At Bordeaux, 1,495 children transferred onto the merchant ship Sontay, destined for the port of Leningrad, which they reached after a seven-day voyage.
[6][7] The presence of the children was seen by the Soviet Union as a way of publicly supporting the future Spanish socialist republic which they hoped would emerge from the Civil War by caring for the next generation of their political elite.
[6] Araceli Sánchez Urquijo was settled in a Casas de Niños in Leningrad and was impressed by the quantity of toys available, but even more so by the length of the days due to the city's northern latitude.
The invasion by the Nazi army put the Spanish children in danger and they suffered extreme hardship and deprivation alongside the wider Soviet population.
They were not allowed to return to Spain as the diplomatic relationships between the two countries had foundered with the war, even though the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin now found the children's presence embarrassing.
Araceli Sánchez Urquijo was one of 23 Spaniards (including 5 women) were among the first 45 hydropower engineers trained at the University of Moscow.
[6] With the death of Stalin in 1953, diplomatic relations between Spain and the Soviet Union thawed a little and negotiations were reopened around the repatriation of the Niños de Rusia exiled during the Spanish Civil War.
Araceli Sánchez Urquijo was subjected to interrogations by the Political-Social Brigade and American security and intelligence agents.
In 1957 Araceli Sánchez Urquijo applied to work at the Isodel Sprecher engineering company in the Calle de Áncora in Madrid which specialised in the manufacture of electrical equipment and installation of production plants.
"[6] Despite their very different political beliefs, (Cebrián was a capitalist and respected by Franco's right wing regime) he supported and defended Sánchez in her work as the cutting edge engineering she had been involved with in the Soviet Union was invaluable to his business.
[7] Sánchez's qualifications were in Russian and she had not learned technical Spanish, so she developed her own Russian-Spanish engineering dictionary, whilst being careful not to show any misunderstandings to her colleagues.
[7][6] She was prohibited from leaving Spain and was not allowed a passport until 1975, after the death of Franco, which did present issues working in an international marketplace.
Her work at Isodel involved adapting projects for the construction of hydraulic, electric, thermal and nuclear power plants.
In retirement she became president of the Izquierda Unida Social Organization for the Elderly and maintained a busy intellectual life.
It told the story of two Basque women pioneers, Araceli Sánchez Urquijo and Laura Irasuegi Otal, both “gerrako umeak” children of the war, who trained in Moscow as civil engineers, a discipline traditionally dominated by men.