by Desconhecido
Visiting the camp brings Taro and Capa back to their easy partnership. Their compatibility is obvious to the troop, which takes them in as a beloved part of this family. There is Taro, moving like a fawn in her coveralls, shifting in and out of the dappled light, circling, snapping pictures. And there is Capa, in his long raincoat and beret, the Eyemo movie camera hiked to his shoulder. He is clumsy. This whole film business is new to him, and he probably makes a few jokes. The men like him. He has “a warm voice with a full timbre, rich like a fruit,” says his friend Geza Korvin Karpathi.
Capa always dreamed of making movies, writing to his mother in 1935, “I want to make movies more than anything else.”
As Aleksander Szurek, an aide to General Walter, will recall, “We all loved Gerda very much and our General was no exception. He loved everything that was beautiful and good in life. Gerda was petite with the charm and beauty of a child. This little girl was brave and the Division admired her for that.”
With the soldiers, the couple finds a familiar balance. Even though Capa and Taro have been traveling on separate assignments, they know how to come together and complement each other as photographers, teammates. While he films, she puts the men at ease. Or Capa sits with the men, talking and joking, while she circles, unobtrusively, catching the soldiers in a moment of relaxation. She takes surprisingly intimate shots of what it feels like to live in a unit on the front.
The ease of her shots is striking—far different from the more composed and heroic shots she took when she and Capa first set out into the Aragon countryside last August—almost a year ago. It is extremely unusual for a woman to gain such access to the front, to a man’s world. Of course her access is made easier because she is there with the ever charming Capa. But that is not all. The men admire her for her willingness to be one of the guys. And Capa and Taro’s own camaraderie helps them blend in with the men. They learn how to become part of a military unit, just as they learned how to become each other’s partner.
Soldiers communicate on a makeshift telephone line.
On May 31, the push starts. The men march up the ridge, pine needles crunching under their boots, carrying ammunition boxes, rolling cannons up the rocky path. Tanks groan through the clearings, their treads spitting pebbles and dirt.
“You felt that you were taking part in a crusade,” Hemingway would write of the battles in Spain. “It was a feeling of consecration to a duty toward all of the oppressed of the world. . . . It gave you a part in something that you could believe in wholly and completely and in which you felt an absolute brotherhood with the others who were engaged in it.”
With their equipment finally in place, the loyalists open fire. But the rebels are ready. Almost instantly, fascist planes swarm the skies, firing endlessly on the soldiers burrowed in the flanks of the hills. Confusion reigns. When the loyalist planes fly overhead, they accidentally shoot their own troops. There is no breakthrough, only chaos and havoc. A somber procession of stretchers carry the wounded and the dead back down the ridge. Then a retreat. Three thousand will die. The offensive is a failure.
A soldier prepares for the offensive.
Republican officers consult as they plan their next steps.
Even as the news for the government side grows grimmer by the day, Taro seems to turn more buoyant. She is a confident photographer now—and more. Increasingly, she seems to see herself as an inspiration, perhaps a lucky charm, for the male troops.
The confusion, the routs, the changed plans, seem not to perturb either Capa or Taro. Szurek notes how they both go as close as they can to the battle. Henri Cartier-Bresson would say of Taro and Capa’s relationship, “She was right alongside him in everything.”
On June 1, they remain through the day’s fighting. When bullets hit Taro’s camera, she quips, “Better there than my heart.”
As their ever alert friend Gustav Regler observes of Capa, “The Spanish Civil War was ideal for Capa because it was such a chaotic war with no real policy. The only thing people agreed on was that they were fighting for freedom and that was the only cause that could possibly interest Capa.”
Capa and Taro return to Madrid, where they linger for a few days, taking pictures of workers making munitions in a factory. Then they learn that General Pavol Lukács—the Hungarian general who gave Capa his first taste of battle in University City last November—has been killed when a shell exploded in his car near Huesca. Their friend Regler is also badly injured. The general’s death is a blow—he was one of the most charismatic figures on the loyalist side, and Capa and Taro quickly hurry to Valencia to photograph the massive funeral.
Once more it is not just the ceremony—the soldiers at attention, the coffin draped with flowers—but the mood and atmosphere of the people that they capture. One of Taro’s photographs is of three women standing on a curb while the funeral procession passes. They are dark-eyed, raising their tired arms in the Popular Front salute. The woman in the middle wears an apron, her other hand fisted at her hip. The image will be reproduced in many magazines. Taro has gotten to the heart of this moment in the Spanish Civil War—the exhaustion, the shadow of tragedy in their eyes, and yet the grim defiance, against increasing odds.
By June 19, Bilbao has fallen.
Tired, stalwart Republican women watch General Lukács’s funeral. (The stamp shown on page 112 is on the reverse of one of the images from this sad event.)
CÓRDOBA FRONT
Late June, the scorching heat is starting to seep into the plains of Spain. At an old farmhouse that serves as a battalion headquarters in La Granjuela, Capa strides in. He sets down his camera and thrusts out his hand, introducing himself to Alfred Kantorowicz, a young information officer from Germany. He speaks warmly, as if they are old friends. Capa and Taro have arrived at the front in Córdoba, in the hopes of getting some good footage for The March of Time.
