The Volunteer vol. 35 no. 4 December 2018

Vol. XXXV, No.4

December 2018

FOUNDED IN 1937 BY THE VOLUNTEERS OF THE LINCOLN BRIGADE. PUBLISHED BY THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE ARCHIVES (ALBA)

Fighting Fascism— Then & Now

ALBA’s Film Festival (p. 3) The Civil War in Comics (p. 12) Spaniards in Mauthausen (p. 9)

Conmemorating the 80th anniversary of the Despedida of the International Brigades.

Barcelona, October 2018. Photo Javier Monsalve

Dear Friends,

Editor Print Edition Peter N. Carroll Editor Online Edition www.albavolunteer.org Sebastiaan Faber Associate Editor Aaron B. Retish Book Review Editor Joshua Goode Graphic Design www.eyestormx.com Editorial Assistance Phil Kavanaugh Manuscripts, inquiries, and letters to the editor may be sent by email to info@alba-valb.org The editors reserve the right to modify texts for length and style.

Books for review may be sent to Joshua Goode Claremont Graduate University Blaisdell House, #5, 143 East 10th Street Claremont, CA 91711

www.albavolunteer.org 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). Drawing on the ALBA collections in New York University’s Tamiment Library, and working to expand such collections, ALBA works to preserve the legacy of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade as an inspiration for present and future generations.

IN THIS ISSUE p 3 Film Festival p 5 Back in the Classroom p 6 Watt Essay Awards p 9 Spaniards in Mauthausen p 11 Anniversary Despedida p 12 SCW in Comic Books p 14 Tribute to Ivens p 16 Fredericka Martin p 17 New Zealand Volunteers p 19 Bob Smillie’s Prison Dossier p 21 Book Reviews p 23 Contributions 2 THE VOLUNTEER December 2018

239 W. 14th Street, Suite 2 New York, NY 10011 (212) 674-5398 www.alba-valb.org

For those of us who think a lot about the 1930s, it’s hard to follow current events and not be reminded of the time when fascism began its rapid expansion. As we prepare this issue for print, we are shocked by the anti-Semitic hate crime at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh. This past April, ALBA presented a professional development seminar at another Squirrel Hill Temple just five minutes away. “We are incredibly saddened, grieving and angry,” our friends in Pittsburgh write to us. “We are nonetheless encouraged by the solidarity in our beloved neighborhood of Squirrel Hill, which in addition to being a longstanding Jewish neighborhood is a neighborhood of immigrants where interactions are fluid and dynamic, in the city of Pittsburgh at large, and beyond. Even though this tragedy has its heart in Squirrel Hill, it is a collective one which extends far beyond its parameters.

“Also heartening was the impromptu vigil entirely organized and led by Squirrel Hill Public High School Students. Thousands of people of all backgrounds gathered to mourn together and listen to these thoughtful and eloquent students. It was somber, moving and beautiful. The anger, among the students and the crowd, although subdued given the immediate circumstances, was palpable. I believe this sense of solidarity and the anger, although subdued given people were just murdered, was also palpable among the speakers and the crowd.”

Founded by the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade

The combined feelings of anger and hope are recognizable. Every time we work with high school teachers and students—as we did in October at the Maltz Museum in Beachwood, Ohio, and in November in both New York City and New Jersey (see page 5)—we, too, are encouraged by their commitment, enthusiasm, and interest in the human-rights struggles of the past. They, like us, are deeply worried about the state of the world. And, like us, they are convinced of the importance of human-rights education in the face of the global rise of the radical right. Several new teacher workshops are being planned for the spring.

Our annual essay award, named in honor of Lincoln Veteran George Watt, has now been expanded to include high-school students. This year saw a record number of submissions; you can read about the excellent winning essays on page 6. To bring the stories of the Spanish Civil War to younger audiences, the number of high-quality graphic novels and comics about the history of the war is growing—including a brand-new graphic novel about Oliver Law and the Lincoln Brigade (see page 12).

That the struggle to defend human rights is both urgent and global was clear from the 24 documentary shorts and feature-length films that were selected for ALBA’s annual film festival (see page 3). What’s long been considered the best documentary about the war in Spain, Joris Ivens’s The Spanish Earth, has now become the subject of a new documentary by veteran filmmaker Peter Davis, who is interviewed on page 14. We also interview Sara Brenneis about her new book on the Spaniards at Mauthausen (page 9). (In the next issue, look for a review of a new feature-length Spanish blockbuster on the Catalan photographer Francesc Boix, who was an inmate at the Mauthausen concentration camp and later testified against the Nazis at Nuremberg.)

ALBA, meanwhile, is undergoing transitions, as office staff and Board members depart and new faces appear, about which more news will be forthcoming. As an organization, we are more determined than ever to fulfill our mission—to teach history, inspire activism, and uphold human rights. As you well know, we cannot do this without your help and support. ¡Salud!

Peter N. Carroll & Sebastiaan Faber, editors

Now is the Time to Support Anti-Fascist Education!

ALBA’s Teaching Institutes reach hundreds of educators each year and each teacher reaches hundreds of students each year. Help us expand our programs now!

For more news, features, and articles, see the online edition of The Volunteer at www.albavolunteer.org

Still from “The Silence of Others.”

ALBA’s Human Rights Film Festival Draws Submissions from over 40 Countries and More Than 500 Spectators

By Natalia Chávez Gomes da Silva

ALBA’s seventh annual human rights documentary film festival, Impugning Impunity, drew over 130 submissions from 41 countries. The films focused on topics ranging from historical memory and anti-fascist women to indigenous rights and environment, systemic poverty and migration. In three days, more than 500 spectators saw 24 films. Two documentaries won the Harry Randall Award.

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pholding the values of the US volunteers who fought fascism in the Spanish Civil War, the 2018 festival brought some of the best current Spanish political documentaries on the Civil War (The Silence of Others, Milicianas, Spain in Two Trenches, and several others) as well as Puerto Rico’s struggle for independence (1950: the Nationalist Uprising), experimental animation questioning capital punishment (Loser By Birth) and the poetics of space and intergenerational trauma (Halabja).

