BOOKS, FAITH, WORLD & MORE

BREAD AND MILK
FOR CHILDREN IN SPAIN

Daniel Hertzler

Six Mennonites went into Spain during the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939. All came out alive, but one was wounded. Lester Hershey took a bullet in the elbow at a military checkpoint, and his right arm has never been the same.

The Spanish Civil War was a nasty little conflict in which 1 million people died. (All wars are nasty, but some are not as large as others.) The Spanish war was precipitated by differences over what sort of society Spain should become. Once a mighty empire with worldwide connections, Spain had declined century by century until the 1898 Spanish-American war took away its last major imperial real estate. The politics within Spain remained confused and contentious. Finally in 1931 a republic was declared and a socialistic government prevailed.

Three traditional groups objected to the new order: the army, the Catholic clergy, and the owners of large landholdings. In July 1936 the army revolted and began a war that lasted until March 1939. The government side became known as the Loyalists and the rebels as Nationalists. Both sides indulged in murders and assassinations. One report says that in the first month 100,000 people were liquidated.

The war drew international attention. Hitler and Mussolini supported the Nationalists, Stalin the Loyalists. Some internationals even came to Spain to fight for the Loyalists. The English Friends and American Friends sought to provide relief to war victims. Mennonites and members of the Church of the Brethren were invited to help.

Two Mennonites went to investigate. They were D. Parke Lantz, a missionary on furlough from Argentina and Levi C. Hartzler, who had recently served as “superintendent” of the Mennonite mission in Chicago.

In 1992 Hartzler wrote an account of this experience titled Spanish Child Feeding Mission, 1937 to ’39: A Service Pilgrimage. There is a copy in the Mennonite Archives in Goshen, Indiana, which I examined recently. I found it more on the level of “a day in the life” than a comprehensive report. But it illustrates some of the adventures and frustrations involved with such an effort.

For example, “For some reason our milk order had been held up. It was difficult to be the representative of a relief organization with no supplies to give while I was depending on local authorities for my food and shelter.” Or again, “This morning it was really cold outside with a raw wind blowing, but some of the children came for their breakfast barefooted.”

The journal refers occasionally to the effects of “Mussolini’s bombers” and in one wry remark Hartzler writes, “I would like to put Mussolini in this office for one week and let him face these poor people who are without homes, food, and even relatives because of this war.”

Hartzler and Lantz had gone to Spain at the request of Mennonite Relief Committee, an arm of Mennonite Board of Missions. Some on the committee were wary of beginning a social service program without any evangelistic emphasis. But at this confused time in a Catholic country, opportunities for evangelism were clearly limited. One committee member even said it “might be better for the refugee children to die in infancy rather than becoming unbelieving adults and dying in their sins.”

But more compassionate judgment prevailed, and the relief effort was approved. However in approving the program the Mission Board Executive Committee warned “that our relief workers . . . will be wholly non-partisan in their touch with the people among whom they labor and, while correlating their efforts with those of other relief agencies in Spain, they will hold themselves aloof from all entangling alliances, whether political or religious.”

Lantz soon returned to the U.S. and Hartzler was left as program director with Clarence Fretz and Lester Hershey on the way. They were detained in France waiting for two vans which were to be used in the relief program. Hartzler’s journal includes the plaintive entry, “What does one do in a foreign land when it seems all you can do is wait?”

Eventually Fretz and Hershey arrived and a program was developed. What could be done efficiently to aid starving children in an unstable environment? It was perceived that “milk stations provided an opportunity for us to accomplish significant relief work. They proved to be easy to establish wherever we could find local personnel to staff them and proper facilities to conduct them.”

Powdered milk became the food of choice and in some instances was distributed on a grand scale. The Mennonites offered to supply bread and milk for 4,000 schoolchildren in the town of Murcia. “At 7:30 a.m. on May 23rd [1938?] we mixed the first milk,” the report reads, “1000 liters of mixed milk. It took until 1:00 p.m. to feed them. The next day we got done by 11:00 a.m. It took one kilo of milk powder for 10 liters of milk which served 40 children. Thus one feeding used 100 kilos of milk powder and 20 kilos of sugar. Each child also received a bun—50 grams of bread.”

In July 1938, Orie Miller asked Hartzler to continue in Spain for another winter. The Friends agreed to allow the Mennonites to run their own program. Also two more Mennonites were sent in, but they had scarcely arrived when the war ended in March 1939. The two were Ernest Bennett and Wilbert Nafziger.

Hartzler’s references to Mussolini’s bombers include one ironic anecdote. He recalled that Canada send a shipload of dried codfish [bacalao] which the Italian bombers sank in the harbor at Valencia. “The Spanish liked bacalao so much that they raised the ship and dried out the bacalao.”

Because the Mennonites had worked on the side which lost the war, it took some delicate negotiations to wind up their efforts and leave the country. They had provided emergency food without bias to all who needed it. But they perceived that in rebuilding the business infrastructure, non-Catholics were discriminated against. So they gave the leftover funds they were not permitted to take out of the country to a Lutheran pastor who used them for loans to evangelicals.

