Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. Cultural Life in a Concentration Camp By Morgan Havard, London Chairman of the International Brigade Association The Volunteer for Liberty, Volume 5, No. 1, January 1944 I cannot imagine feeling any more impotent and helpless than I...
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From the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and Beyond PDPs: 22.5 Graduate Credits: 1 Offered by: Professional Development›History and Social Studies Description What is fascism? Where did it come from? How does it impact human rights? How did ideology shape the Spanish Civil War and WWII? What legacies did they pass on in the...
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The global union federation ITF (International Transport Workers’ Federation) has released an illustrated booklet recounting the organization’s fight to support the lawful Republic during the Spanish Civil War, and how the lessons it learnt there allowed it to work with Allied intelligence to fight Nazism in World War Two. It tells the inspiring story...
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Como de costumbre, ALBA organizó su taller para profesores de secundaria en Nueva York el día de elecciones. Poco después, una de las participantes nos envió esta sentida reflexión.
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. “Of Comradeship and Courage: Three Friends, Three Volunteers” by Morris Brier The Volunteer, v.9 n. 3, November 1987, pp. 8-10. Why at this stage of history do I speak of three comrades, three friends? To me...
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In 2009 an anonymous black International Brigades volunteer became famous when his picture garnered the attention of the international news media. The Spanish government wanted to give the photograph of the man, taken in Barcelona in January 1937 by Catalán photojournalist Agustí Centelles, as a gift to newly elected U.S. President Barack Obama in...
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The following is a reply to the address by the President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, to the International Brigade Memorial Trust, on October 15. 2016 A Uachtaráin, a chara, Mr. President, compañero Presidente! We are inspired by your address today. You have kept the honor of Ireland’s flag flying high, as you always...
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. “Remembrance Day” by Tom Kozar, November 11, 1988 Originally published in The Volunteer, V. 10, no. 3, December 1988. Today is Remembrance Day and as I woke to the sounds of Vera Lynn’s voice singing the words...
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. The Noblest Fruit of Them All by Jim Persoff The Volunteer, Volume 3, No. 5, 1981 When the 14th anti-aircraft battery took up a position in Madrid, somewhere between the Parrios “Tetuan” and “Chamartin,” a team of...
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In the aftermath of the Great War, President Woodrow Wilson’s dream was to make the world “safe for democracy”. Not exactly for democracy in itself as a system of government, but rather for its implicit association with the free market. Economic penetration was conceived as an indispensable path to progress for the capitalist system...
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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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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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