LAS MAMÁS BELGAS
Las Mamás Belgas — The unknown battle of young nurses from Belgium and the Netherlands against Franco and Hitler
In 2017, the Belgian journalist and writer Sven Tuytens (2) published a book and a documentary about the work and risks taken by 21 Belgian and Dutch nurses in the Spanish Civil War and later in their homeland against the Nazis: “Las Mamás Belgas”. The book is in Flemish and translated into Spanish. The book highlights a little known chapter of humanity and bravery in the horrific wars of the 1930s and 1940s in Europe.
In 1937, a group of young Jewish volunteer nurses left Belgium for civil war-torn Spain. They wanted to support the Second Spanish Republic against the advancing fascist forces under general Franco. Together with Dutch nurses, they had to deal not only with the horrors of war in the military hospital ‘El Belga’, but also with the Belgian hospital management and the local politicians who felt that nurses should not interfere in politics.
The fall of the Spanish Republic did not signify the end of their resistance to fascism. After their return to Belgium and the Netherlands, they fought during the Second World War in the confrontation with the excesses of fascism. The book “Las Mamás Belgas” is the result of interviews with surviving eyewitnesses and original archive material. The documentary trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEyBPeGeFeo
“El Belga” — the autonomous socialist hospital in the old Franciscan monastery La Conceptión in Ontinyent
Ontinyent is situated in the mountains of central-western part of Spain, between Valencia and Alicante. The old Franciscan monastery, La Conceptión, was chosen to host a military hospital, equipped by the International Solidarity Fund, founded in April 1926 as the Matteotti Fund by the Labour and Socialist International, in memory of Giacomo Matteotti, the Italian socialist politician who was murdered by fascists in 1924. It was established to function as an “international fund to help the labour movement in countries without democracy”. It was renamed the International Solidarity Fund when its administration was taken over by the International Federation of Trade Unions in 1930. In July 1936 the Labour and Socialist International and International Federation of Trade Unions agreed that the International Solidarity Fund would provide aid for the Spanish Republic. This was first and foremost as a reaction to the non-intervention agreement of the UK and France, which also was accepted by more than twenty countries, among them fascist Italy, Nazi Germany, and communist USSR, none of which ever respected the non-intervention agreement.
International brigades sprang up all over the world to support the Republican government. There are millions of eyewitness reports, books and photos published in all the many languages represented, while the best known testimonies probably are the emblematic photos of Robert Capa, “Homage to Catalonia” by George Orwell, the poems of Federico Garcia Lorca, murdered by the fascist in 1936 and Pablo Neruda’s “Spain in my Heart”, “A Man’s Hope” by André Malraux, Emma Goldman’s articles in the anarchist ‘Information Bulletin’, and Pablo Picasso’s Guernica.
The military hospital in Ontinyent was one of the contributions of the Belgian Socialists to the International Solidarity Fund. Other contributions were collection of clothes, of medical help, both instrument, medicine, bandages, etc., and, some claim, probably correctly, weapons. Young Jewish socialist nurses signed up in Belgium together with colleagues and with Dutch socialist nurses to go to Spain to support the 2nd Republic fighters and the international brigades.
The autonomous character of “El Belga” was threatened by the rise of the demand from the USSR Communists to turn the Popular Front, which had been the basis of the parliamentary win in 1936 in Spain, into a United Front under their leadership and following their policies and strategies. The Popular Front brought together all mainly left-wing soldiers and brigades to fight for the Republic, but came under increasing pressure from the communists, especially when the USSR held back on weapon supplies.
“El Belga” was run by the Belgian socialists and the many internal fights among the Belgian left-wing parties almost threatened to undermine the project, i.e. whether the hospital should be under the Popular Front or the United Front. This threatened the future of the hospital, but, finally, in 1937 a decision was made to insist that the hospital was an autonomous institution mainly serving the Popular Front and with the only aim to provide help and support on the basis of solidarity. Over two thousand (2400) volunteers joined the international brigades from Belgium, 800 of whom were Spanish migrants, and the hospital was equipped with over seven hundred beds and hospital equipment. In April 1937 the hospital was handed over to Federica Montseny Mañé, anarchist and minister of public health and education of the Republican government.
