by Desconhecido
The Spanish government manages to transport hundreds of bags of gold into a sealed and guarded cave. Then, in late October, over three moonless nights, the gold, now put into crates, is loaded onto freighters that carry the treasure to Russia. In all, the Spanish smuggle over 7,800 boxes carrying 510 tons of gold to Russia. Are the Soviets really going to protect the hoard? Stalin is reported to have joked that the Spanish have as much chance of getting any gold back as a man would have of seeing his “own ears.” The gold shipment has become the gold payoff—for arms the Soviets send to Spain.
Capturing Spanish gold is just one way supporting the Republic serves Stalin’s ends. The communists came to power in Russia amid the chaos and death of World War I. The savvy Soviet leader recognizes that soon enough a war is coming in which he is likely to face off with Hitler. Stalin is determined that history will not repeat itself—his government will not fall in wartime. Before the battles begin, he announces that he will purge—arrest, try, convict, and execute—anyone who in “deed or thought, yes, in thought, attacks the unity of the socialist state.” No one who is the slightest potential threat to Stalin can be left alive. One by one, the most famous communists are being hauled into court, tortured into false confessions, and led out to death by firing squad.
Everyone can read about the trials in the newspapers. If you believe in Soviet communism, you must convince yourself that the confessions are real, that Stalin is being a harsh doctor cutting out illness in his land, not a paranoid murderer. The more Stalin can be seen as aiding the government in Spain, standing for “the people” against Hitler, against fascism, the more he can convince skeptics to ignore or explain away his own reign of terror. Supporting the fight against Hitler can make even brutal Stalin look good.
The Spanish Civil War is not just a local conflict; it is a “proxy” war with many shadow puppeteers. On the ground, soldiers huddle in their quickly dug trenches; they smoke their rations of cigarettes and idle away their time under the Spanish sun. Elsewhere, many offstage actors are determining their fates. Spain is a staging ground for the future of Europe.
As the Non-Intervention Commit-tee stalls, journalists and photographers recognize that their work is a political weapon. While cautious and calculating leaders refuse to take action, photographers can bring images of the war home to everyone’s kitchen table. They must tell the world—in pictures—what is really happening on the blood-stained soil of Spain.
While journalists try to create support for the Republic in their stories and photos, another more direct form of aid is on the way. Young people from many nations are pouring into Spain as volunteer loyalist fighters, nurses, and doctors.
BULLETS AIMED AT HITLER
“Far below and flat to the eye lay Spain,” Alvah Bessie writes. “You felt that you were in the presence of Time and Death, the top of the world and the end of it.” Bessie, a writer who signed up for the loyalist cause, has said good-bye to his young family in America, taken a ship across the Atlantic Ocean, and then rushed onward to Paris, where he joins other hastily assembled recruits determined to fight fascism.
Once Stalin comes out as openly supporting the Spanish government, the Soviets assign the Communist International, or Comintern—the arm of the Soviet Communist Party that deals with communist parties around the world—to take charge of recruiting and organizing volunteer fighters. Antifascists and communists from more than fifty countries answer the call. All over continental Europe, England, and America, centers are set up where recruits are given money for tickets to travel abroad. Committees spring up almost overnight—Friends of Spain, medical aid committees, committees for Spanish relief. Flyers, posters, pamphlets declare, “Take care! Today it is us. Tomorrow it will be you. . . . Help us.” On college campuses, in cities, protests and speeches are given by idealistic young people recruiting volunteers.
And it is working. Starting in October, thousands of young people converge in Paris. They are sent by train to the frontier of France and Spain, where the border is sealed and patrolled by French police. In the dead of night they gather up their rucksacks, their chocolate and cigarettes, their meager belongings, and begin the long, arduous trek by foot across the Pyrenees, the jagged mountains separating the two countries. They trudge for hours and hours, through the underbrush and snow, slipping on wet stone, singing, trying to keep their spirits up. As dawn thins over a valley of close-cropped grass, Bessie and the other volunteers emerge on “lemon-trees with their bright lanternlike fruit hanging from their branches.” They are greeted by Republican fighters as compatriots and sent onward to Albacete, where they will be trained as soldiers.
