 | This article needs additional citations for verification .(June 2011) |
As the Spanish Civil War proceeded on the Northern front (from 1937 onwards), the Spanish Republican authorities arranged the evacuation of children, with more regard for ideology than the welfare of the children[ citation needed ] some of whom had insufficient documentation to enable their repatriation.
These Spanish War children were shipped to Britain, Belgium, the Soviet Union, other European countries and Mexico. These children were referred to as "Basque refugees", but included also non-Basques. They were embarked in Bilbao (Santurtzi) on boats chartered by the Basque government, loyal to the Republic. Those in Western European countries were able to return to their families after the war,[ specify ] but those in the Soviet Union, from Communist families, were forbidden to return – by Stalin and by Franco. The first opportunity for most of them to do so came in 1956, three years after Stalin's death. They lived in Soviet orphanages and were regularly transferred from one orphanage to another according to the progress of the Second World War.[ citation needed ] Thus they experienced the War and its effects on the Soviet Union at first hand. [1]
Just under 4,000 children arrived at the Southampton Docks on 23 May 1937. They travelled to Britain on the steamship liner Habana, escorted by the battleship HMS Royal Oak and destroyer HMS Forester. Habana had been equipped to accommodate 800 passengers, but this voyage consisted of 3,886 children, 96 teachers, 118 assistants and 16 Catholic priests. [2] All the children and accompanying adults were housed in a single, large refugee camp in North Stoneham, Eastleigh, near Southampton.The construction of the camp at North Stoneham had been finished only two days prior to their arrival. A local farmer, Mr Brown, had provided three of his fields to be used for the Basque children's camp. Work on the camp had begun two weeks before, but the estimated numbers had then been only 2,000; the number was then increased to an expected 4,000. The camp and the sleeping tents were overcrowded. Sanitation was also a problem in the beginning as the children had been living through war and their hygienic habits had been disrupted by their turbulent lives. Even with the cramped conditions illness was not a large problem within the camp. [3]
The children were under the overall care of the Basque Children's Committee (BCC), part of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief (NJCSR) a cross-party organization that co-ordinated aid to Spain. The plan was to move the refugees out of the camp and disperse them into 'colonies' throughout Britain. These 'colonies' consisted of groups of children each with an accompanying Spanish teacher and assistants. They were housed in both large and small houses that were lent, or otherwise made available; some colonies were large - a hundred or more children, and some housed only a dozen or so. By September all of the children were moved into these colonies. Several hundred were taken in by The Salvation Army; the Catholic Church took about a third of the children, the rest were cared for and supported by many organizations including churches, political and humanitarian groups, local associations, businesses and individuals and other volunteers.
As the war in Spain progressed and areas became safer, the children started to be repatriated; the first few after barely a month. The Spanish Civil War ended on 1 April 1939, to be followed rapidly by the beginning of the Second World War in September. By this time only some 400 children remained in Britain, and by 1948 only 280 remained. [4] Throughout their stay and the subsequent repatriations, those aged 16 and above were allowed to decide whether or not they wanted to leave the country. Some had to stay because their parents had been killed or imprisoned, others stayed by choice and made their lives in Britain. [5]
Some of the refugees became professional footballers, including Sabino Barinaga, Emilio Aldecoa, José Gallego and Raimundo Lezama. [6] [7] [8] [9]
Luis de Castresana was evacuated to France and Belgium. In 1966, he published the novel El otro árbol de Guernica ("The other Gernika tree") inspired by his refugee experiences. Pedro Lazaga directed its film version in 1969.
A refugee, generally speaking, is a displaced person who has crossed national boundaries and who cannot or is unwilling to return home due to well-founded fear of persecution. Such a person may be called an asylum seeker until granted refugee status by the contracting state or the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) if they formally make a claim for asylum. The lead international agency coordinating refugee protection is the United Nations Office of the UNHCR. The United Nations has a second office for refugees, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), which is solely responsible for supporting the large majority of Palestinian refugees.
Basque nationalism is a form of nationalism that asserts that Basques, an ethnic group indigenous to the western Pyrenees, are a nation and promotes the political unity of the Basques, today scattered between Spain and France. Since its inception in the late 19th century, Basque nationalism has included separatist movements.
Operation Keelhaul was a forced repatriation of Russian civilians and Soviet citizens to the Soviet Union. While forced repatriation focused on Soviet Armed Forces POWs of Germany and Russian Liberation Army members, it included all Russians under Allied control. Refoulement, the forced repatriation of people in danger of persecution, is a human rights violation and breach of international law. Thus, Operation Keelhaul has been called a war crime, especially in regards to the many civilians forced into Soviet work camps, many of whom had never been Soviet citizens, having fled Russia before the end of the Russian Civil War.
Sabino Policarpo Arana Goiri, Sabin Polikarpo Arana Goiri, or Arana ta Goiri'taŕ Sabin (self-styled), was a Basque writer and founder of the Basque Nationalist Party (PNV). Arana is considered the father of Basque nationalism.
Displaced persons camps in post–World War II Europe were established in Germany, Austria, and Italy, primarily for refugees from Eastern Europe and for the former inmates of the Nazi German concentration camps. A "displaced persons camp" is a temporary facility for displaced persons, whether refugees or internally displaced persons. Two years after the end of World War II in Europe, some 850,000 people lived in displaced persons camps across Europe, among them Armenians, Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians, Estonians, Yugoslavs, Jews, Greeks, Russians, Ukrainians, Hungarians and Czechoslovaks.
