MARY AND I ARE GLAD OUR SON WENT TO SPAIN Southern Father and Mother Tell How the Spanish People’s Fight for Democracy Belongs to Them By Pat Barr Southern Worker, Magazine of the Common People of the South, Vol. V, No. 16, July 1937. It was a happy group that gathered at the railroad...
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Keep ‘Em Rolling By Hy Chesler Originally published in The Volunteer for Liberty, Vol. II, No. 5, February 12, 1938. The work of the Transport units of the Republican Army is apt to be taken for granted, especially by volunteers who come from highly mechanized countries. It is hardly necessary, however, to point out...
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Keeping the Vehicles Rolling By Marion Noble Originally published in The Volunteer, Volume XI, No. 2, December 1989. Dear Ben, Enclosed is my story about Spain while I was there. It seems that all too little has been said about those of us who did the best we could to keep the vehicles rolling....
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The London Times reports: Crew members of a Spanish charity ship that rescued 218 migrants from the Mediterranean and brought them to Italy are being investigated for aiding illegal immigration, signalling Rome’s increasing intolerance of migrants. Italian authorities impounded the ship operated by Proactiva Open Arms after it landed in Pozzallo, Sicily. The public prosecutor in Catania argued...
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February 27 is the 81st anniversary of the death in action at Jarama of the Irish poet and Lincoln Brigadista Charlie Donnelly. At the 80th anniversary commemoration in Donnelly’s natively village last year, ALBA Board Member Nancy Wallach met with Nora Shovelin of the Clé (Left) Folk Club, which meets each month in Dublin’s Liberty Hall,...
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This Saturday, February 17, the annual Jarama commemorative march organised by AABI (Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales) began at its customary starting point, from the Rivas Vaciamadrid memorial – erected by FIBI (Friends of the International Brigades in Ireland) – in honor of the Irish poet Charlie Donnelly (1914-1937), of the James...
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This article was first published in The Volunteer, v. XI, n. 2, December 1989 and is a continuation of Rosenberg‘s The First Day. cb It was the second day of the Brunete Offensive, and the Lincolns, the British, and the Washingtons, supposedly at rest, were busy burying their dead, replenishing their supplies, and doing...
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By John C. Blair, The Volunteer, Volume 6, Number 3, October 1984 (Our comrade John Blair, died in 1982. This account of prison life, forwarded to us by his widow, Harriet, was written the year before he died. “He had other stories planned,” said Harriet Blair in her letter to us, “but after typing...
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John Tisa, The Volunteer. Volume 4, Number 2, 1982. Dr. Pike and I drove together to Madrid in the early morning of 18 May 1937 – he for medical supplies, and I with a stack of unedited materials for the Volunteer for Liberty, our new front line tabloid. Here is a story he told...
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Vernon Snow was killed in action at Fuentes de Ebro during a Nationalist air raid on October 18, 1937. Snow was serving in the Lincoln-Washington Transmissions section when he was killed. Pat Read his section leader recalled Snow as “a comrade with a loveable personality, calm courage and plenty of ability. (“A Life for Every...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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...
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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,...
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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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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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