Antifascistas, the exhibit on British volunteers in the Spanish Civil War organized by the International Brigade Memorial Trust, opened earlier this month in Manchester, after a successful couple of months in London. Review here.
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The 35th Toronto International Film Festival is featuring the North American premiere of Alex de la Iglesia's new Spanish Civil War film, Balada triste de trompeta (The Last Circus; trailer here):
a wild and hilarious film that exposes the nature of political conflicts in his country’s recent history. Set...
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Peter Wong reviews Army of Crime, a new film on the French Resistance during WWII, which is running this coming week at the San Francisco Sundance Kabuki:
A riveting political thriller, Robert Guediguian’s historical drama “Army of Crime” spices the summer filmgoing season with an enthralling ensemble portrait of heroic...
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Bernard Knox, renowned classicist and Spanish Civil War veteran, died this week, age 95. From the New York Times obit:
An American born and raised in Britain, Bernard Knox led a life as richly textured as the classics he interpreted for modern readers. After studying classics at Cambridge, he fought with...
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In an op-ed for today's issue of Público, the writer Félix Población, inspired by a resolution adopted in June by the Friends and Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade (FFALB), argues it is high time that Madrid names a street after Oliver Law, the Brigade's African American commander, who died in the summer...
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Read British journalist David Eade's article on recent revelations about illicit adoptions of babies by Francoist families:
In wider Spain during the Franco era it has been established that children were indeed taken from their parents without their knowledge and passed on to an adoptive family. It is reported Judge Baltasar...
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An anonymous short story just posted on the Experience Project: He was from London and unemployed in the mid 1930’s and feeling ever more bolshevik by the day – so, he signed up to go to Spain and fight Franco and Hitler – and that Mussolini person. … My grandfather worked in an engineering...
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Ronan Bennett, writing in the Guardian to lament the demise of the UK Film Council, fondly recalls a recent documentary project based on the memoirs of Stuart Christie, the legendary Anarchist bookseller (with the world's best SCW film website), who in 1963 helped conspire to kill the victor of the...
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Gilberto Bosques (1892-1995), the Mexican diplomat who saved thousands of lives of anti-fascist European refugees in the wake of the Spanish Civil War and the outbreak of World War II, has been honored with the opening of his own museum in Puebla, La Jornada reports. Mexican president Lázaro Cárdenas appointed Bosques consul to...
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The Spanish labor party (PSOE) has denounced the removal of plaques commemorating the victims of executions from the walls of the cemetery of Granada, Europa Press reports. The plaques have been removed by the Granada city government, run by the conservative Partido Popular (PP), The plaques had been put up a couple of days earlier, at...
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The Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA) is an educational non-profit dedicated to promoting social activism and the defense of human rights. ALBA’s work is inspired by the American volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). Learn more at our website or
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Despite their name, the famous International Brigades of Spain’s Republican Army included thousands of Spanish soldiers who served alongside the foreign volunteers. Among them was César Orquín, an anarchist from Valencia who served as a commissar in the Lincoln Battalion. Details of his extraordinary life, long shrouded in mystery and scandal, have recently come...
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Over the many years I spent researching the presence of the International Brigades in the town of Vic and its surroundings, in northern Catalonia, I’d always been curious about the case of Simon Bulka, a medical captain, and his wife, the nurse Chrissie Wallace, both from Scotland, who were assigned to the International Hospital...
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The lives of Ruth and Haya Meites, two sisters who left Jewish Palestine in order to help Republican Spain in its struggle against fascism, illustrate the level of international women’s participation in the Spanish Civil War—and its limits.
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“Oh, you were a premature antifascist,” the chair of the Yale Classics department replied to Bernard Knox when, during a job interview in 1946, Knox told him about his stint with the International Brigades preceding his US army service during World War II. “I was taken aback,” Knox wrote later. “If you were not...
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Contemporary Spanish photographers are finding new ways to return to the memory of the Civil War, departing from the sober documentary approach that was dominant until recently.
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We talk about the “return” of Picasso’s Guernica to Spain, even though that massive painting had never been here before its “repatriation” in 1981. The magnificent show “Ben Shahn: On Non-Conformity” curated by Laura Katzman and on display until February 26 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, elicits a similar sense:...
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Richard Rothman is Special Pro Bono Counsel to Weil Law Firm, where he previously served as co-head of Complex Commercial Litigation. In 2023, Rich was honored with the New York Law Journal’s prestigious Lifetime Achievement Award. In his forthcoming memoir Finding Ruby, Rothman explores the lives of two grandfathers of his who fought with...
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Mark L. Asquino (born in 1949) is a Foreign Service officer who retired in 2015 after a long career with postings including in Latin America, Europe, Central Asia, and Africa. Asquino’s memoir, Spanish Connections (2023), narrates a diplomatic journey that ended in Equatorial Guinea, Spain’s only former colony in sub-Saharan Africa, where he served...
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When IB vet Hans Maslowski visited his family in East Berlin in 1969, he gave them a Spanish fan signed in 1938 by 31 fellow antifascists. More than 50 years later, his great-nephew finds out who they were.
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Marianne Angermann, a young German biochemist, joined a Madrid lab in late 1935 to work with her compatriot Franz Bielschowsky, a Jewish refugee who’d been there since 1933. When the war broke out the following year, both decided stay in Spain and serve the Republican war effort as medical personnel. Marianne’s letters to her...
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ALBA's project to provide a complete list of the more than 2,800 individuals who left from U.S. territory to fight with the Spanish Republic
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