In the foggy morning, we were greeted by the Mayor of Torija and the President of Guadalajara Memorial in front of the town hall. The town awarded Freedom Medals to delegates honoring IBers. This was the same spot where IBers gathered to receive welcome from the town 79 years ago. Then we rode buses...
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The IBMT made special note of Delmer Berg’s passing at their annual AGM in Dublin on Oct. 15. IBMT Chairman Richard Baxell called on me to say a few words on his behalf. Below is the text of my remarks. It was especially significant to honor the last Lincoln Brigade veteran in the presence...
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The President of Ireland, Michael D. Higgins, officially opened the Annual General Meeting of the International Brigade Memorial Trust, held in Liberty Hall, Dublin, on October 15. Seated, left to right, are IBMT Ireland Secretary Manus O’Riordan, President Higgins, Sabina Higgins and IBMT Chairperson Richard Baxell. Standing, left to right, are IBMT North West...
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An official inauguration of a monument to the International Brigades was held in front of the Austerlitz train station in Paris on October 22. This was the place where the International Brigaders rode trains to Spain 80 years ago. Among crowded participants (French, Swedish, Danish, Russian, German, Dutch, Italian, Canadian, Polish, USA, UK, Puerto Rico, Romanian, etc.), there was Vicente Almudever (98...
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The Foreign Language Department’s Spanish program at El Camino Community College (Torrance, California) is commemorating the 80th anniversary of the Spanish Civil War with a series of activities and lectures from November 8 to 12. The five-day program includes talks on mass graves, pictorial art, military fortifications, news coverage in the US of the conflict,...
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. Albin C. Ragner: Mostest First-Line Infantryman by Benjamin Goldring The Volunteer, Volume 5, Number 2, June 1983. Albin C. Ragner, Lincoln Battalion Veteran, does not appear to have made it into any books or any print on...
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First to Fight: American Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) Explore this pivotal event in Spanish–and world–history and culture! Parallels to today include Syria, Ukraine, & the rise of rightwing populism. Oct. 29 – Northampton – Breakouts in Spanish and in English. $25. Lunch and materials provided. Led by Kelley Brown, Easthampton HS....
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Notes from the Biographical Dictionary Project. Saul Freidberg provided several short biographical sketches on fellow veterans. The sketches provide insight into Friedberg as well. Eugene David Bronstein By Saul Freidberg, April 22, 1996 Bronstein was born in NYC about 1915. He went to CCNY, from which he was graduated in 1934, where he...
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. A Shout of Triumph By Lloyd L. Brown The Volunteer, December 1975, p. 7 Like millions of people around the world, my fellow-Soldiers at a U. S. Army base were overjoyed to hear that Hitler’s forces...
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Blast from the Past is an ongoing series of posts reprinting articles from historical issues of The Volunteer. “My Grandfather, Sam Gonshak,” by Amber Glassberg Originally appeared in The Volunteer, V.9, No. 3, November 1987. An essay submitted for an Honors English Class for which Amber received and A++ by her teacher Mrs....
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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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