Who are these recruits, willing to leave their lives, scramble across rocky slopes under cover of night? Idealists: young people who are desperate—each for his or her own reasons—to take a stand, to fight for a better world. The British poet W. H. Auden, who volunteered in Spain himself, describes the volunteers:
They clung like burrs to the long expresses that lurch
Through the unjust lands, through the night, through the alpine tunnel;
They floated over the oceans;
They walked the passes. All presented their lives.
“There has been nothing like the International Column in modern history,” writes Herbert Matthews of the New York Times. “I suppose one would have to go back to the Crusades to find a group of men, from all over the known world, fighting purely and simply for an ideal.”
To those in India who were struggling for freedom from British colonialism, the conflict in Spain seemed like one act in a global conflict. This rally in London drew the presence of Jawaharlal Nehru, who became the first prime minister of independent India, and his daughter, Indira, who later followed as prime minister under her married name of Indira Gandhi.
Langston Hughes’s short essay about living in Madrid as it was under assault from Franco features both the difficulties people faced and the good spirits they maintained. Being in Spain as part of an international movement—and away from American racism—was thrilling to him.
Some are Communist Party members who are convinced that Spain is the place to test their dreams. They believe, Bessie writes, “there would someday be a world of people who would see in money no more than a medium of exchange, the fruit of honest labor, not the symbol of superiority, of human bondage.” Some are refugees from Hitler’s Germany and an increasingly dangerous Europe. “From the first day of the outbreak of the civil war in Spain, . . . I never left the radio and avidly followed the events,” Aleksander Szurek explains. “We young communists lived under constant tension ever since Hitler had gained power in Germany three years before.”
There are women who are eager to break out of their hemmed-in lives and who work as medics and nurses. There are also the unemployed mechanics and factory workers who see themselves in the faces of Spanish workers and peasants. And there are African Americans, who have experienced prejudice in their homeland and see their own struggle in Spain.
The great African American singer, actor, and social activist Paul Robeson hurries to Spain. He is thrilled at what seems to him the absolute absence of racism and the fearless courage of those he is meeting. Their fight has become his. “We must know,” he writes in his notebook, “that Spain is our Front Line.” To fight Franco and Hitler in Spain is to stand against racism and lynching in America—the two battles are part of the same war. That realization marks a “major turning point in my life.”
Speaking to a large crowd at a London rally—and an even larger international radio audience—Robeson tells the world what Spain means to him: “The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative. . . . The liberation of Spain from the oppression of fascist reactionaries is not a private matter of the Spaniards, but the common cause of all advanced and progressive humanity.”
The poet Langston Hughes shares Robeson’s sense of what Spain means. His time in the country has opened h
is eyes. “I’ve met wide-awake Negroes,” he explains, “from various parts of the world—New York, our Middle West, the French West Indies, Cuba, Africa—some stationed here, others on leave from their battalions—all of them here because they know that if fascism creeps across Spain, across Europe, and then across the world, there will be no more place for intelligent young Negroes at all. In fact, no decent place for any Negroes—because fascism preaches the creed of Nordic supremacy and a world for whites alone.” Spain has given Hughes a sense of being part of an international struggle.
Jessica Mitford, who shocked her aristocratic British family when she ran off to Spain to volunteer, explains why she came: “I cut pictures of women guerrillas out of the papers, determined, steady-looking women, wiry, bright-eyed, gaunt-faced, some middle aged, some almost little girls. How to take my place at their side?”