Lester Hershey had his own rendezvous with the new system. He approached a military checkpoint driving one of their vans with its child-feeding mission clearly identified. He has reported that their experience with such checkpoints had been that the soldier would stand in the middle of the road. This one waved his gun from the side of the road, and Hershey assumed he was waving them on.

It was a case of miscommunication. As Hershey accelerated past with the van in second gear and his hand on the gearshift, the soldier shot into the back of the van. The bullet hit Lester’s elbow. The Goshen College Record (Feb. 1, 1940) carried an account of the accident and reported that “After first-aid had been administered on the spot, Hershey was taken to a hospital in Valencia where his wound was dressed. A blood transfusion was necessary because of the loss of blood sustained enroute to the hospital.”

Hartzler reports that the director of Auxilio Social Valencia “was very apologetic regarding the incident and did everything possible to provide Lester with the best medical care.” He also identified him as an employee of their organization, so his medical bills were covered by the new government. But to this day, although Lester’s right elbow is as strong as the left, he cannot stretch it straight or bend it more than at a right angle.

The war in Spain was a warmup to World War II. It was scarcely over when Germany invaded Poland in 1939. For Mennonites too it was a warmup, an occasion to organize on behalf of people in need.

I did not find any comprehensive financial statistics in Hartzler’s manuscript. But there is an account of a report from MRC to MBMC in July 1938 that the Spanish relief program for 1937-1938 included $18,151.46 plus 13,449 pounds of clothing including soap and shoes. These figures do not impress us after seventy-five years of inflation, but in mid-Great-Depression it was no doubt a serious effort.

In the Youth’s Christian Companion for November 21, 1937, Hartzler had written, from “somewhere in Spain,” the following admonition: “Remember the suffering women and children in Spain. They will not gather around great boards spread with all the fruits of the earth. . . . Besides, many do not know that God loves them.” Some Mennonites heard him.

For the five twenty-somethings sent to Spain in the late 1930s, it was also a life-molding experience. All five were to devote their careers to church-related activities. Hartzler became a deacon at College Mennonite Church in Goshen, Indiana, and a church-relations director for Mennonite Board of Missions. Fretz became a college teacher and later a missionary with Eastern Mennonite Missions. Hershey had a lengthy career in Puerto Rico as pastor and radio broadcaster. He continued in various pastoral services after his retirement. Nafziger returned to Oregon, where he became a pastor and administrator of a Mission Board related hospital.

The experience was probably most life-altering for Bennett. Reflecting on it more than 60 years later, he recalled, “This was the beginning of my involvement with church ministry. It opened a whole direction for my life which I had not thought about before.”

Bennett was last to leave the program. He followed some refugees into France, where he worked with a Mennonite Central Committee-administered orphanage. He returned to the U.S. in 1941. He served as office manager and assistant treasurer at MCC headquarters in Akron, Pennsylvania, from 1941 to 1946. Then he transferred to Mennonite Board of Missions. There he was eventually to become chief administrator.

What effect did this small effort have in the ongoing life of the communities where these men worked? Lester Hershey spent four days in Spain in 1974. As the son of missionaries, he had grown up in Argentina and later worked in Puerto Rico, so he was able to talk to the Spanish residents. He could not resist doing a little research about their program.

He reports that in one place he found a man drawing water from a well and engaged him in conversation about the Spanish Civil War. He asked him if he remembered the “Americanos” who brought relief to people in need. After the man spoke well of them, Hershey acknowledged that he himself had been one. So the man wished him the blessing of God.

While I was at work on this article, I came upon the book And No Birds Sang (Atlantic Little Brown, 1979), by Farley Mowat. It is a personal memoir of his experience as an officer in the Canadian army during the Sicilian and Italian campaigns of World War II. His account illustrates how war is a combination of confusion, terror, destruction of property, and butchery of soldiers, both friend and foe.

In “An Anti-Epilogue,” Mowat reveals that in January 1944 he was transferred to a headquarters job, and we may imagine that this transfer saved his life. In an effort to explain why he wrote the book after a lapse of thirty-five years, he writes, “Let it be said that I wrote this book in the absolute conviction that there never has been, nor ever can be a ‘good’ or worthwhile war” (p. 218).

There are those who accuse Mennonites of hiding behind the bloody efforts of persons such as Mowat. We need not accept this charge, but if we did, we could take satisfaction from the contrasting and positive feelings these five peaceful warriors had toward their experience in the Spanish Civil War, and we might also ask what their example may teach us about how we might comparably live today.

—Daniel Hertzler, Scottdale, Pennsylvania, is author of a memoir, A Little Left of Center (DreamSeeker Books, 2000) and instructor for Pastoral Studies Distance Education. Also he walks the dog, cuts wood in season, works in the garden, and keeps a few bees. He and wife Mary have four sons and nine grandchildren.