Behind the lines during the Spanish Civil War, nearly two hundred thousand men and women were murdered extra-judicially or executed after flimsy legal process. They were killed as a result of the military coup of 17-18 July 1936 against the Second Republic. For the same reason, at least three hundred thousand men...
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With the support of the Puffin Foundation, ALBA has now successfully conducted educational outreach workshops in New York; Tampa, Florida; Oberlin, Ohio; and Alameda County, California. Similar programs are slated to take place this fall in New York, New Jersey, and Chicago. Scores of high school teachers all over the country are enjoying...
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The first major exhibit featuring the Spanish Civil War work of Catalan photographer Agustí Centelles (1909-1985), co-sponsored by ALBA, is opening at NYU’s King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center on October 5th; a symposium on Centelles’ work featuring six speakers will be held on at the Center on November 30th, including NYU's...
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Judge Baltasar Garzón, recipient of the first ALBA-Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism last May, has accepted a special assignment from the Organization of American States (OAS) to work on the peace process in Colombia. As Special Advisor to the Mission to Support the Peace Process (MAPP), he will coordinate the...
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Planning for your will and your legacy? The Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade established their legacy with the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives. Now you can continue their “good fight” by establishing a legacy gift to ALBA in your will. As a non-profit educational organization, 501(c)(3), ALBA can accept legacy gifts in any amount,...
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Five major new documentaries on historical memory and transitional justice in Spain, Latin America, and Africa! That is how, this November 3-5, ALBA, the Puffin Foundation, the Center for Constitutional Rights, the North American Congress for Latin America, and several other human rights organizations are honoring the work of...
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October 2011 marks the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades. To properly honor the brave men and women who fought to save the Spanish Republic, programs of appreciation and remembrance will take place for a full week in different parts of Spain. ALBA will be joining the official program of activities in...
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For me, as for so many others throughout the world, the volunteers of the Lincoln Brigade are an example of courage and solidarity… They were the kind of people who fight against the worst cancer of humanity: indifference.  It is our duty to carry this idea of solidarity forward. —Judge Baltasar Garzón, on receiving...
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His life begins with the rain, and the soggy cushions / of a couch left by the landlord to die on a Brooklyn sidewalk / in the year 1930. His life begins at age fifteen, Abe / the high school wrestler straining the cords in his neck / to lift the couch with the...
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Written in Red: The Communist Memoir in Spain. By Gina Herrmann. University of Illinois Press, 2010. Written in Red analyzes the life writing of six Spanish Communists: Dolores Ibárurri, Jorge Semprún, Rafael Alberti, María Teresa León, Teresa Pàmies and Tomás Pàmies. Notwithstanding significant stylistic and political differences, their writing shares a preoccupation with the personal...
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Two Americans stand out as among the most effective and least typical of their generation to aid Spain in its fight against Fascism. Unlike most of the other U.S. volunteers who participated in the Spanish Civil War, the flyers Frank Tinker and Albert J. “Ajax” Baumler were not politically motivated men who learned to...
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A Spanish court has initiated criminal proceedings against six former officials of the Bush administration. John Yoo, Jay Bybee, David Addington, Alberto Gonzales, William Haynes and Douglas Feith may face charges in Spain for authorizing torture at Guantánamo Bay. If arrest warrants are issued, Spain and any of the other 24 countries that are...
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The First Annual ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism attracted widespread interest among the media in Europe and the Americas. Among the highlights: David Cole in The Nation; Dan Kaufman in The New Yorker; Amy Goodman for Democracy Now!. All the major Spanish papers featured the event prominently as well, as...
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Among the distinguished guests at ALBA’s 2011 reunion to honor Judge Garzón were Professor Jonathan Turley of George Washington University Law School, who interviewed the Judge; as well as Larry Cox, Executive Director of Amnesty International USA, and Michael Ratner, President of the Center for Constitutional Rights, who both gave speeches at the event....
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The 75th Bay Area reunion, held in Berkeley, California, on Memorial Day, was graced with a surprise guest. Looking spry and mobile at age 95, Delmer Berg, one of the five surviving veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, took the floor. The Columbia, California, resident advised the audience to keep up the good fight...
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A new spirit of human rights activism ignited tremendous enthusiasm as 300-plus friends of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade commemorated the 75th anniversary of the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War at a reunion in New York on May 14. The day’s highlight was the presentation of the first annual ALBA-Puffin Award for Human Rights...
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Contrary to earlier indications, the Spanish government has decided not to exhume the remains of an estimated 30,000 victims from the Valley of the Fallen, the massive monument that also serves as the tomb to former dictator Francisco Franco, The Daily Telegraph reported last week, because it would be "impossible" to match bones to...
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Fritz Teppich, no longer so agile physically at 92, is still mentally active and as cantankerous as ever, especially on three issues, to be mentioned later. But first it must be recorded that Fritz is the last survivor of some 3000 German volunteers who fought against fascism in Spain. He was one of the...