Many of the volunteers are young, so young, in a world that seems to chew them up and spit them into Spain. Here they are, in wool-lined coats and caps, positioned behind sandbags and machine guns, with “an indifference to danger,” writes German volunteer Gustav Regler. “Most of them were émigrés who for three years had suffered humiliation at the hands of the Paris, Prague, and Swiss police. . . . The constant threat of death, which they laughed at or at the least ignored, had restored their dignity. Many were Jews, and their bullets in the darkness were aimed at Hitler.”
Each volunteer pours his or her own pain and suffering, ideals, and dreams into this conflict. Spain gives hope and meaning to a generation of young people who have seen the bread- lines and hunger and desperation, who have run from the ominous shadow of fascism. Fighting for the Spanish government gives them a chance to prove themselves in battle, and to try to make their visions of a better world come true. They can fight evil and build a new future. That is why people arrive representing lands tens of thousands of miles away.
Mulk Raj Anand, a writer active in the fight against British rule in India, also volunteers, and Jawaharlal Nehru, a very close associate of Indian independence leader Gandhi’s, visits. To these freedom fighters, Spain is the center of a global struggle against oppression. “In Spain today,” Nehru says, “our battles are being fought, and we watch this struggle not merely with the sympathy of friendly outsiders but with the painful anxiety of those who are themselves involved in it.”
This British publication was typical of the messages in posters, magazines, and speeches in Europe and America, exhorting all on the left to care about Spain, to get involved, and to realize what might follow if the fascists won.
When recruits arrive in Albacete, the center of the International Brigades, they are organized into units, usually according to language or nations. “The flags of Great Britain, France, America, the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and Finland, Norway and the Irish Free State, Cuba, Catalonia and Spain, Sweden and China, hung from the balcony that was crowded with men in uniform, men wearing dazzling white bandages, men on crutches,” Bessie writes.
This poster in Spanish announces that the Internationals are united with the Spaniards to fight against the invaders.
Some of these young people on the left view Spain as a chance to redeem the Communist Party, which has been stained by Stalin’s terrible purges. Spain is not just the stand against fascism. It is the pure fight, the fight that can save socialism and its ideals. As German communist Regler would say, “Spain was the threatened friend in 1936 after Russia proved to be the friend fallen into evil ways.”
How could they not feel proud of what they had dared to do? Orwell would write of that time as “quite different from anything that had gone before and perhaps from anything that is to come, and they taught me things that I could not have learned in any other way.”
For now, there is singing and meeting other young volunteers. There is milling in the courtyard of the training facilities, laughing as they try on too-tight uniforms and grapple with outmoded equipment. There are endless drills on the dusty roads to learn how to handle the rifles and machine guns. There are the skimpy meals served on bare farm tables, the bitter-cold barracks, and nights lying on straw mattresses across the stone floor, men pulling their caps over their ears to keep warm. There are jokes swapped and local wine drunk and precious cigarettes smoked down to the burning stubs.
There are jubilant crowds at railway stops, where banners hang from the rafters, LONG LIVE THE INTERNATIONALS! Peasants raise their fists in salute, press oranges and grapes into the volunteers’ hands. And there is the train—lurching forward across the plains of Spain—pulling them closer to war.
Shot in September or October 1936, Chim’s photo of the German division of the International Brigades shows soldiers with flowers in their rifles. The unit was named after the head of the German Communist Party, whom Hitler had imprisoned. In the 1960s, antiwar protestors used flowers in contrast with guns—but in Spain, the flowers were a sign of welcome and honor.
In November and December of 1936, Capa was with the International Brigades in the midst of the room-to-room combat in Madrid. The images through page 95 were all taken during that ferocious battle.
CHAPTER SIX
THE SIEGE OF MADRID
NOVEMBER 1936
REBEL FORCES have reached Madrid.
