In Europe

by Geert Mak

  Chapter TWENTY-TWO

  AmsterdamBarcelona

  BARCELONA IS LIKE A SLOVENLY WOMAN WITH BEAUTIFUL EYES. AN unattractive city with lovely neighbourhoods and sometimes gorgeous buildings. A glorious city with terrible neighbourhoods. A city, too, that has trouble coming to terms with itself. When you walk through Barcelona's city centre, there are three things that strike you.

  First there is the stunning uniformity, even for a tourist haven. The shoemakers, barbers, greengrocers, news-stands, cafés and haberdasheries, the endlessly varied mercantilism that once dominated Las Ramblas, have been replaced almost entirely by boutiques and souvenir shops. The news-stands all have the same assortment of papers, magazines and other printed matter, almost all the bistros serve the same brand of instant paella, the souvenir shops all offer an almost identical collection of bric-a-brac.

  Secondly, there is the absence of Spain. Barcelona is French, Italian, Mediterranean, and above all itself. Graffiti, manuals, children's books, newspapers, all of them are in Catalan, even the instructions on the ticket machines. The Spanish nation? There will be none of that here, thank you.

  The third, striking phenomenon is the absence of historical markers. Like the Spanish nation, the twentieth century here has simply been glossed over. During the last century a great deal of fighting has gone on in a great many European cities, and all of them deal differently with their bullet holes. In what was once East Berlin they are still to be found, especially on street corners and in doorways, though their number is dwindling fast. Ah, one realises then, back in 1945 there must have been a troublesome sniper over there. In Barcelona you must look very closely to uncover any of that. On Las Ramblas, for example, in the doorway of a clothing shop on the corner of the Carrer Deca Canula, the faint signs of a gun battle are visible behind layers of plaster. Or at the Telephone Building on the Plaça de Catalunya: today an office building with a cafeteria and a shop selling mobile phones, but back then the centre of all communication and the site of a historic battle. But only if you examine the outside of the building will you see the shadows of a few direct hits. Not a hole in sight, not a plaque to be seen. Nowhere is so much war so carefully dusted away.

  In late December 1936, the English writer and adventurer Eric Blair, better known as George Orwell, had the feeling of having entered a city where the working class was truly in control for the first time. He had come to Barcelona to volunteer for militia service. By that time the city had been in the hands of the revolutionaries for five months, and under the anarchists a thousand collectives had blossomed forth. All the walls were covered with revolutionary posters. Almost every building of any size had been occupied by workers and festooned with red or black flags. Every café and every shop had been collectivised. No one said ‘señor’ or ‘don’, everyone addressed the other as ‘comrade’ or ‘you’. Tipping was forbidden. ‘Well dressed’ ladies and gentlemen were no longer seen, everyone wore work clothes, blue overalls, a militia uniform. There were almost no bullfights in the city any more. ‘For some reason all the best matadors were fascist.’

  ‘All this was queer and moving,’ Orwell wrote. ‘There was much in it I did not understand, in some way I did not even like it, but I recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.’ He signed up with one of the militias of the radical leftist Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, the POUM, a choice he barely thought about at the time but which was to have far-reaching consequences. In the POUM militia, all orders were up for discussion. The training most badly needed – how to take cover, how to handle weapons – was never provided. The youthful recruits were taught only to march. ‘This mob of eager children, who were going to be thrown into the front line in a few days’ time, were not even taught how to fire a rifle or pull the pin out of a bomb.’ Later he would discover why: there was not a single rifle to be found in the whole training camp. Only with great difficulty was Orwell finally able to arrange a weapon for himself: a rusty German Mauser dating from 1896. But, as he wrote matter-of-factly, a modern mechanised army was not something one could organise from one day to the next, and had the republicans waited until their own troops were well trained, Franco would have encountered no resistance at all.