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Martin David Maki wrote many letters in Finnish when he was in Spain with the International Brigade. The letters were recently discovered, and thanks to Matti Mattson, the only man who could translate them because he knows both Finnish and the war, we have them now. Martin’s own handwritten story shows that he was...
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Hank Rubin, father of the Berkeley Food Revolution and well-known writer about food and wine, died in his sleep Thursday, February 24, 2011. He was born in Portland, Oregon, and spent most of his life in California, first in Los Angeles, then in the San Francisco Bay Area since 1950. He was 94 years...
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Maynard Goldstein, the last Spanish Civil War veteran residing in New York City, died on January 12. Just three months earlier, Goldstein—the last surviving veteran of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought at Jarama (February 1937)—spoke at a benefit event for ALBA. He spoke passionately, bringing to life the streets of New York in...
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By the time Mark Thornton and his 18-year old son Nate took a leaflet on a street corner in San Francisco in 1933, their family was down to two. They had left Utah after Mark had been beaten by Pinkertons at a miners’ strike, and the family arrived in Fresno in 1924. Nate’s mother...
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The Spanish Civil War Memory Project, an initiative of the University of California at San Diego in collaboration with several Spanish civic associations, seeks to build a digital Archive of the Spanish Civil War and the Francoist repression. Since the summer of 2007 several teams of graduate students have been recording audiovisual testimonies of...
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Miguel Domínguez Soler was a talented man of humble origin who lived during tumultuous times, survived many brushes with death, and left a memoir based on the diaries he kept his entire life. He was born on March 1, 1910, in Ayamonte, Spain, across the River Guadiana from Portugal. In 1930, one year before...
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Although Picasso experts agree that the painter’s interest in the war as a subject was sparked some time in late 1936 or early 1937, the precise circumstances of the “conversion” that made the Guernica possible were never fully made clear—until now, that is. Last year, while preparing an edition of the Spanish Civil War...
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Angel Viñas's trilogy on the Republic constitutes, without a doubt, the most detailed and fully documented archival studies of the international diplomatic and military reactions to the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War; and also of the efforts of the successive Republican governments to overcome the politico-economic hostility of the major democratic powers—England, France,...
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Juan Negrín y López, the “enigmatic” leader of the Spanish Republic from May 1937 until its defeat in March 1939, has not been treated kindly in many histories of the Civil War. Some attacks have been personal, with critics scoffing at his “lavish spending…his delight in pretty women and his gargantuan eating and drinking.”...
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ALBA is getting ready for two major annual celebrations in New York and the Bay Area. The New York program--on May 14th, at the Eisner/Lubin auditorium on Washington Square, New York City (tickets here)--will feature Judge Baltasar Garzón, who will receive the first ALBA-Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism, alongside Michael Ratner, director...
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On February 16, twenty-four new sophomores from Bergen County Academies High School in Hackensack, NJ participated in a day-long program of study at the King Juan Carlos Center and the Tamiment Library.  The students, who are enrolled in a project we direct, entitled Political Activism Then and Now: Lessons of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade ,...
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Baltasar Garzón, the Spanish magistrate who has headed the effort to identify human rights violations during the Spanish Civil War and the Franco dictatorship, will receive the first ALBA-Puffin International Award for Human Rights Activism at the ALBA annual reunion in New York City on May 14. (Press release; tickets; Facebook.)...
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We Spanish people will never be able to express with words the gratitude we feel for the likes of Mr. Samuel Lesser. Just one small note that I think is important to clarify: The expression “presente!” was (and is still) an expression USED BY FASCISTS to glorify their dead “heroes” … I think is...
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San Francisco, February 25, 2011, ALBA-Bill Susman Lecture: Marjorie Cohn; NYC, May 14, 2011: Annual Reunion and Human Rights Award; Berkeley, May 29, 2011 Freight and Salvage Bay Area Annual Reunion.
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While hiking in the Glass Mountains of Mono County, California, last year, Betty Brown of Kensington, California, came upon some carvings made on aspen trees, referring to the Spanish Civil War--and apparently cut by a Basque sheepherder with anti-fascist opinions.
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When he volunteered in 1937 to fight against fascism during the Spanish Civil War, 20-year old Samuel Levinger was an undergraduate at Ohio State University in Columbus, a Socialist, and the son of a rabbi. This recently recovered letter is self-explanatory as to its purpose and intention and, fair warning, will touch most readers...
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Joined by guests from Spain, France, Austria, Denmark, and the Netherlands, the German Fighters and Friends of the Spanish Republic 1936-1939 held their 13th annual get-together in Berlin last September. Major themes at the meeting concerned plans for next October’s 75th commemoration of the founding of the International Brigades and how to coordinate activities...
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