In Predicadores hell. Cautive children

• Main Author: Rosa María ARAGÜÉS ESTRAGUÉS
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca 2012-02-01
• Series: Studia Historica: Historia Contemporánea
• Subjects: Guerra Civil; cárceles de mujeres; niños del franquismo; Prisión Habilitada de Predicadores; cárcel de Torrero
• Online Access: http://revistas.usal.es/index.php/0213-2087/article/view/8608

In the city of Zaragoza, on April 6th of 1939, 512 women and 53 children were moved from Torrero’s prison to the Qualified jail of Predicadores. The accumulation, the bad conditions of the building, the punishments, the vexations, the bad supply and the violence did of Predicator’s one of the hardest prison of the postwar period: a real hell. Their only crime in most cases was be mothers, wifes or daughters of republican men. They were denied the right of being political prisoners as they were just considered common prisoners. Since 1939 up to its definitive closing in 1955, a great number of women went through its dependences, some of them with their children, «protected» by the Royal decree of November 14, 1930, where it was established that the small children could join prison with their mothers until they were fulfilling the age of four years. The above mentioned decree would suffer a modification on march 30, 1940, by means of an order of the Department of Justice by which the age of the child was reduced at the age of three. Many of them would not manage to survive, luckier others were put at liberty together with their mothers or delivered to some relative. But there were others who accompanied their mothers in a long periplus, going of jail in jail, until they were three that they were separated from them, join institutions of welfare under the guardianship of the State, or given in adoption without previous assent of their progenitors or legal representatives. All of them, held captive by the victors and labelled red children must go through a long rehabilitation process that became loyal and obedient subjects of the New State.