Barsky en route to Spain. Barsky Photo Collection, Tamiment, NYU. Colorized.

In 1944, Barsky wrote A Surgeon Goes to War, an 18-chapter memoir of his time in Spain, which was never published but can be consulted at NYU’s Tamiment Library. This is the first chapter.

The deck space reserved for third class passengers on S. S. Paris is not very big but from it you can clearly see the skyline of New York as it piles up into the biggest castle in the world. But I could not look at it; I was too tired to see. I did not want to say good-bye again to anybody or to blink in the glare of flashbulbs or to answer the questions of any more reporters. I went below and crawled into my dark berth, alone for the first time in thirty seething hours. Let the others watch to see the last of our shores. My throat was sore from talking—and my clothes hurt my body which was sore from fatigue. It was too much trouble to undress, or to get a drink of water or even to pull up the blankets. There was that steamer smell of rubber, linoleum, clean greased engines and paint. For a second I thought about my fantastic situation and then, as if anesthetized, I fell into a dreamless sleep.

This was the afternoon of the sixteenth of January, and the engines which had begun to shake me gently were taking me to Spain. Nothing would have seemed more impossible to me three months before than that I should be sailing away to a country at war at the head of a medical mission. For I had been very busy, a typical New Yorker, I suppose. I was absorbed in my work. I hadn’t time enough for my friends or for my family. Also, I was supposed to be threatened by some sort of breakdown due to overwork. Afterward in Spain everybody had a good time laughing about it.

How had it started?

First of all, there was an interest in Spain, a country trying, after years of black repression, to be a democracy, and in a measure succeeding. So much I had read in newsprint. Then the Spanish government had sent a delegation to beg for American help, American sympathy. I went to a meeting. Yes, that was the beginning.

Two persons, neither at all typical of a new Spain spoke movingly: a woman lawyer, and a Catholic priest from the Basque provinces. There were not many women who had become lawyers even in Republican Spain and persons who associate the Spanish Catholic Church with Fascism and nothing but Fascism forgot the Basque Catholic clergy who were solidly on the side of the people.

These two spoke to us in such a way that we saw a clear issue. A peacefully elected government made up of many factions trying to balance itself, trying to restore a measure of social justice, had been attacked by a perjured army, by generals who had first sworn alliance to the government and then enlisted foreign help against it. But their coup d’etat had failed. The people themselves had wanted to keep their newly won freedom. They fought desperately. Sometimes unarmed, men and women together, in overalls, untrained militia fighting machine guns with picks and stones. They fought for freedom. Not only the sort of freedom which was won for the United States of America when in 1778 [sic] the British fleet sailed away from the port of New York eastward down Long Island Sound—not as much freedom as that. In Spain they wanted only liberty to think each according to his conscience, not to starve in fertile fields untilled, to live un-menaced by secret police. This modest liberty, this democracy which the Spaniard had won legally at the polls without civil war, seemed as valuable to me as it did to them. Why should it be taken away by force, by foreign force?

The next thing I remember was that a group of us met at Dr. Louis Miller’s house. Dr. Miller knew a good deal about American medical missions to various foreign lands. He knew about the services they had rendered and a little about their organizations. American medical practice, he said, was never more needed. Others spoke of the American Quaker relief work done in Germany during the famine which was the result of the blockade at the end of the Great War.

I was a member of a group of doctors who met together to talk about all sorts of things. One night at a meeting of this informal group we were talking about Spain. The government had almost no medical service. Somebody said, “That sort of thing ought to be our meat.”

The American Friends of Spanish Democracy had been formed. The North American Committee had been organized for the purpose of sending clothes and food to Spanish refugees. Then one October night at Dr. Miller’s house the American Medical Bureau to aid Spanish democracy was born. It was under the auspices of this committee that all our work in Spain was conducted.

An ambulance of the American Medical Bureau. Barsky Photo Collection, Tamiment, NYU.

Soon we had a Purchasing and a Personnel Committee, for we envisaged the plan of sending a medical unit to Spain. Most of us were professional people; we had slender resources, yet the end of it was that we raised more than a million dollars. November and December were busy months. The work of raising money went on with enthusiasm. We had many meetings in New York and also in nearly all the big cities of the country. Our appeal was heard from Maine to Florida and west to the coast. There was much interest in Spain, all over the country. We set as our immediate objective the complete equipment of a seventy-five-bed mobile hospital. It was more difficult to find the personnel than equipment. Nurses and doctors of the type we must have were more apt to be busy people with jobs they could not leave. Yet in the end just these people came. They were motivated by the idea of service and willing to do their bit in this fight for democracy. To come with us these people were in some cases to give their health; some gave their lives; in all cases they gave their jobs.

“To come with us,” but at this time I had no intention of going. I worked all day, and we had meetings all night, sometimes two or three meetings, and then we finished the small hours in some coffee-house perfecting our plans.

Towards the end of December contributions began to fall off. We had to face the fact squarely that our plan of sending a seventy-five-bed hospital to Spain looked beaten, for the present anyway. Yet we knew what time must mean in Spain. We felt that if we could once get that hospital across the seas and in action contributions would continue to support it. It would be something concrete. The hospital must sail: We still lacked essential equipment and essential personnel.