Over the course of three days, the audience was able to speak directly with the filmmakers, protagonists, and activists who attended the screenings. This interaction, together with the information revealed in the films, allows the audience to convert the information and emotions provoked by the films into a commitment to activism. The public, in other words, becomes a crucial social actor.

While some of the documentaries dealt with historical events, it was clear that the legacies of the past continue to shape the present, much like a stone thrown into a still lake generates waves. For instance, the effects of what happened during the Spanish Civil War persist to this day—for example, in the quest for justice on behalf of the victims of Francoist repression.

This year’s program played special attention to displacement.

In Exile: A Family Film by Juan Francisco Urrusti (Mexico, 2017) tells the story of a Spanish family that finds itself in Mexico as a result of Civil War. The director of the film, son and grandson of Spanish Republican exiles, masterfully narrates his personal history as it intertwines with those of Spain and Mexico. In Transit by Mariam El Marakeshy (Turkey, 2018), young refugees risk their lives crossing the Aegean Sea to Europe, only to be trapped on the Greek island of Lesbos, with no future and closed borders. Land of Doom by Milad Amin and Ghaith Beram (Syria, 2018), screened in its U.S. premiere, is an intimate and personal recording of civilians’ suffering during the siege of Aleppo.

Winter In Europe (Spain, 2018)—also screened in the U.S. for the first time, and winner of the festival’s best feature—is set behind an old train station in Belgrade, Serbia. There, hun-

dreds of Afghan refugees live through the cold, near toxic fires, and apocalyptic landscapes, waiting to cross the Hungarian border. Monumento by Laura Gabbert (USA, 2017) shows a unique meeting point along the US-Mexico border where family members from both countries can see and speak to one another—but cannot touch each other.

What would you pack? by Sara Gozalo (USA, 2017), produced by the new Sanctuary Coalition, zeroes in on the 25-pound suitcase that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) allows deportees to carry with them. As family members drop off these suitcases, they cannot see their loved one to say goodbye.

Through the drawings and interviews of George Butler, 2,300 Miles To Work (USA, 2018), the winner of the festival award for best short, tells the story of a young economic migrant from Tajikistan travelling to Russia in search of a job. In Franklin Lopez’s A Tale of Two Borders (Canada, 2016), the Anarchist media collective subMedia interviews a number of individuals from the United States and Canada who are helping to chart a course for the future based on solidarity, mutual aid, and open borders.

Other films revealed that war and conflict often affect the body and mind in different ways. The short experimental film Acting Erratically by Tuff Guts (USA, 2018) uses examples of physics phenomena—static, waves, vacuum—to exemplify the December 2018 THE VOLUNTEER 3

Left: Almudena Carracedo speaks with the audience / Some of the filmmakers in attendance. Right: Polo Menárguez, Winner of the Randall Award

and poetic denunciation through a literary heroine in Kyrgyzstan. The spectacular Halabja, 1988 (USA, 2018), by director Faride Sakhaei, is an embodied performance of trauma choreographed by the director and Isabel Umali.

Winners of the Harry Randall Award were Tom Brown’s 2,300 Miles to Work (best documentary short) and Winter in Europe, by Polo Menárguez (best documentary feature). The jury was composed of Kathy Brew, noted documentarian and veteran programmer currently serving as the Guest Curator for MoMA's Doc Fortnight; Paco de Onís, Executive Director of Skylight, a media company dedicated to advancing social justice through storytelling; and Matt Porwoll, an Emmy-awardwinning cinematographer based in New York.

relationship that women and gender-non-conforming people of color establish with a system that mentally violates them. They are bombarded with contradictory expectations that, if not fulfilled, result in disqualification of their faculties, as occurred in diagnoses of hysteria. Along similar lines, the short Loser by Birth, by student Cole Bankston (USA, 2017), brilliantly uses stop-motion, ink, and watercolor on toilet paper to animate the life story of an inmate who was sentenced to death. Books Are My Weapon, by Alice Obar (USA, 2017), tells the story of a librarian in Brooklyn who started a homelessness outreach program. In Julie Mallozzi’s Circle Up (USA, 2017), a mother reaches out to the murderer of her teenage son to offer a chance at forgiveness.

Closing the festival were two films with a deeply personal and feminist outlook. Djamilia (France, 2018), shot in super-8 by the French director Aminatou Echard, braids mythology, tradition

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Attending speakers included filmmakers Tània Balló, Almudena Carracedo, Sara Gozalo, Polo Menárguez, Alice Obar, Farideh Sakheifar, Mollly Stuart, Juan Francisco Urrusti, Professors Josephine Labanyi, Juana Suarez, María H. Ojeda, ICP’s curator Cynthia Young, choreographer Isabel Umali, activists Ravi Ragbir from the New Sanctuary Coalition, Paul Harris from Black Youth Project, and Donald Peebles.

Special thanks to our sponsors: Downtown Community Television Center, the Center for Constitutional Rights, Puffin Foundation, King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center, La Nacional, Estrella Galicia, Natural Merchants, and Manhattan Edit Workshop.

Credits: Marina Garde, director and producer; Ruth Somalo, associate director and programmer; Alec Lane, screening committee; Patrick C. Offenheiser, screening committee; Jacqueline N. Manuel, outreach coordinator; Adam Maida, graphic designer; Max Resnik, projectionist.

Born in Bolivia, Natalia Chávez Gomes da Silva is pursuing an MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at New York University. Her short-story collection Humedad won the National Award of the Santa Cruz de la Sierra Municipal Government in 2010.

Teachers at the NYC institute

ALBA’s Back in the Classroom “When can we do this again?”

The Ohio high-school teachers who joined ALBA’s workshop in Beachwood, Ohio, this past October 12, left inspired—and wanting more.

Teachers of all political stripes seek educational materials that link the past to the present.

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ear the end of a long day of teaching,

a social studies teacher with years of experience in the classroom broke the rules and called out (without raising her hand), “When can we do this again?”

