Spain looks back at dark chapter of adoptions

updated 5:30 p.m. ET March 1, 2009

SARRIA DE TER, Spain - As Antonia Radas left school one day in 1945, a cheerful third-grader growing up as a beloved only child, a stranger greeted her with shocking news. The little girl was not who she thought she was.

"I am your brother, and I have come to take you back to mother," Radas, now 70, recalls the man saying. He looked to be 19 or 20, and wore khaki military garb with a white cape; she was in the crisp gray uniform of her parochial school in Spain's Canary Islands.

Radas did not believe him, insisting she had no siblings, and stayed put. But that man was in fact her elder brother Jose.

It would take decades for Radas to learn the truth about her past: that she was one of perhaps thousands of child victims separated from their parents toward the end of the 1936-1939 Spanish Civil War and its immediate aftermath.

Spain under pressure
The ordeal of Radas and others is now putting Spain under pressure to take a closer look at a dark chapter of its past. Historians say government archives show that the right-wing regime of Gen. Francisco Franco waged a campaign to take away children of their enemies, Republican prisoners, and sometimes stripped women of newborn babies. The goal was to educate the children to shy from leftist thought, embrace Roman Catholicism and support the regime.

As part of an unprecedented ruling last year that accused Franco's forces of crimes against humanity, Spain's best-known judge, Baltasar Garzon, called for an investigation into the cases of people known as "the lost children of the Franco regime." He complained that "in 60 years they have not been the subject of any investigation whatsoever."

The judge ultimately bowed out of the case in a dispute over jurisdiction. But now he is pressing provincial courts to move ahead with a probe. So far the provincial courts have not responded, but under Spanish law they are obliged to do so, said Fernando Magan, chief counsel for the Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory.

"In the end, the Spanish justice system will have to give us an answer," Magan says.

Ricard Vinyes, a contemporary history professor at the University of Barcelona, says many children were either offered up in adoption to pro-Franco families or placed in children's homes run by the state or the church, or encouraged to become priests or nuns.

Parallels to Argentina's 'dirty war'
Parallels have been drawn between Spain's trauma and that of Argentina's "dirty war" in the late 1970s and early '80s, when hundreds of children were taken away from dissidents and raised by military families or others that supported the ruling military junta.

Firm numbers are hard to come by. Vinyes says in Spain's case no one knows how many adopted children were not told about their real families, but certainly there are Spaniards out there who even today do not know their true origins.

State records from 1943 show that more than 12,000 children were in state or church custody, according to Vinyes, and that about 80 percent of them had been in prison with their parents. Some were reunited with them. Many were not.

Vinyes says Spain's historical archives are in a deplorable state, and governments since Franco's death in 1975 have shown little interest in investigating the civil war era.

"By ethical imperative, it is up to the state to encourage a policy of historic memory," Vinyes says.

But Cesar Vidal, a conservative author and historian who has written extensively about the war and the Franco regime, denies any widespread push to take children away from imprisoned leftist parents.

"I think there were probably cases, but very isolated ones and under no circumstances was it systematic," Vidal says.

In Radas' case, her father was on the run as a suspected Republican sympathizer, and she shared a prison cell with her mother as a toddler. Her mother, Carmen, surrendered custody of her to a fellow prisoner about to be released because she feared Franco's forces would take Antonia away.

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