That is what Capa, anxiously waiting in Paris, hears. After their first trip in Spain, he and Taro have spent several weeks back in France—this time with money in their pockets. In September, Vu ran a huge spread of Capa’s images from the war, including the one of the soldier being shot. Though their photographs have created quite a stir, and The Falling Soldier has earned Capa a name, Vu magazine changes direction and fires Vogel. It will no longer focus on Spain. Capa is back to hustling for other assignments in Europe, waiting for a chance to get back to Spain. Chim has remained there, and his photos continue to try to show an upbeat and forward-moving story: a celebration of the nineteenth anniversary of the 1917 Russian Revolution, parades of happy soldiers marching, busy textile factories spinning their spools of thread in Barcelona.
In fact, the war news from Spain has been grim. Franco’s troops are swinging up from the south and the west, planning a double-pronged attack on Madrid. Most assume the city will fall. The government quietly leaves the capital for Valencia. But loyalist fighters are not ready to give up. The militias, the unions, the civilians—all cooperate to build trenches and barricades, soup kitchens, medical centers. Everyone lies in wait, braced for a terrible battle.
As the fighting raged in University City, Republican soldiers camped out in classrooms and laboratories, surrounded by the equipment left behind.
On November 7, mounted rebel troops enter a southern suburb of Madrid, crossing the Manzanares River. The attackers are repelled—just barely. The assault is led by Moroccan soldiers, enlisted by Franco from Spain’s North African colony. The Moroccans are known to be well-trained, ferocious, deadly fighters; Spaniards believed they would race into battle with daggers clenched between their teeth. But many of these soldiers are simply young, poor conscripts, lured with promises of fighting the “infidels” and earning money and land in Spain.
The loyalist government forces plan a counterattack, and soon University City, a campus of modern buildings in the northwest corner of the capital, becomes the site of intense and brutal fighting. Madrid appears to be tottering: “The fascists were standing in the suburbs,” writes Arturo Barea, who runs the Republic’s censor office. “The streets were thronged with people, who, in sheer desperation, went out to meet the enemy at the outskirts of their town. . . . Our ears were forever catching the sound of bombs and mortar explosions, and sometimes we heard the cracking of rifle shots and the rattle of machine guns.”
The arrival of the International Brigades—however ill-equipped and unprepared they actually were—was like a scene from a movie. To supporters of the Republic, it felt as if the idealists had come to rescue the embattled heart of Spain.
The next day, November 8, brings a remarkable sight: two thou
sand soldiers marching down the broad boulevard of the Gran Vía—the International Brigades! Freshly arrived from their secret training in Albacete, and paid for with the new Soviet aid, they come in rippling waves, singing songs, dressed in uniforms with “loose brown Glengarry caps like those of the British tank corps.” Geoffrey Cox, a correspondent for London’s News Chronicle, captures the moment: “They were marching in excellent formation. The tramp, tramp of their boots sounds in perfect unison. Over their shoulders were slung rifles of obviously modern design. Many had scarred tin helmets hanging from their belts. Some were young; others carried themselves like trained, experienced soldiers. . . . The International Column of antifascists had arrived in Madrid. We were watching the first brigade of what was to develop into the most truly international army the world has seen since the Crusades.”
These volunteers are swiftly dispatched to aid in the fighting. And it works. Amazed, all the foreign newspapers run headlines, MADRID HOLDS! The poet Pablo Neruda, who is working as the Chilean consul, writes of Madrid:
With eyes still wounded by sleep, with guns and stones, Madrid, newly wounded, you defended yourself. You ran through the streets leaving trails of your holy blood, rallying and calling with an oceanic voice, with a face changed forever by the light of blood, like an avenging mountain, like a whistling star of knives.
Then Franco raises the stakes.
RAIN OF DESTRUCTION
Madrid is on fire.
All through the chilly nights come the whistle and whine of bombs; all night the sky blooms with flames and white glare; all night explosives flash and boom. The fronts of buildings have been sheared off, and residents straggle down the boulevards dragging mattresses and clothing, seeking shelter. On November 15, Franco brings in German planes—Hitler’s Condor Legion. Rebel air raids, aided by German aircraft, rain their destruction down on the city.
