You Have Probably Never Heard This Story. You Need To.

I am going to tell you about three children.

Their names were Ramón, Ricard, and Elvira. In April of 1984, they were six, four, and two years old. A man named Denis, a friend of their father’s, drove them to a train station in Barcelona, sat them down on a bench, told them he was going to get candy, and never came back.

The children spoke only French. They did not know their last name. They did not know their parents’ names or what city they had come from. Station workers eventually found them sitting alone and took them into care.

Nobody ever came to claim them.

Not that day. Not that week. Not ever.

I posted about this story and the response was unlike almost anything I have seen. Thousands of people shared it. Comment after comment said the same thing: I have never heard of this. How is this possible? How did I not know about this?

The Documentary

Abandoned is streaming now on Hulu, and it is four episodes, and I am going to strongly encourage you to clear your schedule and watch it this week.

The series follows Ramón, Ricard, and Elvira, now adults, as they attempt to do something they have spent their entire lives not knowing how to do: find out who their parents were and why they were left on that bench.

The trigger for the search was Elvira’s pregnancy. She has said that when she became a mother, the questions she had carried quietly for thirty years suddenly had a weight she could not put down. Who were her parents? Where did she come from? What was she passing to her child that she did not even know she carried? She went on a Catalan radio program and told her story publicly, asking anyone with information to come forward.

What followed was a years-long investigation that crossed borders — France, Belgium, Spain — and drew in a constellation of amateur genealogists and researchers who gave their time simply because the story moved them. DNA databases. Distant relatives. Photographs of people none of them had ever met. Elvira has said the search reconciled her with humanity. People helped her without knowing her, sometimes without speaking the same language.

The Interview

When I decided I needed to speak with the person who made this documentary, I tracked down the director, Carlos Alonso Ojea, in the Canary Islands.

It was the highlight of my week. Genuinely.

Carlos is thoughtful and precise and it is clear from the first few minutes of talking to him that he loves these three people.

As you can probably imagine, I related so much to this story. I hope that you love it as much as I did.

Watch Abandoned on Hulu. Then come listen to my conversation with director Carlos Alonso Ojea — available now wherever you get your podcasts, and at the link below.

LISTEN TO THE INTERVIEW HERE.

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Kate