  The front line Orwell was sent to lay within sight of Zaragoza, a narrow strip of lights ‘like the portholes of a ship’. Little happened in the months that followed, except for the occasional attack by night. ‘In trench warfare five things are important: firewood, food, tobacco, candles and the enemy. In the winter on the Zaragoza front they were important in that order, with the enemy at last.’ In lieu of ammunition, the opposing parties exchanged volleys of words: ‘Viva España! Viva Franco!’ Or: ‘Fascistas – mari-cones!’ In the long run a special shouting unit was even set up, and on the republican side this catcalling was raised to a fine art. Orwell describes how, on an icy cold night, someone from a neighbouring trench shouted to his fascist neighbours across the way only what he – ostensibly – was having to eat. ‘“Buttered toast!” one heard his voice echo through the dark valley. “We're just sitting down to buttered toast over here! Lovely slices of buttered toast!”’ No one on either side had actually seen toast or butter for weeks or even months, but mouths watered along both sides of the front.

  In April 1937 Orwell returned to Barcelona: in three and a half months the city had completely changed. Now there were normal avenues along which the rich, dressed in elegant summer attire, drove their shiny cars, and along which officers in the well tailored khaki uniforms of the People's Army strolled, the automatic pistols that were almost impossible to find at the front hanging from their belt clips. It was as though there had never been a revolution. The bourgeoisie had simply put on overalls and laid low for six months.

  What shocked Orwell the most was the hardening of the political climate. At the front he had never noticed any rivalry between anarchists, communists and other political factions. In faraway Barcelona, however, it seemed that a systematic campaign had been set rolling to discredit the anarchist and POUM militias, in favour of the People's Army. No more heed was paid to the muddied soldier home from the front. The radio and the communist press passed along the most malicious rumours about the ‘poorly trained’ and ‘undisciplined’ militias, while the People's Army – in accordance with the best practices of Soviet propaganda – was systematically referred to as ‘heroic’. In actual fact, it was the militias which had held the front lines for more than six months, while the soldiers of the People's Army were receiving their training behind the lines.

  Like so many international volunteers, Orwell had no idea at first what kind of a war it was in which he found himself. He had simply gone to Spain to fight ‘against the fascists’ and had ended up more or less by accident in the POUM militia. It was only there that he saw that a revolution was underway within the republic as well, that because of that war the anarchists had been forced to surrender one revolutionary ‘asset’ after the other; in this internal struggle, the communists were not on the side of the revolution; on the contrary, they were on the side of the extreme right. In both Madrid and Barcelona, countless battles were fought for control over certain organisations and committees. The number of killings back and forth steadily increased, and slowly the anarchist ministers lost their grip on their followers.

  These internal tensions came to a head in spring 1937. Ever since the coup, the Telephone Building in Barcelona had been in anarchist hands. An anarchist collective listened in on all telephone conversations, and if a conversation did not please the listener, the connection was simply broken. At one point that became too much, even in revolutionary Barcelona. On Monday, 3 May, the communist police commissioner and his men tried to storm the building. That resulted in a gun battle, and soon barricades were thrown up. The communists moved into Hotel Colón, diagonally opposite the Telephone Building.

  There was grim fighting in the streets in the days that followed, with the communists and the police on one side, the anar
chists and left-wing radicals on the other. The POUM, which had a considerable following in Barcelona, was one of the first to man the barricades. In the end, in a radio broadcast, the anarchist minister Frederica Montseney ordered her people to stop fighting. The local anarchists were enraged, ‘they pulled out their pistols and shot the radio to pieces,’ an eyewitness said. ‘They were absolutely furious, but they obeyed nonetheless.’

  According to the most widely held view, this civil war in miniature was little more than the police's way of getting even with the anarchists. Those who fought alongside the anarchists, however, said it was more than that: it was the clash between those who wanted the revolution to continue, and those who wanted to control it and slow it down. The communist press granted the affair even greater import. They claimed it had been part of a plan to bring down the government, a conspiracy cooked up by the POUM. Even worse: it was a fascist plot to sow discord and ultimately cripple the republic. The POUM was denounced as ‘Franco's fifth column’, a ‘Trotskyite’ organisation of infiltrators and turncoats in close contact with the fascists.

