The official map of mass graves dating from the Civil War in Andalusia, released after a five years of research, offers an inventory of almost six hundred different unmarked burial sites. The mass grave at the San Rafael cemetery in Málaga is assumed to contain more than four thousand bodies, making it the...
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Geoff Dyer, writing in The Guardian, reflects on recent war accounts from Iraq and Afghanistan (Sebastian Junger, David Finkel) and, more generally, on the strengths of fiction vs. non-fiction when it comes to transmitting the reality of warfare:
If there were ever a time when the human stories contained within...
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More coverage, this time in the Guardian, on the exhibit of Spanish Civil War friends Kati Horna, Remedios Varo, and Leonora Carrington (see earlier post). Includes video.
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The AP reports: In a written defence put forward by his lawyer, he requested that he be acquitted citing a legal precedent that prevents a trial taking place if it is opposed by the public prosecutor’s office. The precedent mentioned is the so-called “doctrina Botín,” named after Emilio Botín, the current CEO of the...
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Earlier this year Magnum, the photo agency founded by Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and "Chim" Seymour, sold its photojournalism archive (more than 185,000 prints) to a private investment company owned by Michael Dell, which in turn has handed it over to the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas in Austin. The HRC...
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Spain's dictator Francisco Franco, who won the Spanish Civil War in 1939 with significant help from Hitler Germany, repaid the favor two years later by handing the Nazi regime "a list of every Jew in his country in order to facilitate efforts to locate, deport and destroy them," today's Ha'aretz reports, based on...
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From today's New York Times:
With a drug war raging around them and an unreliable judicial system in place, Mexico's human rights activists have their hands full as they grapple with a growing new class of victims: themselves. (...) The new reality is...
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The Filmstage reports that James Gandolfini, aka Tony Soprano, will be producing a film on Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn for HBO, starring Clive Owen and Nicole Kidman, and directed by Philip Kaufman (The Right Stuff, The Unbearable Lightness of Being).:
Gellhorn, considered one of the greatest war correspondents of all...
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The fundamental study by a Benedictine monk on the role of the Catholic Church in the Spanish Civil War, Hilari Raguer's Gunpowder and Incense, translated by Gerald Howson, can now be read in its entirety online. "The history of the Catholic Church in Spain," Paul Preston writes in the prologue,
parallels that...
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Just uploaded to YouTube: "Contra la impunidad" (Against Impunity), a nine-minute video put together by Pedro Almodóvar's production company, in which a number of well-known Spanish actors and intellectuals (including Pilar and Javier Bardem, Juan Diego, and Almodóvar himself) read first-person narratives of victims of Nationalist and Francoist repression. The video emphasizes that...
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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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