The day-long workshop on “The United States and World Fascism: Human Rights from the Spanish Civil War to Nuremberg and Beyond,” was held at the Maltz Museum of Jewish Heritage as part of the slate of professional-development offerings through the North Eastern Ohio Education Association and with support from Ohio Humanities, state-based partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities.

The ALBA program for secondary-school teachers of social studies and language arts (especially Spanish and English teachers) focuses on a carefully selected anthology of primary sources that range from letters written by volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade about their reasons for going to Spain to published essays by journalists and politicians as well as literary pieces (poetry, short fiction) that can be used in a variety of classrooms. In addition to written materials, ALBA’s instructors in Ohio, Sebastiaan Faber and Peter Carroll, introduced compelling visual sources—posters, photographs, paintings, newsreel clips, and oral histories made decades ago.

We find that teachers of all political stripes seek educational materials that link the past to the present. Today, there’s a special fascination with issues related to fascism and anti-fascism and the dilemmas associated with extending human rights.

The history of Spain’s Civil War is a benchmark for addressing those issues, which extend to the origins of World War II and the Nuremberg tribunals that attempted to define war crimes and punishments, culminating in the postwar creation of the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights.

Among related issues that appeal to teachers are matters of ethnicity and race, class and gender—topics that can be traced for decades through the 20th century into our own times. For example, we ask questions about the rights of refugees, then and today, and encourage teachers to develop teaching tools that will engage their students.

The Maltz Museum was a particularly appropriate setting, since it sponsors its own programs for teacher education including an anti-racist “Stop the Hate” essay contest for high school students and provides a Hate Map room installation to identify fascist-type organizations around the United States.

We’re already making plans to go back to Ohio!

Three weeks later, ALBA drew nearly 50 New York City teachers to its annual professional development day held at the King Juan Carlos Center of NYU on Election Day in November.

The next day, Peter Carroll and ALBA’s new Board member Maria Hernández Ojeda brought the educational packages to Bergen County Academies in New Jersey, providing workshops for more social studies and Spanish teachers.

We’re on a roll! Please be generous in supporting ALBA’s Teaching Institutes as we carry on anti-fascist lessons around the country.

Teacher comments: This was the most organized and intriguing professional workshop I have participated in! Thank you!

I would love to return or host you again. I have so much more learning to do!

Thank you very much! I’m so happy I came! This is going to enrich my classes so much. Very well organized, very useful material.

The human rights perspective is so important for developing citizens.

I truly enjoyed this workshop, the presenters, the venue, everything.

Every teacher I spoke with at the conclusion of the day was truly inspired to design and deliver a lesson that integrates the content and resources. —Tim Casperson, District Supervisor of Humanities, Bergen County, NJ Every teacher that passes through these institutes is truly amazed.

—Sergei Alschen, Social Studies teacher, Bergen Academies, NJ

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The Duchess of Atholl (right) with a Mexican diplomat and his wife on board the refugee ship, the SS Sinaia, 1939. Marx Memorial Library, London.

Watt Prize Draws Record Number of Submissions

By Aaron Retish

This year’s George Watt Essay contest for the best student writing on the Spanish Civil War is receiving well-deserved attention from around the world as a record number of students submitted their essays and poetry, nearly doubling the previous number of submissions last year.

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Píriz-González of the University of Salamanca wrote the winning entry in the graduate student category for “Propaganda de exterminio: la Quinta Columna como psicosis colectiva” (Propaganda of Extermination: The Fifth Column as Collective Psychosis), a chapter of his dissertation on the idea of the Fifth Column in the Spanish Civil War. Píriz-González analyzes the origins of the myth of the Fifth Column and how it was used in propaganda and politics to mobilize the people. Based on deep archival research and using diverse sources, including cartoons and posters, this dissertation illuminates an important overlooked theme that permeated the Spanish Civil War and continues to the present day. arlos

ALBA also awarded three prizes in the undergraduate category. Eric Ryan-Inkson of the University of Leeds prepared a well-researched essay “A Historical Repositioning of the Duchess of Atholl as an Influential Humanitarian During the Spanish Civil War” that uncovers the important work of Duchess Katherine Stewart-Murray in saving refugees from the Spanish Civil War. Drawing on archives in Scotland and England, Ryan-Inkson weaves together British politics, ideas of non-intervention, and humanitarianism. Christian Culton of the University of California, Santa Cruz received a prize for his essay, “Nationalist Propaganda During the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939): Appeals for International Support and the Western Fear of Communism.” The prize jury was especially impressed by how Culton discussed the overlooked topic of Nationalist propaganda and his wide range of sources. The collaborative essay by Eva Ackerman, Dana Gold, and Amanda Wessel of Bryn Mawr College, “Internacionalismo judío en contextos geográficos: Investigando los motivos complejos para la participación judía de los Estados Unidos, Argentina y Palelstina en la Guerra Civil Española”

(Jewish Internationalism in Geographical Context: An Investigation of the Complex Motives of Jewish Participation in the Spanish Civil War from the United States, Argentina and Palestine) is a very well-documented essay examining why Jews in three different nations chose to fight in the Spanish Civil War. The pre-collegiate category received over 40 submissions this year, many from students of teachers who have attended ALBA’s teaching institutes. The jury awarded two prizes, one in fiction and another in non-fiction. Joselinne Piedras-Sarabia, of GPISD CTE Early College High School in Houston, Texas has written a beautifully constructed, harrowing story about child abduction during the Spanish Civil War in “Madre, ella todavía está aquí.”

The co-authored essay by Lily Jensen and Emma Easton, “From Guernica to Aleppo: The Price of Civilian Bombing in the Spanish Civil War” examines how modern bombing of civilian targets began in the Spanish Civil War, continued through World War II and is still being used today.

Well-written and well-argued, the paper demonstrates how bombing of civilian targets actually builds solidarity rather than breaking morale. Jensen and Easton are students of ALBA teaching institute alum George Snook at Packer Collegiate Institute in Brooklyn.

