The floods on the night of September 25, 1962 left an open emotional wound in the collective memory of Terrassa (and other municipalities in Vallès and Barcelonès Nord) with hundreds of fatalities, in addition to missing people and tremendous material losses. After 62 years of the tragedy, and with the aim of emotionally repairing the damage to the families, the Terrassa City Council will begin, in 2024, the process of searching for the missing and possibly stolen children, as well as the identification of victims. It will be the first time that a Catalan City Council takes on this challenge, protected by law 16/2020, approved by the Parliament.
Mayor Jordi Ballart (Tot Per Terrassa), accompanied by the spokesperson for the Lost Children association, Ana Martínez, pointed out today, next to the Arenes stream (the zero point of the flood), that “the time has come to face the truth about that flood.”
“We must carry out an in-depth historical investigation and do justice to the victims and their families,” said the mayor.
One of the priorities is the search for the missing minors, who are estimated to be around 60, and whose bodies were never found. “It is suspected that they were adopted by families, protected by the Franco regime, when they were children who had a family. For this reason, although more than 60 years have passed, we ask that if someone knows something, knows of a case and if we can rescue even one person, the effort will have been worth it,” Martínez announced.
The City Council will allocate, initially, 6,000 euros to facilitate the investigations and makes the historical archive and all its documentation available. Under the protection provided by the state Historical Memory Law to undertake processes of these characteristics, Ballart has pointed out that we must “work hard and attract new witnesses, statements and clues that can lead to judicial claims and investigation processes.”
It seeks, first of all, to determine how many boys and girls could have been stolen and adopted fraudulently and to offer families who lost a minor the possibility of closing a wound by knowing what really happened.
All the information collected will be made available to the families involved, so that they can carry out legal processes if they wish, with the competent authorities, the Department of Justice of the Generalitat, the Spanish Government and other organizations related to This question. “We want to go to the end, we want to know what the Franco regime did not do and what it allowed to do, we want to repair the moral damage and help families who have a case of disappearance to move from suspicions or indications to facts,” said the promoters of this initiative. And for this reason, they are willing to take the cases that are detected to all higher administrations, including the European one, to “give a voice to the victims.”
From Lost Children they affirm that “we have many signs and many silences, so we do not lose hope. Even if we only get one family to find a loved one, it will be a good reward.”
Martínez, who lost a brother and a grandfather in the flood and suspects that another brother was stolen, has been emotional. “It is a door that opens to us and that gives meaning to all the years of work we have done. We need to give voice to what happened, and now we have an opportunity to restore the pain, resentment and anger of those families who lost a child and are seeking answers.”