Bergen-Belsen displaced persons camp was a displaced persons (DP) camp for refugees after World War II, in Lower Saxony in northwestern Germany, southwest of the town of Bergen near Celle. It was in operation from the summer of 1945 until September 1950. For a time, Belsen DP camp was the largest Jewish DP camp in Germany and the only one in the British occupation zone with an exclusively Jewish population. The camp was under British authority and overseen by the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA) with camp directors that included Simon Bloomberg. Today, the camp is a Bundeswehr barracks, having been a British Army base until 2015.
Sh'erit ha-Pletah is a Hebrew term for Jewish Holocaust survivors living in Displaced Persons (DP) camps, and the organisations they created to act on their behalf with the Allied authorities. These were active between 27 May 1945 and 1950–51, when the last DP camps closed.
The Repatriation of Cossacks occurred when Cossacks, ethnic Russians and Ukrainians who were against the Soviet Union, were handed over by British and American forces to the Soviet Union after the Second World War. The repatriations were agreed to in the Yalta Conference; Joseph Stalin claimed the repatriated people were Soviet citizens as of 1939, although many of them had left Russia before or soon after the end of the Russian Civil War or had been born abroad.
In the decades since the Holocaust, some national governments, international bodies and world leaders have been criticized for their failure to take appropriate action to save the millions of European Jews, Roma, and other victims of the Holocaust. Critics say that such intervention, particularly by the Allied governments, might have saved substantial numbers of people and could have been accomplished without the diversion of significant resources from the war effort.
Raimundo Pérez Lezama was a Spanish footballer who played as a goalkeeper.
Emilio Aldecoa Gómez was a Spanish professional footballer who played in the English and Spanish football leagues and later managed in Spain and England. He made one appearance for the Spain national team, as a substitute in a 2–1 win against Ireland in May 1948 at the Montjuic Stadium, Barcelona.
Bagnoli is a western seaside quarter of Naples, Italy, well beyond the confines of the original city. It is beyond Cape Posillipo and, thus, looking on the coast of the Bay of Pozzuoli.
Victims of Yalta or The Secret Betrayal is a 1977 book by Nikolai Tolstoy that chronicles the fate of Soviet citizens who had been under German control during World War II and at its end fallen into the hands of the Western Allies. According to the secret Moscow agreement from 1944 that was confirmed at the 1945 Yalta conference, all citizens of the Soviet Union were to be repatriated without choice—a death sentence for many by execution or extermination through labour.
Sabino Barinaga Alberdi was a Spanish football forward and manager.
Hampshire has always been a popular destination for immigrants, with the ports at Portsmouth and Southampton receiving immigrants from all over Europe and being the starting point for voyages to the New World. Southampton Docks rapidly expanded since their creation in 1850, and saw increasing traffic with South Africa, Australia and the Americas.
José Augustin "Joe" Gallego, was a Spanish footballer who played as an outside forward for various clubs in the English Football League in the 1940s and 1950s.
Following the Soviet invasion of Poland at the onset of World War II, in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Pact against Poland, the Soviet Union acquired more than half of the territory of the Second Polish Republic or about 201,000 square kilometres (78,000 sq mi) inhabited by more than 13,200,000 people. Within months, in order to de-Polonize annexed lands, the Soviet NKVD rounded up and deported between 320,000 and 1 million Polish nationals to the eastern parts of the USSR, the Urals, and Siberia. There were four waves of deportations of entire families with children, women, and elderly people aboard freight trains from 1940 until 1941. The second wave of deportations by the Soviet occupational forces across the Kresy macroregion, affected 300,000 to 330,000 Poles, sent primarily to Kazakhstan. Thanks to a remarkable reversal of fortune well over 110,000 Poles, including 36,000 women and children, managed to leave the Soviet Union with Anders' Army. They ended up in Iran, India, Palestine, New Zealand, and British Africa, as well as in Mexico. Among those who remained in the Soviet Union, about 150,000 Poles perished before the end of the war.
At certain periods the Soviet state had to deal with large numbers of orphans in the Soviet Union—due to a number of turmoils in the history of the country from its very beginnings. Major contributors to the population of orphans and otherwise homeless children included World War I (1914–1918), the October Revolution of November 1917 followed by the Russian Civil War (1917–1922), famines of 1921–1922 and of 1932–1933, political repression, forced migrations, and the Soviet-German War theatre (1941–1945) of World War II.
Camp Polonia was a district of Ahvaz, Iran, which housed Polish refugees during World War II. The refugees were Polish citizens who with the outbreak of World War II, had been deported into the Soviet Union, but were then released when Stalin declared amnesty for the Poles, and were then allowed to leave the USSR in 1942 to go to the refugee camps in Iran and later British held India. Over 115,000 arrived in Iran, roughly 75,000 were soldiers, cadets, and officers of what was known as Anders’ Army, a Polish army in exile that had assembled in the Soviet Union under the command of General Wladyslaw Anders. The rest were mothers and babies, elderly men and women, and children. At least three thousand of these refugees being Jewish, including four rabbis and nearly 1,000 unaccompanied children who were taken from Polish orphanages in the Soviet Union.
Araceli Sánchez Urquijo (1920–2010) was a Niños de Rusia child evacuee during the Spanish Civil War and the first woman to work as a civil engineer in Spain.