The jury for the Watt award was comprised of Angela Giral (Columbia University), Josh Goode (Claremont Graduate University), Gina Herrmann (University of Oregon), Jo Labanyi (New York University) and Aaron Retish (Wayne State University). The George Watt Memorial Essay award honors the memory of Abraham Lincoln Brigade veteran George Watt (19141994), a social worker, writer, and lifelong activist central to the creation of ALBA.

Mika Etchebéhère in Spain, 1936 6 THE VOLUNTEER December 2018

Graduate Award Carlos Píriz González Since the concept of the Fifth Column was publicized for the first time at the beginning of October 1936, workers’ and revolutionary organizations and the different governments of the Republic used the idea to urge the persecution and extermination of such enemies. A propaganda campaign in the Republican rearguard mobilized society to target the supposed spies, saboteurs and defeatists who worked for the rebels. In addition to rallies and various political acts, the fifth column spawned a visual language in war posters and cartoons. The propaganda campaign was most powerful in the press, as newspapers regularly published news on the Fifth Column. All this made visible something that seemed invisible.

This paper analyzes how this process encouraged an alarmist sensibility, constituting what sociologists and anthropologists have defined as a collective psychosis, focusing on the fear of a (supposed) clandestine army.

Republican institutions and workers’ organizations, along with their respective organs of propaganda, generated such a collective psychosis by using the concept of the Fifth Column as a scapegoat. This influenced the civilian population in the rearguard, especially in the large urban areas. Particularly, the notion of the Fifth Column favored social mobilization, fomenting violence and the elimination of any possible fifth columnist, generating and reviving what in the Francoist imaginary came to be called the Red Terror. This in turn increased the ranks of the fifth-column movement, further enhancing its myth. All this together contributed to the weakening and ultimate defeat of the Republic.

Undergraduate Award Eric Ryan-Inkson This research provides an in-depth analysis of the life, work and politics of Katharine Stewart-Murray, otherwise known as the Duchess of Atholl, and examines the influence of her humanitarian work during the Spanish Civil War. As the head of the National Joint Committee for Spanish Relief (NJC)—the largest aid organization in Britain at the time—and the Basque Children's Committee (BCC), the organization that was responsible for bringing 3,879 Basque Children to the United Kingdom in a groundbreaking evacuation, the Duchess was at the center of the British humanitarian operation in Spain between 1936 and 1939. As Atholl was a Member of Parliament (MP), and an established member of the aristocracy, the Duchess used political, aristocratic and diplomatic channels to achieve humanitarian objectives. Her efforts saved the lives of many civilians, prisoners of war and refugees alike. Atholl petitioned Spanish and international bodies to adhere to

the laws of the Geneva convention and sought to protect the victims of war by publicly condemning attacks on women, children and aid workers. The organizations she headed have been attributed with achieving major humanitarian successes during the conflict.

Yet Atholl's work has long been neglected and forgotten.

Few scholars have studied Atholl in any detail, and have paid even less attention to her work during the Spanish Civil War. This is due to the exceptional character and politics of the Duchess. Atholl lost her seat as MP due to her pro-Republican, anti-fascist politics in 1938. Her sympathetic relationship with the Spanish working-class angered many from her Aristocratic background—and her position on feminism placed her at odds with other prominent humanitarians working in Spain. As a result, the Duchess has never received the recognition for the humanitarian work that she deserves, albeit posthumously.

Christian Culton As Nationalists and Republican soldiers fought in the battlefields of Spain’s rich valleys during the Spanish Civil War, American and British pro-Nationalist propagandists waged a war of their own. In the streets of British and American cities, they distributed pamphlets aimed to delegitimize the Second Spanish Republic by portraying the Republican forces as communists, atheists, and as a threat to Western civilization. To support Francisco Franco’s Nationalists, they aimed to make the case that it was in the interest of the British and American populace to support the fraught “Non-intervention Agreement” (1936). Propagandists, using sophisticated and targeted arguments, appealed to the values of British and American society, arguing that Franco’s Nationalist movement fought for Western principles and that the Republic sought collectivist totalitarianism, anarchy, and a repudiation of the Western legal system. These propagandists, which included Catholic British and American ecclesiastical members, argued that communists and Bolsheviks were to blame for the civilizational decay of Spanish society. By adopting this narrative, the pamphlets employed a skillful twist of circumstance and an effective distortion of reality. Indeed, British and American intervention on the side of the Republic would have likely proved to be disastrous for the Nationalists. And the most effective way to prevent such a situation, it seemed, was to sound the alarm of looming threats to the West: barbarism, totalitarianism, and above all, communism.

Eva Ackerman, Dana Gold, and Amanda Wessel According to recent estimates, almost one quarter of the international volunteers in the Spanish Civil War were Jews, representing numbers disproportionately larger than the populations in their home countries. While previous research focuses more on the leftist ideology of these volunteers, our research analyzes the specific socioDecember 2018 THE VOLUNTEER 7

Republican poster warning against the Fifth Column by Manuel Gallur Latorre

The pre-collegiate category received over 40 submissions this year, many from students of teachers who have attended ALBA’s teaching institutes. cultural motivations of international Jewish populations in New York, Argentina, and Palestine in order to discern how cultural and historical differences prompted the decision to aid the Spanish Republic. We found that American and Argentine Jews were motivated by sentiments of solidarity with Jews in Spain and Europe as a whole. Both groups believed that Franco’s fascist Nationalist movement was a direct attack on fellow Jews. For many, family histories of anti-Semitic pogroms in Europe that prompted migration to the Americas formed the backdrop of this solidarity. Americans in particular felt that fighting with the Republicans served as a forceful protest against fascism. For Argentine Jews, the threat of fascism was perhaps even more present, as Nationalist and right-wing groups were already emerging and perpetrating anti-Semitic violence in Argentina.

Similar political instability in Spain and Argentina made Argentine Jews significantly concerned about containing the spread of fascism. For these reasons, Americans and Argentines felt that fighting fascism abroad served as selfpreservation on the Homefront.

