At the University of Colorado this summer: The Autumn Orchard, an opera by J. Michael Martínez and Daniel Kellogg based on the life of the Spanish poet Miguel Hernández (1910-1942), who supported the Spanish Republic and died in a Francoist prison shortly after the end of the Civil War. Miguel Hernández's centenary is...
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Few people have done more than investigative magistrate Baltasar Garzón to connect issues of human rights and historical memory in Latin America with those in Spain. IPS reports that a Peruvian attorney, Ronald Gamarra, has been called as a defense witness to present evidence supporting the claim that amnesty laws do not cover...
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A victory against impunity in Argentina. Almudena Calatrava reports for the AP:
Some of the most notorious figures of Argentina's “dirty war” were convicted Thursday of kidnapping, torturing and murdering 22 people at the beginning of the 1976-1983 military dictatorship when the country cracked down on leftist dissent. Family members of...
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Exclusive to the online Volunteer: A reflection on historical memory a propos of Bloody Sunday (the Saville Enquiry Report was published last month) and the Spanish Civil War, by Trisha Ziff, curator of photography (Hidden Truths: Bloody Sunday) and filmmaker (Chevolution), currently directing the documentary, La Maleta Mexicana/The Mexican Suitcase. Read the...
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The Catalan news program 30 Minuts has made an hour-long documentary on Agustí Centelles, the Spanish Civil War photographer whose archive was recently bought by the Spanish government, and whose portrait of a young black volunteer set off a global detective search. See the documentary here (in Catalan):
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http://www.amnesty.org/en/news-and-updates/ecuador-first-ratify-new-un-mechanism-enforce-economic-social-and-cultural-rights-2
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After years of hard work,Carmen Negrín, the granddaughter of Spanish Republican Prime Minister Juan Negrín, is gratified, she tells the Spanish newspaper Público, to see her grandfather's voluminous papers turned into a major national archive. Meanwhile, ALBA board member Gabriel Jackson has just published a major biography of Negrín (review forthcoming in...
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La buena nueva (2008), a Spanish Civil War film directed by Helena Taberna and starring Bárbara Goenaga, received the Special Jury Prize for Acting at the Amsterdam Film Festival:
A young priest arrives in his first assignment to a small parish serving a working-class village in the first days of...
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A ceremony was held at the IB Memorial in London two days ago:
This was the first year that there were no veterans of the conflict at the annual celebration, although seven from Britain still survive and were awarded Spanish Passports by the Spanish Government in 2009 as a gesture...
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What exactly is the legal status of the hundreds of thousands of sentences issued by Francoist tribunals during and after the Civil War? To the frustration of many associated with the movement calling for a "recovery of historical memory," Spain's "Historical Memory Law" of 2007 did not include an a massive annulment of...
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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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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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