This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

I'm Jonathan Blitzer. I'm a staff writer covering immigration, and I've heard a lot of stories

over the last couple of years about how war and immigration laws and politics have had concrete impacts on individual

families. We don't often get to hear about the long-term impact of some of these events on those

families. But then, I recently met a woman who has a story I had never heard before. Nearly a

century ago, a group of Spaniards put their children on a boat and sent them across the ocean in search of safety.

500 kids traveled without their families to make a new home in Mexico.

They were escaping the Spanish Civil War when a left-leaning government, known as the Second Republic, and its supporters, who were known as Republicans,

were overthrown in a coup led by conservatives from the far right. The fighting was brutal,

and it lasted three years. The families who sent their children on this journey were from places like Barcelona, Madrid, and Valencia. Destri Maria Sibley's grandmother was on the boat.

Here's Destri.

Her name is Rosita Taroka Martinez, my grandmother, or my abu, as I call her.

I'm standing in her house alone.

No one's lived here for months.

There's dust on every surface.

It covers the windows in a dark film, and everywhere I walk,

I step on skeletons of cockroaches and the leaves of dead houseplants.

I'm here to sort through my grandmother's stuff, to see what she's left.

The house looks dead, but for me,

it's filled with so many memories. Happy birthday to you. I don't know much about my grandmother's

past. I know she was born in Spain and grew up in Mexico with two sisters like an orphan.

And then she migrated to the United States.

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