As head of the purchasing committee, it was my job to figure out everything needed for this new kind of hospital. We had to buy everything; mattresses for the ward beds, surgical equipment, etc. etc.; in fact, everything from a safety pin to a special operating room light running on dry battery. (Afterward, by the way, to be known as the “Light that Failed.”) Lister bags for carrying water, etc., etc., etc., besides all sorts of special medications, serums, antitoxins. From the start we were very careful about paying our bills; we only paid those we had to pay!

It was my job as head of the personnel committee to see that we picked only the right sort of people. They must not be sentimentalists, yet we could take only persons ready to die if necessary for their convictions. Also, most essential, they must be persons of proven skill in their present professions. In the matter of chauffeurs, it meant nothing to us if a man could drive a car; he must also be an all-round mechanic, perhaps an orderly, with the right stuff in him to make a nurse if necessary, and he must be young and healthy and mentally well-balanced. We had to have a pharmacist, and laboratory technicians. The nurses to be enlisted must be in better than average good health.

Barsky with colleagues at Híjar, Dec. 1937. Randall Collection, Tamiment, NYU.

One type we had no particular use for, and these came to us in droves: writers. We had a very impressive permit from the State Department licensing our work and permitting us to send personnel overseas, and these literary gentlemen were anxious to ride on this magic carpet. The writers soon learned that in their particular capacity we had no use for them. But they, as might have been expected, were men and women of imagination and more, of histrionic ability. They came disguised as chauffeurs—it would usually turn out that they drove a car—as ambulance drivers, as mechanics, as male and female nurses and, I regret to say, sometimes as doctors. But we managed to pierce all these disguises. Perhaps it was no wonder that things went slowly or that we thought they did.

Things were now so retarded that our whole project hung in the balance. I was beginning to feel the strain of carrying on my practice and continued lack of sleep. There were so many things to worry about, even if I did get to bed. One thing was that we had not yet found the right man to head the expedition. I knew how much would depend on him.

One night after we had had three meetings and our contribution had been far less than we hoped, a small group of us talked frankly about our difficulties. We admitted to each other for the first time that the whole thing was still uncertain.

“Look here,” somebody said, “we’ve got to go! The way to go is to go. We set a date right here. Tonight. When do we go?”

“Well, make it January sixteenth.”

And then very solemnly we all shook hands and decided that the hospital would sail on that date. How, was another matter.

The outfit would sail. Things, as we had foreseen, moved along faster after we had made our big decision. But one important thing was still undecided. Who was to head the outfit? When late one night someone suggested that it might be myself, the idea at first seemed ridiculous. How could I even think about it?

“How can any of us?” they asked. Then somehow all at once I realized that I had been eager to go from the start, perhaps in some deep part of my mind I had known that I would go all along. Yet for days I could not get over my sense of surprise.

On the morning of the fifteenth of January, the equipment which we had spent months collecting was in a warehouse, not yet completely packed, we had our personnel together, we had very becoming and serviceable uniforms—but we had no money. We could not sail without at least three thousand dollars—this was not extra money, you understand, it was to pay among other things for our third-class passages and our food.

That night there was to be a mass meeting in the Manhattan Opera House and on the collection taken in our fate depended. The Spanish Consul was there, there were two bands, and we wore our new uniforms with “A.M.B.” (American Medical Bureau), on the armbands, for the first time. Everybody thought we were going to Spain; we hoped we were ourselves, desperately we hoped. And then when the tumult and the shouting died away, we counted the collection.

We had between five and six thousand dollars and the next day we would sail for Spain!

The rest of that night was spent by doctors, nurses, pharmacists and laboratory technicians, in crating and packing the stuff in the warehouse. At one time we were afraid we would never get that done in time either but at last some bedraggled individuals who had been doctors and nurses got on the boat, and we heard the whistle which meant all aboard for the Spanish Front.

Bands were playing and everybody waving and crying and cheering. It seemed that we would never, never leave that dock. When in the end we did, I went below and let the others watch for the Statue of Liberty.

One of the other doctors woke me up. He told me that on board were about ninety young men in plain clothes. It was whispered that they were going to enlist in the Lincoln-Washington Brigade. My worries were now few as compared to the load I had been carrying but I had to see that our outfit did not openly fraternize with these men. We were a non-partisan unit. Also, I was worried about a little box in my pocket. Just as the whistle blew a friend had opened my hand and put the little box in it.

“Here, Eddy, take this,” he had said.

I opened the box. It contained about six grains of morphine. If I were to be caught with this contraband in my personal possession I could easily be returned to the United States—yet it was hard to throw away even this much of the stuff I knew would soon be very precious to us. I spent a good deal of time worrying over this trifle.

From “The Surgeon Goes to War,” an undated, unpublished manuscript by Dr. Edward K. Barsky with Elizabeth Waugh (ALBA collection, Tamiment Library). This chapter appeared in Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil War (2007), edited by Peter N. Carroll and James D. Fernández.