In June, Capa (left, in a black beret) sits with men near Córdoba. “Capa was an agreeable man in a group who did not grumble and used his Hungarian-Jewish humor to cheer people. He had a character which people immediately liked,” said documentary filmmaker Joris Ivens.
The international troops here are known as the Battalion of 21 Countries. Kantorowicz watches Taro create quite a stir among the unit as “the charming lady reporter” who wore “a beret plopped on her beautiful sandy hair and a dainty revolver belted at her waist.”
More men arrive, crowding into the door, smitten with Taro, who is enjoying the attention. And she speaks German! Soon a few bottles are uncorked, and everyone jokes and talks. “You could hear the peals of female laughter all the way out in the fields. It was an exhilarating half hour.”
Then they settle down to business: Capa and Taro wish to go to the front line, to shoot the battle that is raging in the valley below. But before they head out, they want the men to stage a battle scene for Capa to film. This is common in moviemaking—staged scenes that simulate the real war. In fact, the battalion won this village back in April, and they will be re-creating what happened. Here again is the blurry line between reporting and propaganda.
The men are excited to make the movie. They push out their chests and mug for the camera. Then Capa directs them to create a battle in which they are under attack. Rifles drawn, the men march and dash along the road, skirting a stone wall, as if evading enemy fire; they run in clusters, across an open courtyard and down an empty, bullet-riddled street. While Capa films, Taro snaps still pictures.
By dawn they are on the real front lines, and the men, Kantorowicz notices, have all spruced themselves up for Taro. “Never had I seen so many well-shaven men here.”
Something is changing in Taro. Maybe it is all the attention, the grinning young men, her copain and boyfriend by her side. Maybe a line is being crossed within her very being. She is not just bearing witness to Spain’s war. This is her battle, her fight. Even as the news of the government side grows worse by the day, she starts to take more chances. During the quiet that settles during sies
ta hour, she flings her camera over her shoulder and dashes across an open field. She acts as if bullets cannot touch her.
“She confidently believed,” Kantorowicz writes, “that her appearance at the front during the fearsome hours of fascist counterattacks would be like a battle standard for our exhausted men. That the charm that emanated from her, her daring, her involvement, would boost their morale and encourage the slender and wavering lines of the International Brigades to make a fresh effort.”
This cartoon features the glamorous Taro in the midst of men hurriedly grooming themselves before the filming of the battalion begins.
La pequeña rubia, the soldiers call her. The little blonde.
“GET OUT”
For the loyalists in Barcelona, the situation is far from charmed.
When George Orwell goes to meet his wife after he is released from a hos-pital, she jumps up from her chair in the lobby of a hotel and hisses, “Get out!”
Not exactly the hero’s welcome he’d expected, having been rushed back from battle when a bullet sliced his throat. But there she is, grabbing him by the arm, insisting, “Get out of here at once.”
Barcelona is a city with “a peculiar evil feeling in the air—an atmosphere of suspicion, fear, uncertainty, and veiled hatred,” Orwell writes. The communist-led government has outlawed the anti-Stalin POUM, the Workers Party of Marxist Unification. “Even to be known to have served in the POUM militia was vaguely dangerous.”
A few days before, on June 16, the police barged into the office of Andrés Nin, the founder of POUM, and dragged him away to a secret prison. There he was tortured into confessing that he was really a spy for the Germans. Rumors bristle. He was killed, some say. He escaped to the fascists, to Germany, others declare.
Soon the authorities, guided by Stalin’s communists, are arresting anyone connected with the POUM, turning a hotel into a prison. All the red POUM flags are torn down, its bookstalls stripped. Wandering down La Rambla toward the water, Orwell finds ragged militiamen, still muddy from the front, sleeping on chairs, since they cannot go to their homes, which “had been raided. Any POUM militiaman who returned to Barcelona at this time had the choice of going straight into hiding or into jail—not a pleasant reception after three or four months in the line.”
This shot was taken near La Granjuela, Córdoba Front. This action was a staged re-creation of previous combat.
All through late June the arrests continue as the communists eliminate their rivals or drive them underground. Orwell’s own belongings—his diaries and newspaper clippings—have been seized. He tears up the card that shows he’s a member of POUM, roams around the streets of Barcelona, unable to sleep at a hotel, where he is likely to be picked up by the police. During his last days in the city, Orwell tries frantically to help his good friend Georges Kopp, his commander in the POUM militia, who has been arrested and is now stuck in prison. “It is a terrible thing to see your friend in jail and to know yourself impotent to help him.” Eventually Orwell and his wife are able to escape on a train to France. But they cannot rescue Kopp.
The revolution, the dream of a liberated Spain, may be lost.
Regards devoted a special issue to the war in Spain with photos by Capa, Taro, and Chim. Taro is now a name in her own right.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
TALKING AND DANCING
JULY 1937
JULY 1937 is the month of grand gestures, of conferences, pavilions, speeches. It is nearly one year since the start of the Spanish Civil War. On July 4, famous writers from many different countries descend on Valencia for the second International Congress of Writers in Defense of Culture. They fill the grand town hall, craning to listen from the mezzanine as speakers take the podium. The aim of all the speeches is to support and show unity for the Spanish cause.
