Book Notes: The Lost Children of Francoism

Authors: Ricard Vinyes, Montse Armengou y Ricard Belis

Title: Los niños perdidos del franquismo

Language: Spanish

Year: 2002

My rating: 8 out of 10

In January of 2002, a documentary was aired in Catalonia that was titled The Lost Children of Francoism. Even though the film was shown at 1 am, over 900,000 people watched it. For the viewers, the documentary was extremely shocking. Everybody knows that the Argentinean Junta used to kidnap the children of dissidents and hand them over to their parents’ killers. Nobody knew, however, that this had also happened in Spain during the first years of Franco’s dictatorship.

During the Civil War, the famous Spanish psychiatrist Antonio Vallejo Nágera came up with the theory according to which Marxism was a degenerative psychological ailment. According to Vallejo Nágera, everybody who resisted the advance of Franco’s troops was sick and had to be isolated from society. Franco loved the psychiatrist’s ideas and allowed him to conduct experiments on the POWs, including the Americans who were volunteers of the International Brigades. 

The book titled The Lost Children of Francoism includes and expands the material presented in the documentary and offers the texts of Vallejo Nágera’s studies. The psychiatrist not only strove to prove that Americans were, by their nature, inferior to Spaniards but also advanced the idea that the children of the Spanish Republicans had to be isolated from their parents to prevent them from becoming infected by the disease of Marxism.

I read this book for my Oxford talk, and it’s very heavy reading. The book is a little all over the place in terms of structure and feels hurried at times. But this is a crucial bit of knowledge about Franco’s dictatorship.