very fine print, without illustrations, something that would be unthinkable as a gift for a 10-yearold today. 

In those four years, he did not attend school, although occasionally a teacher gave him a lesson in the house. When the war ended, he returned to Madrid and enrolled in the Cardinal Cisneros High School, even though he had never been to elementary school. Education then was nothing like the liberal education of the Republic. After three years, he left school and joined the family fruit selling business.