George F. Redlich was born on March 22, 1919, in Stillwater, Oklahoma to German immigrants Frederick Wilhelm Redlich and Bertol (Eckold) Redlich. When George was about twelve-years old, his father moved the family from Tulsa, Oklahoma to Chicago, Illinois. The move was prompted by his father’s job loss and the hope that he...
Read more »
Judith Montell and Connie Field’s 1990 documentary Forever Activists: Stories from the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, which was nominated for an Academy Award, is now available for streaming online, through Vimeo’s on-demand service, here.
Read more »
“We Couldn’t Believe It…” by George Kaye, Machine gun Co. 58th Battalion The Volunteer for Liberty v. 2, No. 33, October 6, 1938. Hill 666 means several things to us of the Lincolns –eight hours of unadulterated hell, for one thing. As...
Read more »
The National Library in Madrid has recently digitized over 100 photographs taken at San Pedro de Cardeña, the concentration camp for the International Brigade prisoners which the fascists established at the site of an abandoned monastery in Burgos. This startling photograph was taken during April 1938, inside San Pedro, shortly following the fascist capture...
Read more »
Jack Shirai, (Japanese-American Volunteer, killed at Villanueva de la Cañada –July 1937) By Ludwig D. The Volunteer for Liberty, V.1, No. 17, October 4, 1937. I hear that Comrade Shirai fell. Who did not know him? His funny pidgin English, His smiling...
Read more »
This is the full text of the Barbara Martin’s article that appears in the December 2018 issue of The Volunteer v. 35, no. 4. While I never met Freddie in person, I corresponded with her from June 1981 until August 1987. I also spoke to her once shortly after an earthquake had hit...
Read more »
The Volunteer for Liberty, V2, No. 35, November 7, 1938 The Canadian Mac-Paps, one of the hardest fighting units in the International Brigades have blazed a trail of important military achievements since Oct. 13th, 1937 – the day...
Read more »
Spanish documentary makers Clemente Bernad and Carolina Martínez face up to two years in prison and a more than $13,000 fine for having filmed images in the crypt at the Monument for the Fallen in Pamplona, where a mass is celebrated every month in memory of Francoists, El País reports. Memory organizations such as the Association...
Read more »
k-Indicates killed or missing in action k –(Canadian) Arvid Carlson (also known as Arthur) was born in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania around 1909. His family was of either Finnish or Swedish background. Carlson likely attended Commonwealth College at some point in the 1930s. He joined the Canadian Communist Party in 1932. Carlson was single and living...
Read more »
Members of the New Llano Cooperative Colony in Louisiana formed Commonwealth College in 1923 Commonwealth was envisioned as a Labor College “… a college specifically aimed at the leadership of what they designated as a new social class, the industrial worker. The school moved to site thirteen miles outside of Mena, in Polk County,...
Read more »
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
sign up to receive email updates from ALBA. Support ALBA through a tax-deductible gift! To inquire about a donation, please contact the ALBA office at info@alba-valb.org or 212-674-5398.
What Was a Young Dutch Pilot Doing in Civil-War Spain? Saturday, March 20, 1937. Farmers at work in a vineyard near Narbonne, in southern France, see a Dutch plane circling for hours. At four in the afternoon, a car arrives whose driver unfolds a white sheet. At this signal, the plane lands on a...
Read more »
Carmelo Delgado, a Puerto Rican law student in Madrid, fought as a militiaman on the Republican side until he was taken prisoner by the rebel forces and shot. Can his remains be recovered? In their moving graphic novel El abismo del olvido, which deals with the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, Paco Roca...
Read more »
As Patricia Schechter dug into her family’s history, she uncovered one of the untold stories of the Spanish labor movement: an Andalusian strike in early 1936 grounded in a rich legacy of disciplined pacifism and sturdy worker cooperatives. After the July 1936 military uprising that unleashed the Spanish Civil War, hundreds of men from...
Read more »
Vince Lossowski (1913-1984), who was born and raised in Rochester, New York, in a Polish working-class family, served with the International Brigades from August 1937 until September 1938. In 1942, he was recruited for the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), along with half a dozen of his fellow Lincoln Brigade vets. During World War...
Read more »
The roots of fascism lay right here in the United States. In fact, anti-Blackness is a persistent feature of fascism in all its forms. But there is a long lineage of Black antifascists that still have things to teach us. When the House Un-American Activities Committee was first created, in May 1938, its chair,...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
“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...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
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
Search the Database