Irene Filip has just published a detailed essay on Dr. Hans Kaiser and his wife Dora, the two Austrian Jewish volunteers who helped run the International Brigade hospital at Benissa. Read the article, which has appeared in the yearbook of the Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, here (in German).
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Visiting Chile, President Obama stopped short of offering an apology for the US role in the overthrow of President Salvador Allende in 1973, leading to the bloody military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet--an episode about which then Secretary of State Colin Powell said in 2003 "it is not a part of American history that...
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Alan Entin, nephew of Bernard "Butch" Entin, has been working with his local radio station on a documentary about his uncle: "Uncle Bernard and The Abraham Lincoln Brigade" in the series "Hidden Histories" (27 min, available in mp3 here). Also in Hidden Histories, three 2-minute segments on the Spanish Civil War with Jack...
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Ten days ago, at the International Film Festival and Forum on Human Rights (FIFDH) in Geneva, Switzerland, the screening of Impunity, the new documentary by Juan José Lozano and Hollman Morris on the peace process in Colombia (website; trailer), Baltasar Garzón joined in a panel discussion on the question of impunity in relation to...
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Because of its altitude (10,000 feet above sea level), low humidity and minimal light pollution, Chile’s Atacama desert is the site of some of the world’s largest and most powerful telescopes. The observatories in the desert are privileged viewing and listening posts, where antennae and lenses can capture signals emitted from the most distant...
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The haunting strains of “El Cant dels Ocells” – a Catalonian folk song orchestrated by the great cellist and Spanish Civil War refugee Pau Casals—were the overture to the memorial service for Lincoln vet, Matti August Mattson, held yesterday, March 18, in the auditorium of NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center. The...
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Tiempo de Historia reports that a digital copy of the personal archive of José Díaz Ramos, secretary general of the Spanish Communist Party from 1932 to 1942, has just been donated to the Centro de Memoria Histórica in Salamanca:
La donación de este fondo para el Centro Documental de la Memoria Histórica...
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This month marks the one-year anniversary of the online Volunteer and the ALBA blog. Some statistics: Total number of visits: 27,229. Total number of page views: 58,932. Unique visitors: 18,481, from 141 countries. Most read pages, posts and articles: ALBA Blog, Helen Graham, Cartier Bresson, Picasso and Delaprée, Oliver Law, Video,...
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Montse Armengou and Ricard Belis, the pair of Catalan documentary filmmakers that brought us Les fosses del silenci (The Spanish Holocaust, view part 1- part 2), Els nens perduts del franquisme (The Lost Children of Francoism, part 1 - part 2), and Memòria per llei (Memory by Law, view) returned last month...
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The blog of the Pabellón de la República, at the University of Barcelona, just announced the catalogization of a stunning collection of 4,500 photographs shot between 1934 and 1938 by legendary photographer Agustí Centelles, collected in a 133-page scrapbook assembled in the late 1970s by the photographer himself, for the purpose of establishing...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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New information about the New Zealand-born Spanish Civil War surgeon Doug Jolly (1904-1983) has emerged following the recent publication of his biography, Frontline Surgeon.
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On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
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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.
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Self-effacing and shy though he was, Dr. Edward Barsky’s experience in Spain made him an outspoken activist, tireless organizer, innovative frontline surgeon, and political prisoner. “Eddie is a saint,” Hemingway wrote. “That’s where we put our saints in this country—in jail.”
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The Volunteer is thrilled to honor Dr. Barsky on the fiftieth anniversary of his death.
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For Edward Barsky, political and humanitarian activism were two sides of the same coin. Those who persecuted him begged to differ.
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The time she spent in civil-war Spain loomed large in the life of Martha Gellhorn, the St. Louis-born war journalist. “The truth is that Martha could not stop thinking, feeling, and writing about her Spanish experiences.” “Objectivity bullshit.” That’s what Martha Gellhorn (1908-1998) called the journalism of her day. Her letters to personalities like...
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Among the thousands of Jewish volunteers who joined the International Brigades were many descendants of the Sephardim. What was it like for them to “return” to Spain? Three case studies: Lini de Vries, César Covo, and Samuel Nahman, aka Manny Harriman.
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How the 22-year-old Jewish American dancer Janet Riesenfeld performed flamenco to help raise money for the Second Republic under fascist attack.
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Why did Jawaharlal Nehru, future prime minister of India, visit civil-war Spain in 1938? As it turned out, the triangular relationship between Britain, Spain, and India had deep cultural and geopolitical implications.
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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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