Widney Brown, Senior Director of Amnesty International, states:
This is outrageous. As a matter of principle, Amnesty International does not take a position on the merits of the specific charges made against a person under investigation by a court, but in this case – where investigative Judge Baltasar Garzón is...
Read more »
IPS reports:
Argentina is an example for Spaniards to bear in mind as they investigate crimes committed during the 1939-1975 dictatorship of general Francisco Franco, says Emilio Silva, head of the Spanish Association for the Recovery of Historic Memory (ARMH). Silva took part in the Madrid launch of the book...
Read more »
On May 24, there will be a march in at least 22 Spanish cities and in front of the embassies in various places family members will bring photos of relatives persecuted by Franco.
Read more »
In a stunning move, report El País and Público, Supreme Court Justice Luciano Varela, in charge of the case against Baltasar Garzón, has sent back the documents submitted by Falange Española (the Spanish fascist party) and Manos Limpias (an extreme right-wing public-servant union) that lay out the charges against the magistrate, and...
Read more »
Have an idea for a story or blog post for the Volunteer? Send us an email at info@alba-valb.org
Read more »
In El País today:
It is clear that Francoism gave rise to a social elite that continues to hold positions of privlege. Some of the companies that are part of the stock market index began accumulating their fortunes through the use of political prisoners .
More here.From the New York Observer:
Pablo Picasso liked to work fast. When no new canvases were handy, he painted over what he already had. He reportedly completed his masterpiece of the Spanish Civil War, Guernica, in six weeks.
More here.
His views on the Garzón case at Radio Netherlands Worldwide:
Have conservative forces in Spain influenced this decision?
Yes, this also happened in Chile. The most conservative forces had an interest in repression, as they were on the ideological side of Pinochet in Chile and on that of Franco...
Read more »
Carlos Jiménez Villarejo, a former District Attorney who specialized in anti-corruption cases, writes in El Público on the allegations of bribe against Garzón:
It is reasonable and, above all, just, to demand an immediate dropping of these charges, which, like all of the charges still pending , are completely unfounded....
Read more »
El País reports that the Comisión Colombiana de Juristas has issued a press release in which it expresses great worry about the decision of the Spanish Supreme Court to move ahead with the case against the investigative magistrate.
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.
Camp Kinderland was first established 102 years ago by Jewish working-class immigrants who wanted to take their children out of the city’s hot summer streets and, through the camp program and its related Yiddish shul, familiarize them with their progressive Jewish traditions and heritage. Through the years, Camp Kinderland has upheld the principles that...
Read more »
Lincoln vet Bill Gresham’s Nightmare Alley cemented his fame as a noir novelist. Yet most of his Spanish Civil War poetry was never published—until now. William Lindsay Gresham (1909-1962), the Lincoln Brigade veteran whose bestselling crime novel Nightmare Alley (1946) inspired two films, was never the same after the Spanish Civil War. He rarely...
Read more »
“The past isn’t dead,” William Faulker famously wrote; “it isn’t even past.” The quote came to mind me while attending a remarkable gathering last September in the ancient Spanish town of Azuara, a small community of roughly 500 inhabitants, 40 miles south of Zaragoza (Aragón). Azuara was transformed by the Spanish Civil War. Over...
Read more »
The first American to die in the Spanish Civil War was a 47-year-old mining engineer from New York who had married a Spaniard, moved to Madrid in 1933, and covered the 1934 revolution for the US media. As soon as he heard about the 1936 coup, he joined the Republican army. Leo Edwin Fleischman...
Read more »
The way we think about George Orwell today was profoundly shaped by the Cold War—and by the groundbreaking work of Peter Stansky, who started writing about him shortly after his death. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in the summer of 1936, Peter Stansky was four years old—and although he lived in Brooklyn,...
Read more »
From March 1 to August 3, 2025, The Tampa Bay History Center will host an exhibition titled “Invisible Immigrants: Spaniards in the US, 1868-1945.” Co-curated by Luis Argeo and James D. Fernández, this show uses materials—photographs, documents, letters, keepsakes—digitized or on loan from the family archives of the descendants of those immigrants, as well...
Read more »
Teesside, an industrial region in Northeast England that in the nineteenth century grew to be a center of shipbuilding and iron and steel production, spawned no fewer than thirty International Brigade volunteers. Of the nine who were born in the borough of Stockton-on-Tees, moreover, six played leading roles in Spain: five rose to the rank of Lieutenant...
Read more »
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.
Read more »
On September 24, 1945, Dr. Barsky delivered this speech during the Spanish Refugee Appeal rally at Madison Square Garden.
Read more »
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.
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