In contrast, many communist Jews living in British Mandate Palestine were pressured to go to Spain by the Yishuv, the Jewish governing body before 1948. Fighting in Spain was an alternative to facing imprisonment by the government for opposing the Zionist project. These cases demonstrate that Jewish populations had diverse motivating factors that can be attributed in part to local sociopolitical contexts at the time of the Spanish Civil War. Nevertheless, their identities as Jews were central to their participation in Spain, perhaps more so than previously recognized.

Pre-Collegiate Category Joselinne Piedras-Sarabia “Madre, Ella todavía está aquí” follows the gutwrenching tale of a young girl growing up in the midst of Spain's civil war. Her sister dies at childbirth, tearing her family apart. Years later, rumors sweep across a bloodstained Madrid—children declared dead were actually sold off in illegal adoptions. The young protagonist must deal with the grisly news and find ways to help seek

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for the missing family member and eventually learn to move on. The feeling that Ella is still there haunts her.

This piece of writing is dedicated to Spain's estimated 300,000 lost children and those grasping onto hope and seeking. The living dead, as some clamor, were shipped into human trafficking. To this day, millions are still protesting, hoping to meet their parents or their children. Many of the siblings or parents looking reported bearing the same feeling; that their lost one was still alive.

Lily Jensen and Emma Easton “From Guernica to Aleppo: The Price of Civilian Bombing in the Spanish Civil War” investigates the unforeseen and far-reaching consequences of the indiscriminate bombing of civilians and cities in the Spanish Civil War. As the first major conflict in which technology was sufficiently suited to targeted aerial raids, the Spanish Civil War acted as a testing ground for many of the military tactics utilized in subsequent wars, and it marked the beginning of an effort to weaken the morale of civilians through a deliberate campaign of terror bombing.

However, the strategy backfired: the bombing instead incensed victims and strengthened their resolve to fight back. Additionally, the air raids on Republican cities by the Nationalists and their German and Italian allies during the Spanish Civil War aroused public outrage across the world, strengthening popular hostility towards the fascist nations and their ideology prior to World War II. However, despite its lack of success, during World War II, the Allies themselves resorted to the extensive use of area bombing which culminated in the use of two atomic bombs in 1945. In virtually every subsequent war from Vietnam to Syria, aggressors have regarded the bombing of civilians as acceptable military practice. Nonetheless, history shows that strategic bombing of civilians was unsuccessful on two critical counts: the practice failed to achieve its primary purpose of incapacitating an enemy by destroying its infrastructure and morale, and it backfired by inspiring civilian resistance and provoking global outrage.

Sara Brenneis on Her New Book

“The Memory of Spaniards in Concentration Camps Has Essentially Been Shut Out”

By Sebastiaan Faber

Few people know that the infamous Nazi concentration camp at Mauthausen was built

by Spanish Republicans who were also its first inmates. This past May, Sara J. Brenneis, an associate professor of Spanish at Amherst College, published Spaniards in Mauthausen (Toronto), which discusses how the Spaniards’ camp experience has been narrated since 1940. This fall also saw the publication of the English translation of The Impostor, in which bestselling Spanish novelist Javier Cercas investigates the life of Enric Marco, a Catalan activist who for years falsely claimed to have passed through a Nazi concentration camp.

An essay by Brenneis on Cercas’s controversial book was published this fall in the Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies. A good moment for an interview.

“The historical memory movement is very much alive in Spain.”

Y ou show that the story of the Spaniards in Mauthausen was long hidden from public view. Would you say your own book is part, or symptom, of the changed way we—and Spaniards—look at the relationship between the Spanish Civil War and World War II? SJB: Absolutely. In the book I look into how 10,000 Spaniards who fought for the Republic during the Spanish Civil War—or supported the Republic, because some of the deportees weren’t on the front lines—would only a few years later end up in Nazi concentration camps. After their experiences during the Civil War, they were committed anti-fascists in exile in France. As World War II escalated, they were captured by the Germans, who asked Franco what to do with them. The deportees’ political involvement and Franco’s disinterest in protecting them in any way doomed them to the camps. I think seeing the Spanish Civil War and World War II as one continuous international conflict is a perspective that still isn’t particularly understood, but these Spanish deportees to the camps are the embodiment of that continuity.

Why have previous narratives of the Spanish experience in Nazi camps been marginalized or forgotten when the evidence has long been available?

Sara Brenneis. Photo Maria Stenzel.

SJB: I was surprised as I researched this book at how many articles, books and films about this chapter of Spanish history are available—but you have to know where to look for them. There’s more out there about the Spaniards in Nazi camps now than in any other time in Spain’s history.

But that doesn’t mean it’s gotten any easier to look back at the past and say: yes, Spain was active in World War II; Franco and Hitler collaborated; Spaniards were killed in Nazi concentration camps—and what more can we learn about what happened and the victims?

Plus, the Spanish government hasn’t gotten involved in any meaningful way in recognizing or acknowledging its role, which really sidelines the whole matter both inside and outside of the country.

Your work straddles Spanish Civil War Studies and Holocaust studies. Are their major differences between those two fields—in academia or more broadly—in how they approach historical memory?

SJB: The central questions are largely the same: what happened, and how have we as a society remembered not only the events but also the individuals who were involved? And once the generation of people who actually lived through it have died, how do successive generations remember—and how do we assure that the

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“Only a very small percentage of the population has a clear picture of the role the Spanish government and Spaniards played in World War II.” memory lives on to educate the next generation about our shared past? But what’s absolutely true is that so much more work has been done on Holocaust memory than on memories of the Spanish Civil War—there have been many efforts by individuals, governments, cultural institutions to document what happened in the Holocaust, and it’s still ongoing. The Spanish Civil War has been investigated to a much lesser extent, though that has changed in the last 15 years or so. But the memory of Spaniards in the concentration camps—and Spain’s involvement in World War II—has essentially been shut out of both of these fields, Spanish Civil War Studies and Holocaust studies, which is in part why those memories are virtually unknown.

