Jim Benét, lifelong journalist and veteran of the American Regiment de Tren (Transport) in the International Brigades, died in December near his home in northern California of a blood infection. He was 98. Born in New York to a literary family on both sides—his father was William Rose Benét, a poet; his uncle, Stephen...
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David Lomon, who died on 21 December 2012, aged 94, was the last known survivor in Britain of the more than 2,500 volunteers from the British Isles who joined the International Brigades.
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Sylvia H. Thompson, who spent her life fighting for the poor and oppressed and championing the legacy of the veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, died of cancer in December in New York City. A stalwart supporter of both VALB and ALBA, she volunteered countless hours, year after year, organizing VALB’s annual reunions in...
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On the last day of 2012, Dr. Moisès Broggi decided to not celebrate New Year’s Eve for 105th time in his life. Some months earlier we had finished up an article together, L’exili i el silenci (“Exile and Silence”). It would be the last piece of writing of someone whom many of us had...
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Moises Broggi i Vallès, Catalan surgeon who served in the 35th International Division Medical Services, passed away on December 31, 2012. As a young doctor, working in an on call capacity, he provided medical care in the Military Hospital of Barcelona from the first day of the war. In early 1937 he was appointed...
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Harry W. Randall, Jr., once the chief photographer of the special photographic unit of the Fifteenth Brigade during the Spanish Civil War, died at a care facility in Snowflake, Arizona on November 11. His vast collection of photographs—which included not only his own camera work but a large array of negatives, albums of prints,...
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The past months have been a time of loss for the International Brigade community. Harry Randall, Adolphe Low, Jim Benét, David Lomon, and Albert Hirschman left us, as did Sylvia Thompson, widow of Lincoln Brigade and Second World War veteran Bob Thompson (1915-1965) and Dr. Moisès Broggi, the Catalan physician who headed up the...
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Victor Grossman in Berlin writes to report sad news:  the death, earlier this month, of German IB veteran Adolphe Low, who was granted French citizenship in 1945 and remained in France. He was the last of the German International Brigade veterans. Adolphe Low was born as Adolf Löw in Cottbus, south of Berlin, in...
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Mike Nash, the director of New York University’s Tamiment Library, Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives and ALBA board member, died unexpectedly on July 24. He was 66. A well known and accomplished archivist and historian, he came to NYU in 2002 from the Hagley Museum and Library, after working at Cornell University and the...
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Earlier this month, journalism mourned the death of the radical British journalist Alexander Cockburn, son of the journalist and Spanish Civil War veteran Claud Cockburn, aka Frank Pitcairn (1904-1981). Among the many obituaries, The Nation's Victor Navasky writes:
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