Nuestra Voz, Organo de la 86 Brigada, No. 1, 2 de Junio 1937, p. 3 The English Company of the 20th Battalion has had its baptism. Isolated from the main body of the Battalion, waiting for relief from day to day, the company maintained its morale, held its discipline. It learned and it has...
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The Volunteer, v2, no. 2, January 13, 1938 BALLAD OF TERUEL The General stood in Teruel Whence not a few had fled; He called his brave defenders up And unto them he said: “Soldiers, today we stand as one To crush the wicked Red....
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The Volunteer for Liberty, p. 10.v.2, no. 2, January 13, 1938. Cyprus, a small island in the Eastern Mediterranean, has a population of 340,000. Cyprus, now a British colony, has been under British imperialist domination since 1878. The foreign ruler subjects the people to a life of degradation and misery. ...
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Lloyd Edward Johnson was 41-years old when he arrived in Spain in April 1937. He was the oldest of four sons born to Norwegian immigrants Seavert and Nesina Johnson. Johnson was born and raised in St. Paul, Minnesota. He applied for a position as an apprentice electrician with the Northern Pacific Railway Company when...
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Pursuit of Reason, Philadelphia: Adelante Press, 1971, p.19-20 “Wat’s dis, wat’s dis?” Colonel Jean LeBeau bounced along the line of fire like a bullet-proof ball. “Come ‘lone der, Yanks. Let’s go! Up de hill, up de hill!” The Colonel put his whole, squat body into his appeal to get the men moving. He waved...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, V.1, No. 24, November 17, 1937 After six months on the Cordoba front, the American Hospital Unit under Dr. A. I. Friedman (of Hackensack, N. J.) is now at Villa Paz for a short period of reorganization before, leaving for the Fifteenth Brigade. The American Hospital of the South and...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, V2, No. 31, August 5, 1938. The Army of the East is coming to the aid of the Levante! Like a bolt of lightning this sweeping thought penetrated every company, every unit, every soldier in the Army. How? Where? Again the smashing lightning idea. Along a front of more than...
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That morning when I heard that Manch was killed— Beneath the almond tree our company Was lined up for its bread and jam and coffee. I saw his sergeant, Aaron, passing by. I called to him; he told me...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, V. 2, No. 31, September 5, 1938. The cabo in the Spanish people’s army should realize that not only has he many responsibilities in connection with the whole life of the soldiers in his squad, but also that it is necessary to train himself in such a way as to...
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The Volunteer for Liberty, V2, No. 25, July 19, 1938 The cabo in the performance of his tasks plays a very important part in the functioning of a military machine. The squad, being the basic unit, must function properly in every way, if the peloton, section, company, etc. , are in turn to function...
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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