The Spanish daily Público reports: Spain’s Institute of Cinematography and Audiovisual Arts has uploaded to the Ministry of Culture’s youtube channel a selection of 93 film documents from its historical archive and from the Spanish Civil War holdings of Spain’s Filmoteca. Many of the Civil War documentaries were included on a wonderful DVD collection...
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A day after the landslide conservative victory in Spain’s general elections on Sunday, the Association for the Recovery of Historical Memory (ARMH) has announced the discovery of the remains of Nicomedes Fernández, miner from the town of Nerva (Huelva) who was killed in February 1938 at age 34. The new government of Mariano Rajoy,...
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I had come to Burgos from New York City in order to lend my presence in representing the families of the former prisoners at San Pedro de Cardeña. My father, Lincoln Brigade Veteran Hy Wallach, had been incarcerated there during 1938-1939. The ensuing events of the weekend would repeatedly bring to mind the...
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Nancy Wallach, daughter of Lincoln vet Hy Wallach, spoke recently at a gathering in the former concentration campo of San Pedro de Cardeña, where the Francoists held her father, along with Sidney Rosenblatt, Max Parker, Carl Geiser and many other IB prisoners of war (see the Jaily News blog). This is the...
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It was in 2006 that I first saw this phrase, on a button worn by a young man on the uptown 6 train. I was on the subway heading up to the Museum of the City of New York for a meeting related to the exhibition “Facing Fascism: New York and the Spanish Civil...
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Felipe Blasco sends us a detailed report on the IB tribute in Barcelona, with some nice pictures of the Friends and Family of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade. Read the report (in Spanish) here.
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The Associazione Italiana Combattenti Volontari Antifascisti di Spagna (AICVAS) has posted a video report of the events surrounding the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades. Watch it here.
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Jim Jump writes: This image was seen by millions of TV viewers in Britain and Spain during the live broadcast on Saturday night (November 12th) of an England-Spain soccer game in London (which Spain lost, by the way). The placard appeared on screen for several seconds during the two-minute silence for Britain’s war dead...
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The commemorations celebrating the 75th anniversary of the founding of the International Brigades came at the very end of a strange never-ending summer. The blue skies that presided over inauguration of the new monument to the IB in Madrid in October were gone within a day or two. On a cool, overcast day earlier...
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Fanny Schoonheyt, the tall, blond “queen of the machine gun,” was the only Dutch woman to join in the battle action during the Spanish Civil War. Her life is shrouded in mystery. Could she have been the only female foreign official in the Republican Army? What was her involvement in the events of May...
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Luis Buñuel: The Red Years, 1929-1939, due to be published next month with the University of Wisconsin Press (excerpt, order), reveals scores of unknown facts about the life and work of Luis Buñuel during a crucial decade not only in the filmmaker’s life but in the history of film and photography—as well...
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Among the sources of information about Buñuel's activities during the first few weeks of the war: is a receipt signed dated 25 August 1936, for a loan of £490 granted by Leo Fleischman, an engineer from New York who enlisted in the Fifth Regiment and died in combat in October 1936.
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Olavi Kantola was a Finnish-American volunteer in the International Brigades. This text by Alina Flinkman appeared in the Finnish magazine "Vaku" in 1941.
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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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Under the heading “New theories about a 20th century icon” El País reports that José Luis Alcaine has found extremely interesting parallels between the film version of Hemingway’s novel A Farewell to Arms, and Picasso’s Guernica. Alcaine, a director of photography who has worked with Pedro Almodóvar and Victor Erice, summarises his conclusions...
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Today I’d like to share with you my honest understanding of what has been going on in Spain over the last few weeks. It’s not easy to make sense of what’s going on; the mainstream Spanish press, in my opinion, has been getting things quite wrong, or else ignoring the situation, except in its...
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Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, members of ALBA, representatives of the Puffin Foundation, authorities, amigas y amigos:
Seventy-five years ago in my country, Spain, one of the darkest and saddest chapters in the history of humanity began. It lasted more than forty years and even today, after 34 years of democracy, it has not...
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I would like to add a note on Picasso's sketch on a copy of Paris-Soir of April 19th, 1937. Since my piece was published in The Volunteer I have come across some new information that links the evidence on Picasso's initial engagement with the Spanish Civil War at the end of 1936 and...
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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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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