Your book came out three months before the U.S. edition of Javier Cercas’s The Impostor: A True Story, about someone who falsely claimed to have been imprisoned in a German concentration camp. How does Cercas’s book compare to the many other accounts of the Spanish experience in the Holocaust you’ve studied?

SJB: Well, the main difference is that Cercas’s book isn’t true— that is, the central story in The Impostor is about Enric Marco, who wasn’t actually in a Nazi concentration camp. And in that sense Cercas sensationalizes what are already incredible, lifeand-death accounts of men and women who were deported to the camps. The books and memoirs I look at for Spaniards in Mauthausen are such immediate, personal accounts. They’re detailed, often painful, always moving stories of people who lived through unspeakable violence, who saw and experienced things that just seem impossible. But the difference is that their stories actually happened.

In a recently published article about Cercas’s book, you state that it is a “misplaced glorification of a false survivor.” Why misplaced?

SJB: Because there are thousands of stories of Mauthausen survivors, Ravensbrück survivors, Buchenwald survivors that have never been told. It’s a shame—given the fact that Spain as a whole is largely ignorant of this history—that Cercas picked someone who invented his background to be the subject of this book. But my point in the article I wrote about The Impostor isn’t just that I wish Cercas had written about an actual Spanish victim of the Nazis, it’s also that Cercas paints Enric Marco as a hero, a modern-day Don Quijote. I find that characterization to be unfortunate, to say the least.

How do you think The Impostor will be read in the United States, where the collective memory of the Holocaust is markedly different than Spain’s?

SJB: I suspect that more critical readers—those who have actually studied the Holocaust—may see it for what it is: the story of a false survivor. But for most people, the Holocaust is constantly reinvented in books and movies—I’m thinking of Sarah’s Key or The Boy in the Striped Pajamas. These stories 10 THE VOLUNTEER December 2018

are fictionalized, there are many aspects of them that are simply made up, but they are how larger audiences actually learn about the Holocaust. I suspect that Cercas’s book will land among these more popular portrayals of World War II and the Holocaust in the United States, though if we’re lucky, it may pique readers’ interests to find an account of an actual Spanish concentration camp survivor or to learn more about the history behind Marco’s falsification.

In your essay, you also express skepticism about Cercas’s claim that Spain’s historical memory movement is “dead.” What would you say are its major signs of life?

SJB: I’ll tell you what brings home this feeling that the historical memory movement is very much alive in Spain: the busloads of Spanish high school students who travel from Barcelona to Austria to take part in the commemoration ceremonies at the Mauthausen Memorial every May. Survivor groups like the Amical de Mauthausen and Triangle Blau, among others, organize these educational pilgrimages so that students without any personal connection to the camp can see for themselves where their countrymen and women were imprisoned and died. They learn the history in such an immediate way. Cercas ignores these grassroots organizations and movements in Spain to preserve the memories of Spain’s traumatic past, which are the lynchpins to Spain’s historical memory movement, in my opinion.

Studies have shown, you write, “that Spain rates last among European nations in terms of its population’s knowledge of the Holocaust.” What factors help explain this, you think?

SJB: Well, despite the extracurricular activities of the Amical de Mauthausen and other groups, students in Spanish high schools are simply not taught about the role their country played in World War II and the Holocaust. They may read Anne Frank, but how incredible would it be if they read something more relevant to them, like Joaquim Amat-Piniella’s K.L. Reich, a novel about the author’s experiences in Mauthausen, or Montserrat Roig’s oral history of Catalans in Nazi camps? These are homegrown materials that focus on what the Holocaust was and how Spain was involved—but they’re not part of the curriculum in Spanish schools. And certainly the fact that the Spanish government has never weighed in is another factor. I’ll be interested to see if Spain’s understanding of the Holocaust shifts at all as the story of the Spaniards in Mauthausen becomes better known— a new big-budget film, El fotógrafo de Mauthausen, comes out in Spain in October. It tells the story of Francesc Boix, a Catalan prisoner in Mauthausen I talk about in the book. Boix, who worked in the camp photo lab and brought photographic evidence of Mauthausen to the Nuremburg Trials, is becoming something of a folk hero in Spain. But for now, only a very small percentage of the population has a clear picture of what the Holocaust was and the role the Spanish government and Spaniards played in World War II.

As the author of an important nonfiction—academic—book about the way the experience of Spanish deportees to Mauthausen has been represented in Spanish culture over the past seven decades, what do you feel about Cercas’s playful blurring of the line between fiction and nonfiction? It’s become his signature move.

SJB: I’ll be honest. As a reader, I’ve enjoyed Cercas’s books— he knows how to build tension around these “real stories,” as he calls them. But as a scholar of the Spanish deportation to Mauthausen, I’m much more conflicted about the way Cercas plays with fiction and history in his novels. Whatever sense of responsibility he feels—and I know he feels some, because he has written more earnest pieces about the Spaniards in Nazi camps elsewhere—flies out the window in the interest of a thrilling story in The Impostor. But I also think the only way to counteract Cercas’s imprecision is to make sure we continue to tell the true history behind these important historical moments—the Spanish Civil War, the Spanish deportation, the transition to democracy—because we share that responsibility as scholars, writers and filmmakers. Fiction writers dance between fiction and nonfiction—it makes for a good read—but historians and cultural critics should feel more of an urgency to stick to the truth. Of course, a good story is a good story—whether it’s invented or real. Cercas knows that.

Cercas, in his book, extols the work of academic historians and criticizes the way the witnesses, activists, and the media have “killed” actual memory by sentimentalizing and commercializing it. (“[T]he memory industry proved lethal to memory,” he writes in a passage you cite.) As an academic, where do you stand on the relation between the authority of scholars’ accounts and the value of other accounts?