Underneath, though, everyone is jittery. The news of Andrés Nin’s disappearance has people on edge. The deadly reach of the Soviets is obvious. The French writer André Gide has just published a book about the Soviet Union, criticizing what he has seen of Stalin’s rule. The tone of the conference is rancorous, confused: stand with the Republic and its key ally, the Soviet Union? Or speak out against Soviet crimes? The talk churns on. The British poet Stephen Spender calls it a “spoiled children’s party.”
Guests express solidarity at the writers’ conference, but tension over the behavior of the Stalin-led communists is not far below the surface. July 1937 photograph by Taro.
Taro and Capa are circling the conference, seeking the best shots. Even though Taro has been living roughly in the woods, a newsreel captures her gliding down the aisle looking impossibly glamorous, slender, with her bobbed hair, her honey-colored embroidered blouse.
While they are on the sidelines as reporters, they are noticed. The Mexican writer Elena Garro, Octavio Paz’s wife, describes them as “wrapped in the tragic, romantic aura of adventurers who were young, beautiful, and very much in love.”
Capa is getting ready to return to Paris that afternoon, in order to sell the pictures of the conference and the ones they have taken on the front. Taro will stay behind with the movie camera. Before he leaves, Capa draws aside Ted Allan and says to the eager young man, “I leave Gerda in your charge, Teddie. Take good care of her.”
This article on the Congress features photographs taken by Taro.
Allan happily agrees. After all, he has a crush on her.
As Capa walks away, does he know Allan is in love with Taro? Perhaps he is counting on it—that way Allan will do everything to protect her.
Don Quixote peers in a window on this poster for the writers’ conference, linking the political writers of the moment with the great Spanish literary tradition.
SOMETHING IS GOING ON.
On July 7, Taro is covering the writers’ conference, which has moved to Madrid. Dutifully she takes pictures, politely tucking herself out of the way in the aisles to aim her shots. Famous people march up to the podium. The speeches drone on.
But she’s aware of another drama behind the scenes. All day, officials have been jumping up from their seats and flitting out of the room. She tenses; her journalistic instincts grow alert. The government censors are stone-faced, revealing nothing. Everyone knows some kind of military push is going on. During evenings in the basement restaurant of the Hotel Gran Vía, journalists have been talking about the rumors: the government is planning to open a new front. No one will say what it is.
Then a door bursts open.
A trio of soldiers march to the podium, fascist flags pierced on the blade tips of their bayonets. Brunete, a suburb fifteen miles west of Madrid, has been captured by the loyalists!
Taro snaps the shot.
The room explodes with excitement. After the dispiriting failures of Segovia and Huesca, the government decided in secret to attack a poorly held rebel line outside Madrid. The operation was both strategic and symbolic: with the approaching anniversary of the start of the war, they aimed to break apart fascist troops who were in the outskirts of Madrid. The Republic’s most experienced and best commanders were sent there, along with eighty thousand men. “There were more men, more planes, more guns, than the war had yet seen.” It’s a grand, huge push.
Republican soldiers have captured the rebels’ flag—and Taro is there to record the triumph.
The day before, at dawn on July 6, one government division drove into the neighboring town of Quijorna while another division launched a surprise attack. By evening they had captured not only Brunete but neighboring villages.
Sniffing a big story, Taro hurries out of the building. The censors refuse to let any journalists enter the battle zone. She will not take no for an answer and manages to wangle a car and driver. Two other journalists squeeze into the backseat of the car, and they’re off toward the battle in Brunete.
In these July photographs, Taro records the early optimism of the Republican offensive in Brunete.
The day’s smoke and gunshots may have subsided, but Taro kno
ws how important it is to show a captured town. There, on a dusty road, she crouches on the ground and shoots the perfect symbolic image: three government soldiers below a sign on a wall announcing the village of Brunete. Another photo shows a soldier painting a Soviet sickle on a wall above the words VIVA RUSSIA. The symbol of the violent right-wing Falangists has been crossed out.
On their way back to Madrid, Taro and the others drive past medics carrying stretchers and the bodies of the dead. Despite these grim scenes, when Taro and the other journalists meet up with a group of international volunteers at the end of the day, the soldiers happily share their rations. As the journalists’ car drives off, they hear the voices of the men singing the “Internationale,” the global anthem of socialists and communists. An elated Taro enthusiastically joins in.
Taro has scooped the photographers—she has shown a major loyalist victory. And she’s thirsty for more.
WASHINGTON, D.C.
It is July 8, and Gellhorn and Hemingway are heading to the White House, where they are to have dinner with the Roosevelts and present a private screening of The Spanish Earth. Gellhorn has a personal friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt, via family connections, and she has long been trying to open the First Lady’s eyes to the Spanish situation.
That evening, after eating a runny, thin soup that Hemingway disdains, everyone watches the film. To the visiting couple’s delight, the president offers insightful comments, suggesting ways to create a stronger antifascist message. But Roosevelt does not change his political position. The United States will remain uninvolved in Spain.
PARIS
