They Still Draw Pictures

Book excerpt: A heart-wrenching, yet enlightening collection of children's drawings forged in the fires of war. Of the 600,000 refugees who sought shelter from Franco's tyranny in the relative security of Republican-controlled eastern Spain, more than 200,000 were children. The Republic responded to this crisis by establishing colonias infantiles (children's colonies), often in country estates and mansions that had been abandoned by fascist sympathizers. In these colonies, the young refugees -- many of them orphaned or sent by their parents to safety -- received schooling and medical care, kept each other company, and produced thousands of drawings that serve as a moving, collective testimony of the experience of being a child in wartime. Companion to a major traveling exhibition, They Still Draw Pictures collects and comments on a cross-section of the children's art produced in the colonias infantiles. Born of the trauma of exile and separation, the drawings are invaluable historical documents, giving physical form to the children's experiences of air raids, brutality, destruction, and homelessness. These pictures also represent daily life in the colonies and preserve the children's clear memories of life before the war and hope for life after it. They are supplemented by a smaller selection of drawings from later wars. "Once I drew like Rafael, " Picasso said, "but it has taken me a lifetime to draw like a child." Deceptively transparent, these drawings speak with a poignant immediacy of war's consequences for its youngest victims.