SJB: I really think all of these accounts have value. Ideally, scholars give us a clear sense of the history and the context of the events. But other, more personal accounts give us a sense of how the topics we’re interested in as scholars are perceived in the real world, for lack of a better term. This is why I included so many different kinds of texts in Spaniards in Mauthausen: because the way people remember the past is colored by fiction, nonfiction, films, memoirs, even social media. When we look at these different materials alongside one another, it’s important to sort the invention from what we can corroborate as truthful, but those more commercial accounts can lend nuance to what might otherwise be a dry reporting of the facts. So, when I look a popular novel or a Twitter account that deals with the Spaniards in Mauthausen alongside a more academic text about the topic, I’m getting two sides of the story that often complement each other. This is how history comes to life, how it grabs people’s attention, and we can’t simply discount these popular works because they might not be wholly accurate. I’d hope that once someone gets interested in a topic like the Spaniards in Mauthausen from one source, they’d seek out another book or film to learn more. Eventually, perhaps they’ll land on a more academic source, but not at the expense of reading these rich and fascinating survivor stories.

Sebastiaan Faber teaches at Oberlin College.

Paris and Barcelona remember the IB The 80th anniversary of the “Despedida” of 1938 was the occasion to remember the International Brigades in both Paris and Barcelona with two different international conferences. Both initiatives brought together an impressive list of scholars who presented cutting-edge research on a wide range of subjects.

The Paris conference, “Solidarias 2018,” took place on October 24-26 and focused on the role of foreign women in the Spanish Civil War. Organized by three French universities and the Amicale des Combattants en Espagne Républicaine (ACER), it included three full days of conference papers and two documentaries. Over 48 participants came together from eight countries, mainly from France and Spain, but also Belgium, the United States, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, Holland and Germany. The venue for the first two days of the conference was a homage to the IB in its own right as it was on the same plot of land at 4 Avenue Mathurin Moreau where all volunteers passed through on their way to Spain between 1936 and 1938. ALBA was well represented in the conference by two board members, Josie Yurek and Bob Coale, the latter presenting a paper on Fredericka Martin, whose rich collection is one of the backbone collections of the Lincoln archives. The success of ALBA was evident at several points in the procedures when scholars from different countries repeatedly made references to the holdings in the Tamiment Library—proving, if need be, that the project the veterans set up decades ago has effectively become a center of study for researchers around the globe. Two of the keys to this success are ALBA’s lively website and the Tamiment’s online holdings catalogue.

A second international conference took place in Barcelona on Friday October 26. “History and Memory of the International Brigades, an East-West perspective” was sponsored by the European Observatory on Memories of the University of Barcelona. There, fourteen participants from six countries spoke on the memory of volunteers from the United States, the former Yugoslavia, the Netherlands, and Poland, as well as initiatives for preserving the IB legacy developed around Spain. The keynote speaker was the French historian Rémi Skoutelsky, whose provocative paper disproved those who compare the IB in Spain to the wave of young Islamist fundamentalists who have headed to Syria in alarming numbers, over 1,000 from France alone, to fight for ISIS. Another groundbreaking study was presented by Rocío Velasco de Castro, from the Universidad de Extremadura, whose intensive study of Muslim volunteers in the IB attempts to fill a void created due to difficult access to source material and a certain reluctance to accept that not all Arabic-speaking combatants were fighting for Franco. As it turns out, several of them volunteered from the US and served with the Lincolns,. The one-day conference was filled to standing-roomonly capacity, proving that the subject sparks great interest in Spain today.

In addition to academic conferences, on Sunday October 28, the precise 80th anniversary of the Despedida, the City of Barcelona held its official homage to the IB at the Barcelona monument to the Lincoln Brigade in the district of Horta-Guinardó. The Mayor of Barcelona, Ada Colau, opened the event with a moving tribute to all IB volunteers. Following her were other official representatives from Catalonia and Madrid, as well as delegations from the Amigos of Madrid and those of Catalonia, including Lluís Martín Bielsa, the president of the Catalonian Amigos, who 80 years before as a young Guardia de Asalto had been on guard during the Despedida parade in Barcelona. Two official IB associations were also invited to speak. ALBA was again represented

by Bob Coale while Claire Rol-Tanguy, daughter of Henri Rol-Tanguy—former commissar of the 14th IB and commander of the French resistance during the liberation of Paris in 1944—spoke on behalf of the ACER. The well-known Catalan actor Lluís Homar read three Hemingway poems on war and the iconic troubadour Paco Ibáñez closed the ceremony with his rendition of the anti-Franco poem by Rafael Alberti “A galopar.” Afterwards, numerous organizations and government institutions payed tribute by laying flowers at the foot of the Lincoln Brigade monument.

December 2018 THE VOLUNTEER 11

Cover of the English edition

The Spanish Civil War in Comic Books

By Carmen Moreno-Nuño

La Brigada Lincoln / The Lincoln Brigade is a new graphic novel by Pablo Durá, Carles Esquembre and Ester Salguero that has just been published in Spanish and English

The last couple of years have seen a number of wonderful new graphic novels on the Spanish Civil War. An overview.

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hen José

Pablo García’s graphic novel version of Paul Preston’s classic Spanish Civil War history was published in 2016, it quickly rose to the top three of the Spanish bestseller list. Its success not only confirms the surge in interest in Civil War since the beginning of the 21st century, but also the great popularity that the graphic novel has achieved in Spain in recent years.

More authors publish their work on a greater range of subjects and in better quality editions than ever. Translations and exhibits abound, while sales have surged. Since 2007, there is a National Comic Prize. And bestselling works like Arrugas (Wrinkles) by Paco Roca and María y yo (Maria and I) by Miguel Gallardo have been taken to the cinema.

Among the pioneers in the genre is Forges, whose satirical masterpiece Historia de aquí (History of Here, 1980-81) deals with shameful episodes of Spain’s national history. Among the best early comics on the Spanish Civil War are Eloy, uno entre muchos (Eloy, One among Many); Río Manzanares; Euskadi en llamas (Euskadi in Flames); and Gorka Gudari, published between 1979 and 1987 by Antonio Hernández Palacios, and Carlos Giménez’s Paracuellos series, which first appeared 12 THE VOLUNTEER December 2018

in 1981 and whose 2007 compilation, Todo Paracuellos, came out in English in 2016.

biographies. Almost all of them underscore the value of memory and the urgent need to revisit the past.