  Eyewitnesses from the Telephone Building tell a different story. There was nothing like a planned conspiracy, they say. No backup troops were brought into the city beforehand, no supplies stockpiled. There were no preparations whatsoever, and there was no plan. It was nothing more than a street brawl, said Orwell, who had been in the thick of it, ‘a very bloody riot, because both sides had firearms in their hands and were willing to use them’.

  For the communists, however, this ‘plot’ remained a good excuse to stamp out their anti-Stalinist rivals. A few weeks later, the whole POUM leadership was arrested. The POUM itself was declared an illegal organisation, all of the POUM's offices, hospitals, assistance centres and bookshops were seized and its militias disbanded. A general manhunt began for former POUM supporters, who were often militia members just back from the front. Hundreds if not thousands of POUM members, including at least a dozen foreign volunteers, disappeared under mysterious circumstances.

  Orwell escaped this witch-hunt by the skin of his teeth. His commander and comrade, the Belgian engineer George Kopp, was less fortunate. Kopp had given up everything to fight against the fascists in Spain, he had spent the whole winter at the front, during the brawl in Barcelona he had acted as a mediator and saved dozens of lives; his reward was to be thrown into prison by the Spanish and Russian communists, with no charges brought and no trial held. Orwell and his wife moved heaven and earth to have Kopp released. During the first few months they received a few letters from him, smuggled out of prison by others who had been released. Those letters always had the same refrain: dark and filthy cells, too little to eat, chronic illness, no medical care. At last, the letters stopped arriving, and the Orwells assumed that Kopp had disappeared forever into one of the secret prisons. As by miracle, however, he survived the ‘international solidarity’.

  At the end of his Homage to Catalonia, George Orwell does something unique: he issues a warning to the reader:‘Beware of my partisanship, my mistakes of fact, and the distortion inevitably caused by my having seen only one corner of events.’ Such honesty is a rare thing.

  No other war has ever had as many lies told about it as the Spanish Civil War. Everything, but everything, is covered in a thick layer of propaganda, and even today historians have the greatest difficulty coming close to something like the truth. We know almost nothing about how all those people like Kopp, those 130,000 victims of terror from the left and from the right, met their end, or why, or where their tormented bodies were buried.

  The only concrete evidence we possess are the eyewitness reports. The only former foreign volunteer I knew well lived in California, in Oakland. He drove around in a cream sports car, he wore an oriental shawl and he talked all the time about Betsy, Betsy, his new love. His name was Milton Wolff, he was in his late seventies, and he had been the last commander of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade of American volunteers. He was twenty-three at the time.

  In two years’ time his battalion had gone through eight commanders – four were killed, four were badly wounded – and Milton was number nine. In 1938, Ernest Hemingway wrote of him that he was only still alive by virtue of ‘the same hazard that leaves one tall palm tree standing where a hurricane has passed.’ Milton had remained standing through the fiery bloodbath at Brunete, the slaughterhouse of Fuentes and the snows of Teruel. This was the same man who drove the cream car.

  The last time I saw Milton was in 1993, during a sunny meal with Californian friends. He was still a tall, handsome man, and there was a girlfriend in the background then as well, half his age, as always. He had worked for the British Secret Service during the Second World War, including a stint in Burma, and later on he had served as an American intelligence service liaison officer with the communist resistance in Yugoslavia and Italy. After the war the American government treated him, like many other former Spanish volunteers, to the fascinating title of ‘premature anti-fascist’. An army career, therefore, was out of the question for him. Even in his eighties he was still out to improve the world: collecting medicine for Cuba and financing ambulances and local clinics in Nicaragua.

  That afternoon in 1993, Milton was in a sombre mood. ‘They're dropping like flies these days, all my old comrades.’ He mumbled something about the ‘bastards’ who had ruined it all, then turned his attention to my girlfriend's blonde locks. The squirrels were running along the tops of the fences. From the kitchen we could hear our hostess flattening used cans with a hammer, for the collective recycling service: metal with metal, compost with compost, paper with paper.

