[3] Laura Irasuegi Otal was born in Eibar, Gipuzkoa, in what is now Basque Country in Northern Spain on 26 November 1923.

She was assigned the number 1732 and was put on the ship Habana which left the port of Santurtzi on 12 June 1937, initially sailing to Bordeaux.

The children travelled in the holds, in unsuitable conditions, and arrived in Leningrad dirty, with lice, colds or pneumonia.

[7] Irasuegi was settled in one of the Las Casas de Niños, large children's houses in the town of Obninsk, about 100 kilometers from Leningrad.

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.

In 1942 she was part of a group of Niños de Rusia who managed to leave the city travelling across the frozen Lake Ladoga in trucks.

[9] With the death of Stalin in 1953, diplomatic relations between Spain and the Soviet Union improved a little and negotiations began about the repatriation of the Niños de Rusia exiled during the Spanish Civil War.

Laura Irasuegi died in Errenteria, Gipuzkoa, Basque Country in Northern Spain on 6 October 2016, age 92.

7 by Shostakovich, followed by a poem by Soviet poet Olga Bergoltz in memory of Irasuegi's survival of the Siege of Leningrad.