Half a million Spanish refugees: it’s such a staggering number that
it’s difficult to get any mental picture of the situation, except in terms of a
huge mass of people.
And in order to get Canadians interested enough to help in our re-
lief work, it’s not very effective to simply speak of half a million half-starved
raggedly clothed people. We have to give some good hard-hitting facts that are easier to imagine, in terms of human beings.
That’s why I'm writing this, since during the five weeks I was in
France I visited both civilian and military refugee camps, saw and heard some of
the heartbreaking things that are happening to the people in them and realised
every minute of the time that, although money won't give them back their country,
it will at least keep them alive, and that Canada simply can’t let up on sending
money at this time.
The general set-up as far as the Spanish refugees is this: the
French government, through the Minister of the Interior, has distributed the
women and children throughout every Department in France, asking the Prefecture
of Police of each Department to distribute them in groups in the various mun-
icipalities, according to their ability to support them. Practically every
municipality has a group of women and children (together with a small number
of old men) housed in all sorts of buildings, from extremely ancient factories,
roughly built barracks, prisons, to fairly habitable houses.
The municipalities supply food to the groups to the value of seven
francs a day (about 20 cents) for adults and four francs a day (about eleven
cents) for children. That's all. In practically every case the buildings were
completely and blankly empty when the refugees moved in, the only exception
being in some sort of cooking equipment and some long trestle tables and benches.
Considering that not one woman in a hundred brought anything across
the border with her except the clothes she and her children stood up in, and
perhaps a blanket or two, the camps are not homelike. In some cases there’s
just loose straw on the floors and everybody sleeps in a row, as close as
possible for warmth. In some cases bolts of sacking have been distributed and
the women have made mattresses to stuff the straw into, which is tidier but
not much softer. In some cases our International Committee has already supplied
metal cots and bedding. They can go on doing that just as fast as finances
permit.
Life in the camps is not pleasant. There's a limit to the amount
of time the women can spend on “housework” when the house is just a big old
factory with some straw on the floor. The potato-peeling squads sit around on
boxes and sing, because they have something to do. If there’s anything to knit
or sew with, the women knit or sew, but there isn't very much yet. Because it’s
not warm weather yet, they just have to let the children run around dirty; they
can’t let them go naked while they wash their only clothes.