  ‘It was simply a temporary and local phase in an enormous game that is being played over the whole surface of the earth,’ George Orwell wrote. ‘But it lasted long enough to have its effect upon anyone who experienced it. However much one cursed at the time, one realised afterwards that one had been in contact with something strange and valuable. One had been in a community where hope was more normal than apathy or cynicism, where the word “comrade” stood for comradeship and not, as in most countries, for humbug. One had breathed the air of equality.’

  Right after the civil war broke out, German and Italian aid to Franco began pouring in: Junkers, Heinkels and Messerschmitts, technicians and pilots, guns and munitions, thousands of volunteers. It was, in part, a purely commercial transaction: Franco sold the Germans one mining concession after another. The Americans, ostensibly neutral, provided oil and 12,000 trucks. In their eyes, a ‘fascist’ coup posed less of a risk than a ‘communist’ revolution.

  The republic received support from Mexico, which immediately sent 20,000 rifles. All republican eyes were fixed on France, where the left wing Popular Front was in power at the time. French friends of the republic quickly arranged for the transport of more than seventy airplanes, but then the assistance stopped. Britain was determined not to be drawn into another unclear conflict on the continent, and France followed suit. ‘Appeasement’ was the key word in those years; that is to say, the containment of dictatorships by means of patience and prudence, the very opposite of the bellicosity of 1914.

  And so it happened that, on 8 August, 1936, France closed the Spanish border to all military transports. This inevitably forced the republic into the arms of the only ally they had left: the communists and Stalin's Soviet Union. With that, their fate was sealed in the very first weeks of the war.

  The part of the country where Milton Wolff once fought lies along today's national highway N420, about a hundred kilometres south-west of Barcelona, behind the bungalows and the filling stations. Here were his positions, amid the olive trees in the quiet hills close to Gandesa. From his memoirs: ‘A lone plane appeared and circled over the hills. A lull … And finally the entire hill seemed to come alive with shouting and shooting and exploding grenades, and then it was over.’ For him, that was a crucial moment: it was when he lost contact with his battalion. Ascó, this must be the ‘poor brown village’ where he hid. Behind that
the Ebro, which he finally swam across to get through the lines. The water is wild and red.

  Further along, Calaceite and Alcañiz lie baking in the sun, all their shutters closed. Two old women are sitting before their houses in knitted vests; the rest of the city is either asleep or dead, there's no telling which. Along the road you constantly come across flattened foxes, rabbits, badgers, weasels and partridges. Above the mountaintops hangs an endless roll of cloud, folded back on itself like a duvet. The customers at the roadside restaurant are salesmen and truck drivers, the waitress silently serves up today's special, for there is nothing else to be had: salad, stuffed aubergine, stewed rabbit.

  Heading west, the countryside becomes more rugged. The hills fade into an almost treeless plain. The earth is hard and bristly, the hot wind whistles around my van. Every once in a while the road curves through a brown, silent village. This area is littered with the cadavers of abandoned farms, houses, shops, cloisters. Behind almost every ruin lies a tragedy, although there is no telling which. What, for example, is the story behind that row of fallen houses, ten kilometres or so past Gandesa? Were they burned down during the civil war, or abandoned in the 1960s when better days never arrived? And that enormous imploded house close to Alcañiz, did it simply fall down, or did soldiers blow it up? This is the old Ebro Front, where the republicans mustered all their forces in summer 1938 for a four month, last-ditch stand. Only in Belchite, an abandoned village to the East, is the war still tangible: a few piles of debris and collapsed walls, a roofless church, one and a half trees, a cross of iron. In March 1938, Milton Wolff and his Abraham Lincoln battalion were among the last group of republican soldiers in the village; his commander was killed, then they were all swept away by Franco's tanks. More than 6,000 men were killed on both sides. The ruins were recently used as a backdrop for TV commercials for the Dutch Army: ‘We perform peace-keeping missions.’