The trees are emerald and bursting with rubied apples, the almighty sun is peaking over the horizon, and children are even playing in the yard. It’s a picture-perfect scene — until the painters come, scattering polka dots across the landscape. But they’re not just circles of stains on the green canvas; they come with smoke and birth fires, they fly into cities and into dreams, they destroy.

The first world is the safe one that housed the children who made it to the colonias infantiles, the ‘infant colonies’ or ‘camps’ of refuge. The second is blemished one that took the innocent and still haunts survivors.

“The people of this town were waiting there, and they chose us like slaves: ‘I want this one. I don’t want that one.’ Like slaves. That experience left its mark on me and I’ll never forget it,” a man in his eighties recalls. The withered white wisps framing his round grandfatherly face match his experiences in the Spanish Civil War, worn by harsh years and conditions in constant evacuation of the prevalent bombardments triggered by his own countrymen. His name is Alfonso Ortuño, and he was just 10 years old when he first sought refuge from battle on civilian home ground. He was just 10 years old when he wasn’t picked to come to the colonias.

Alfonso attended Colegio Público (CP) Miguel de Unamuno, a 4-story house of coral looming in the heart of Madrid’s Central district. The area was once a former hub for Spain’s finest ambassadors; however, in the September 1936, it was far from a luxuriously accommodating community. That month, the school board held a meeting with the students’ parents.

“I noticed that when the meeting was over many of the mothers had tears in their eyes. How strange, I thought, how strange,” Alfonso remembers. He rolls the word off his tongue, knowing it is an insufficient descriptor for life in the war.

Like many children who survived the harsh war, Alfonso had few words to say, so he naturally drew. Thousands of drawings from all over Spain and other areas affected by the Spanish Civil War compose the archives of children’s art. The children, who mostly resided in France at the time as evacuees from Madrid and similarly bombed cities, drew the pictures in refugee camps and schools operated by Republican relief organizations. These facilities resonated with the full force of leftist demand for social reform and the movement for sustainable institutions in education amid the chaos of the war as described by University of Almeria researcher Christian Roith. There, the green trees, bright suns, and main characters are scribbled on paper. As these sanctuaries grew, numerous campaigns soon emerged.

3,000 drawings were made in the colonias infantiles and sent to a committee in Valencia in 1937 to be prepared for an exhibition, a documentation of the reflection of the war in the minds of 3,000 children. Representatives of the Spanish Child Welfare Association and the American Friends Service Committee gathered the collections to send to the U.S. where they were sold in 1938 to garner financial support for the Republicans.

More artwork resides in the National Library of Madrid and the Biblioteca Nacional de España as well in Special Collections Libraries in the University of California at San Diego, Harvard University, Haverford College, and the University of Delaware among other personal collections. The drawings, like their artists, originated from all throughout Europe, but just as international supporters came together by the force of war, the drawings spread throughout the world.

On October 1, 1936 Alfonso and his sister left Madrid. The same trembling mother who refused to release her children from her arms now released them into the station that would take them to Valencia until peace came. She arrived at the station with all the other waving mothers who were comforted by white lies. The train, filled with 100 kids and hardly any oxygen, shuttled its passengers to Valencia alright but never opened its doors to the city of the colonias. It charged ahead to Puebla Larga where the town crier alerted citizens that the children were arriving.

“They told us we were going to live in colonias, in camps, which turned out not to be the case. I think they sent us to Valencia first so our parents would be comforted thinking they were taking us to the colonias, but that’s not what happened. . . . Puebla Larga was clearly not a military target because the air raid shelter was never used, and the whole time we were there only three bombs were dropped on the train station. They didn’t explode and were stuck in the ground by the tracks.”

When they arrived at the Puebla Larga, they arrived at a market. The town crier had called out to the sea of people, begging anyone who could to take in the children. Voices buzzed around and those overcome with even the smallest compassion stepped up reluctantly. This was their sendoff to safety, but the process was cruel. Alfonso remembers being put “there like slaves on the block.” Like an auction for the most convenient commodity, the least troublesome child these already war-torn families had to take care of.

“It was heartbreaking. That experience left its mark on me and I’ll never forget it. . . . my sister was crying, because we had never been separated, and she clung to me and wouldn’t let go. Then there was this couple that was interested in taking either me or my sister. A couple from that town. But we were holding each other so tight that it was impossible to tear us apart: they had to take both of us or neither.”

A humble Antonio Rodríguez and his wife Julia took the two children into their home to add to their already family of six. They went to school together in Puebla Larga and all survived the toils of the war, but Alfonso Ortuño never got the chance to sit in a stony Valencia classroom with other children who were missing their homes. But he still drew pictures, too.

“I loved drawing,” Alfonso smiles. “I drew hundreds of pictures, and probably someone told me to draw what I had seen in Madrid. And this is what I saw, the evacuation, what I remembered before being evacuated. I remember they said good-bye saying ‘salud, salud’ because the word ‘Dios’ (God, as in ‘adiós’) wasn’t used then, it had been eliminated in the Republican zone.”

As Adolus Huxley reminds us, these drawings are indeed “works of art; but it is also our duty to remember that they are signs of the times, symptoms of our contemporary civilization” through the prevalence of airplanes. Without conscious projection, art made by children retain the greater truth in comparison to words. “Children learn early how to hide their feelings behind words. They do not know how to hide feelings in art, however, and hence when the art does not match what the child says, the art is often a better indicator of what the child is truly feeling,” Dr. Patricia Klorer states in her book about expressive therapy in children.

In accord with the infinite patterns of history, viewers discover the same themes of warfare hovering above and around quaint community life among children’s drawings created during other modern wars of the world. Plight, planes, and peace again take the stage in the Second World War, the Korean War, and the Libyan Civil War among others. The patterns of the 1930s are the same: serene day-to-day life prior to the war, significant events during the war, and hopeful outcomes of the war.

A Spanish Civil War drawing from the Colonia Escolar Colectiva la Torre Beneama parallels almost perfectly with a child’s drawing made during World War II. The 1938 artist, a 12-year-old Margarita Arnao Crespo from Alcante, drawing from the Spanish Civil War, and the 1944 artist, a 4-year-old Charles Weingarten, feature tanks center stage with hovering planes in the background, noting the prevalence of new warfare technology. Encompassing greater areas than those affected by the 1930s battles, more immediate tensions as depicted in child art still unveil the same observations and reactions to the mass combat.