Several other nationalities contributed to the hospital — Belgian and Italian doctors, Cuban, Swedish, Polish, and Spanish nurses — and several of the Belgian ‘mamas’ were themselves refugees from eastern and central Europe. The Socialist Workers International and the International Solidarity Fund continued their support. The hospital also functioned as a training station for nurses.
“El Belga” was fully operational throughout 1937 and 1938, with more and more wounded coming in as the battle front moved closer and closer. The nurses worked round the clock, slept on the floor or on whichever bed that was not occupied. The help from the community ensured a constant stream of freshly washed bandages, coats, shirts, sheets, and the operation theatres worked round the clock — they had been fully equipped and operational since the end of 1937, regardless of the many hindrances from the political quarrels. The hospital remained one of the rare examples of a purely socialist solidarity institution in the midst of a real and a political war.
The hospital was fully operational throughout until the occupation by the fascists in March 1939, following which it was renamed ”hospital for prisoners”. It was given back to the Franciscans in October 1939 who were happily surprised when they found out that the Belgians had renovated the place and installed heating. Maybe that is why they never took down the IOS initials inset in the cast iron gate — ‘Internacional Obrera Socialista’ — Socialist Workers International — the gate is still there.
Most of the nurses returned to Belgium and the Netherlands in 1939 and enlisted at hospitals in their homeland, continuing the fight against the fascists when both countries were occupied by the Nazis in early 1940. It should be remembered that several among them were Jewish, thus again risking their lives to help others.
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References
(1) Documentary trailer (in Spanish): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEyBPeGeFeo
(2) Sven Tuytens, born in Brussels in 1967, studied journalism in Antwerp. After a carrier at international public relations and communication companies in Brussels he started his television career in 1996, making long tv reports at the regional television station Tv-Brussel in Brussels, where later on, he became head of the cultural agenda. At the same television station he directed several documentary series, related to different aspects of the history of the Brussels region.
In 1998 he moved to Rabat in Morocco to work as a correspondent for VRT, one of the two Belgian public broadcasting companies, making news reports for television and started working for VRT radio.
In 2000 he moved back to Brussels and returned to Tv-Brussel making his first long documentary “Congo na Bisso” (2010) on Belgian colonialism in Congo, produced by Tv-Brussel.
Since 2010 Sven Tuytens works as a correspondent in Madrid for VRT radio & television and the Dutch public network NTR.
Together with Spanish researcher Ernesto Viñas he is the driving force behind “Brunete en la Memoria”, a Madrid-based historical association that aims to keep alive the memory of those who fought at the Battle of Brunete. As a researcher he is helping families from former fighters to find the burial sites of missing soldiers, organising workshops on the Spanish Civil War in colleges, participating in conferences and organising historical walks to the former battlefield,
He is the author of guides and books on the international brigades during the Spanish Civil War. In 2016 he wrote the script and directed “The Belgian Mums”, a short documentary produced by Primera Plana Producciones in Castellón (Spain).
(3) Article “El Belga” in Brood&Rozen 2016/2, Belgian periodical published quarterly by AMSAB, “Instituut voor Sociale Geschiedenis“ — Institute of social history, archive, and research institution for social and humanitarian movements; https://www.amsab.be/ (in Flemish).
My personal recommendations for further reading:
- George Orwell: “Homage to Catalonia” (April 1938; first published in the USA in 1958) — Describes Orwell’s experiences during his years with the International Brigades and the deceit by the communist forces and their murder of anarchists and socialists.
- Leonardo Padura: “The Man Who Loved Dogs” (2009; Tusquets Editors, Spain) — Set in Cuba, Catalonia, Moscow, Mexico — three intertwined stories from the expulsion of Trotsky to his exile in Mexico, where he is murdered by the communist brought in from the Spanish Civil War to be trained as an assassin, and a man in Cuba who meets the man who loves dogs on the beach in the midst of crisis and poverty.
Sven Tuytens: “Las Mamás Belgas”, published by Lannoo (BE) in October 2017, in Dutch and Spanish:
