"This is my daughter. The one a nun told me had died"

Marta

CASTELLON (Agencies) The lab has confirmed yet another case of stolen babies, this one in Castellón, North of Valencia along the coast to Barcelona. Begoña Juez was just 19 when she gave birth 37 years ago in the general hospital there. "I remember the waiting room with great pillars; I remember a doctor listening to my stomach but the next memory is in the room after giving birth. A nun came in and told me I had had a little girl but she had died. Then she brought me food," says Begoña. But the little girl is alive and no longer a little girl; mother and daughter were reunited in another case of several hundred, if not thousands, of babies stolen during the 1950s and apparently even in the 1990s. TheAttorney General, Cándido Conde-Pumpido, said a few days ago in Valencia that he had detected "networks in some specific places of the country" with the purpose of stealing babies.His office is presently investigating 849 possible cases throughout Spain.>>>
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Marta's story
Begoña's daughter was adopted by a family in Castellón, but she was always 'suspicious'. So she began searching for her biological mother last March. "I had a name and two surnames (in Spain everyone has father's then mother's surname) that I found in adoption documents of my (adopted) parents. I'd searched them on Intenet but nothing came up," says Marta.

She had better luck on the social networks. "I remember that day perfectly. A Facebook 'friend' and I were chatting. I didn't know her but as I belong to the PP (party) I thought she had found me through that. We started talking and after a while she told me she investigated things. I encouraged her to find my mother, though I didn't hold out much hope," remembers Marta.

Three days later she received an e-mail. "It was from Bilbao. It had the phone number of a brother of Begoña and I called." That was the first contact.

Marta and Begoña meet
After several phone calls and lots of webcam contact, Begoña flew from Tenerife, where she now lives, to Castellón. That was back in May. She stayed at Marta's house for a month.

"When she first arrived we couldn't talk, we couldn't even cry," says Marta. "We hugged a lot and then, after that first day, we stayed up til 5.30 in the morning, just couldn't stop talking." One of the things they have in common is that they both talk a lot. "We cross our fingers the same way, too," Marta laughs. "And we have the same expression: a tomar por saco ...

Begoña had returned to Castellón many years after she had given birth to the little girl that turned out to be Marta. But she never forgot that. "I first arrived in Castellón when I was pregnant, with another daughter (Marta's sistyer, who curiously shares the same name)," says Begoña. "I entered domestic service because my partner had left me and I had to work. After a long time -I've given birth twice more- I found things very strange, as though they wanted me out of the hospital in a hurry. The nun told me they would take care of everything, not to worry. I was a young girl, what was I supposed to do?"

Now, DNA tests have proved unequivocally that this is mother and daughter.