3.
Just outside the town of Ortoz (Landos) there is a camp of
87 people, of whom 33 are children. It presents a more cheerful picture,
since it is situated in a small country house and surrounded by open
land. The director of the camp, who was formerly an employee of one of
the ministries in Barcelona, and his wife, have organised things well, and
the rooms are clean and well-kept. The mayor of Ortoz got a squad of men
to clean up the house before the refugees arrived, and procured a few beds,
although most of the refugees sleep on the floor. A Spanish teacher holds
classes morning and afternoon, and some school supplies have been donated
by the local teachers’ union. Additional beds, blankets and shoes for
both women and children would make this campus quite habitable place.
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Just outside the village of Morlaas (Bassos Pyrenees) is a camp
of sixty children, all of them orphans or separated from their families,
who formerly lived in a children’s colony near Gorona in Spain. Five
women, two of them teachers, look after the children. They are housed in a
country house with extensive grounds around it. The women have made a
heroic attempt to make the place clean and habitable, and although there
are no beds or mattresses, blankets are tucked neatly around the straw in
the daytime, to keep it in place. The rooms are decorated with the children’s
drawings, most of which show different phases of their journey out of Spain:
a bombardment in Tarragona, where they all rushed for the underground shelter,
the journey through the mountains, huddled around a fire waiting to cross the
frontier, and finally, a rather idealized version of their present home.
There is one stuffed animal, brought somehow out of Spain in spite of bombard-
ments and chaos. The children have made some toys out of bits of wood and
pine-cones, and a branch and some string has become a bow and arrow.
Five of the children are in the hospital at Morlaas with bad cases
of scabies. Many of the others have scabies to a lesser extent. All need
clothing and shoes. The plight of the women is worse. They have taken all
the bits of material they could lay hands on to make little shirts or dresses
for the youngsters, on the sewing machine donated by a woman from Morlaas.
Consequently they are practically in rags. One of the teachers had a single
garment, a gray flannel affair which was once a dressing gown but now served
as a dress. She didn't mention the needs of the grown-ups, though. The
children came first.
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At Pontenx des Forges, a little town in the turpentine forests
of Landos, an old saw-mill houses almost seven hundred refugees, of whom
half are children. The huge building has no windows, but is lighted by
skylights and is divided into large dormitories by six~foot-high partitions.
A narrow-gauge railway truck runs through the building still.
Each dormitory holds more than a hundred women and children.
They are badly crowded; and in wet weather the place is jammed with children
playing underfoot, old or sick women lying on the plank beds, young boys
playing tag, women sitting about with nothing to do....
Three pumps and a nearby stream serve the whole camp. There are
no showers. A barracks of rough boards has been built for an infirmary,
and two Spanish nurses have made the place as neat as possible by lining
the walls with brown paper. They have one white overall apiece, are bare-
legged and wearing ragged sandals. The young French doctor who visits the
camp every day praised them highly for their work and as I left, asked me
especially to try to get some uniforms for them.
There has been a serious outbreak of intestinal fever in the
camp, and the doctor admitted that recovery was hopelessly slow because of
the inadequate diet. One small boy of ten is suffering so badly from mal-
nutrition that he has been in bed for a month, too weak to walk around.