Franco stole children of murdered enemies for supporters

The children of slaughtered opponents were secretly taken, renamed and given to families sympathetic to General Francisco Franco in the years after he seized power in Spain, a new book reveals.

Thousands of children whose parents were "reds" were forcibly torn from their families. Trainloads of bewildered, uprooted orphans crisscrossed Spain, taking them far from their homes. The shameful secret became known only after the Catalan government decided to compensate Franco's prisoners in belated recognition of their suffering. For the first time, elderly victims of a lifetime of lies describe in the book their struggle to recover their true identities.

Among them was Vicenta from Valencia, who entered a Madrid orphanage in 1940 aged five. "My father is a captain and his name is Melecio Alvarez Garrido," the child insisted, but the nuns refused to acknowledge her identity.

They renamed her Vicenta Flores Ruiz and offered her for adoption. The justification was that "segregation from infancy could liberate society from the terrible plague of Marxism" – as described in the neo-Nazi theory perpetrated by the army's psychiatry service.

"Four times I was offered for adoption. The director would call me. 'Vicentina, your parents have come. They were lost in the war but now they're here.' And I ran through the corridors convinced I'd meet Melecio, but they were strangers," Vicenta recalls.

At 14, she travelled to her old home in Valencia where her father, chief commissar of the 82nd Brigade of the Republican army, had been shot in October 1940. With difficulty she found her old house, and a neighbour, Carmen, who said: "Of course I remember you, you went to dancing classes with my girls."

The police caught her and sent her back to her adoptive home, but at 18 she returned to Valencia to work as a maid and continue searching. Then she married, moved to France and had children. Finally, at a meeting of former prisoners of Franco in Perpignan in France in 1999, Vicenta met Isidro Guardia, who had served in the 82nd Brigade and had known her father.

In 2000, Isidro showed her Melecio's grave in Valencia, and told her how he died. "He was responsible for evacuating refugees. He could have saved himself but he stayed and paid dearly. I remember you with him. You had a little fringe."

The testimonies were collected by Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis for their book, Francoism's Lost Children, to be published in October.

Florencia Calvo, 72, was moved to France with her sister Maria, 70, during the civil war. They were repatriated by Francoists in 1941, separated and given for adoption.

"When I arrived in Spain I asked a nun about my sister. She said, 'They must have thrown her from the train,'" Florencia says.

The sisters reunited 60 years later when Maria saw Florencia on a television programme about missing persons, showing a photo Maria recognised as her younger self.

Emilia Giron, sister of a guerrilla fighter, told how she lost her son. "They said they were taking my son to baptise him, and I never saw him again. It's tormented me all my life, because I know I gave birth. I wonder how many others were taken."