The publishing boom sparked by the rise of the memory movement over the past 15 years has given rise to a new collection of graphic novels on the Civil War as well. These newer titles often focus on lesser-known historical

Two titles do a particularly good job shedding light on forgotten historical episodes while acknowledging the complicated workings of memory and the difficulty of representing the past faithfully.

episodes. Some incorporate women’s or children’s perspectives. Others explore the tensions between the first and second generation or life in prisons, concentration camps, or exile. They often straddle genres, intertwining historical drama with thriller and noir or docufiction. Some are simply

Los zurcos del azar (The Furrows of Chance, 2013), by Paco Roca, won the prize for the best work at the Comic Fair in Barcelona in 2014. Although this is not the first time that Roca deals with the Civil War, here he pays a brilliant tribute to the exiled republicans who helped free Paris from the Nazis after fleeing Franco’s Spain. A young writer, Paco, travels to a town in France to interview an unknown war hero, Miguel Ruiz, who is ill and lives alone.

His neighbor, the only person who takes care of him, discovers Miguel’s story with amazement: the horror at the Alicante port at the end of the war, the escape on the S.S. Stanbrook, the arrival in Oran, the internment in a labor camp to build the Trans-Saharan railroad, the battles fought at the service of the Corps of Africa, the liberation of Paris, and the reunion with his loved one and her sudden death when Carlos Giménez’s classic in English translation.

Los zurcos del azar, by Paco Roca.

they try to return to Spain to join the anti-Francoist guerrillas. Miguel’s is a traumatic memory.

Despite the passing of time, the past for him is more real than the present— underscored by the fact that the past is drawn in color while the present is drawn in sepia. Based on rigorous historical research (Roca was advised by ALBA’s Robert Coale, who also wrote the epilogue), Roca’s book masterfully synthesizes the great diversity of the Republican exile experience. Thanks to Paco’s ability to listen, the lack of public recognition for the Spaniards who continued the fight against fascism after the Civil War and the consequent reluctance of Miguel to tell his life (“I do not have much to tell,” he says) at the end become gratitude—gratitude

from the villagers to Miguel and from Miguel to Paco “for having made me recover a part of my life that I did not dare to remember.”

El convoy (Norma, 2015), by Denis Lapière and Eduard Torrents, tells the story of the first convoy that took 927 Spaniards to the Nazi concentration camp in Mauthausen.

Only a dozen survived. Divided into two parts, the story shows the differences between the memory inherited by a second generation (Angelita) and autobiographical memory (her father Manuel). Angelita, an attractive 44-year-old woman living in Montpellier in 1975, receives a call announcing that her mother is seriously ill at a hospital in Barcelona.

On her way there, Angelita discovers

that her father, who supposedly died in Mauthausen, has been sneaking around with her mother for fifteen years.

Angelita is forced to face the painful memories of her childhood: fleeing

from Barcelona, ​​crossing the Pyrenees on foot, the separation from her father, the Argelès concentration camp, and the sexual harassment suffered by her mother at the bakery when she is finally offered a job. In the second part of the book, the story of Manuel unveils an even darker reality: the poor relationship between Manuel and his wife as they live through the different experiences of exile and the concentration camps. As in Roca’s book, in The Convoy the past is drawn in colors and the present in sepia. The appendix in which Torrents narrates his family’s experiences in Barcelona during the war, illustrated by photographs and drawings, brings the book closer to the genre of docufiction.

Other recent titles worth highlighting include 36-39 Malos tiempos (Bad

Times, 2011), by Carlos Giménez, which shows through the eyes of a young child, his family, and his neighbors how horror becomes the norm in a besieged Madrid. Las serpientes ciegas / Les serps cegues (The Blind Serpents, 2008), by Felipe Hernández Cava and Bartolomé Segui Nicolau, approaches war through the noir genre. La vida es un tango y te piso bailando (Life is a Tango, 2015), by Ramón Boldú, offers a self-conscious story sprinkled with humor. ¡No pasarán! (2011), by Vittorio Giardino, tells the adventures of an international brigadista in a Catalonia that is about to fall. In Joan: Sobrevivir en la guerra civil (Joan: Surviving in the Civil War, 2012), by Robin Wood and Carlos Pedrazzini, young man turns into a rogue in order to survive. Un

largo silencio (A Long Silence, 2012),

by Miguel Gallardo, completes with vignettes from the 21-typed pages of Gallardo’s father’s memoirs. Tristísima ceniza (The Saddest of Ashes, 2011),

by Mikel Begoña and Iñaket, follows photographer Robert Capa’s wanderings through Spain. Finally, El fotógrafo de Mauthausen (The Photographer of Mauthausen, 2018), by Salva Rubio and Pedro J. Colombo, tells the story of Francesc Boix, the only Spaniard who testified at the Nuremberg trials.

Carmen Moreno-Nuño is Associate Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of Kentucky. Her research focuses on the cultural representation of the historical memory of the Spanish Civil War and the postwar era in democratic Spain.

December 2018 THE VOLUNTEER 13

Ivens and Van Dongen in New York. Photo Ivens Foundation.

“WE ARE LIVING A REVIVAL OF FASCISM.”

Filmmaker Peter Davis Revisits The Spanish Earth

By Sebastiaan Faber

In Digging the Spanish Earth, a veteran filmmaker pays tribute to Joris Ivens’s classic—while also revealing the curious circumstances under which Ivens made his film. An interview.

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mong the best-known documentaries to come out of the Spanish Civil War is The Spanish Earth (1937), which the Dutch filmmaker Joris Ivens produced together with Ernest Hemingway, Helen van Dongen and John Dos Passos, with John Ferno as cinematographer. Long considered an icon of the political documentary, the film takes a clear pro-Republican point of view, underscored through a simple narrative structure: The Spanish people throw off the yoke of the ruling class to modernize agriculture—specifically, through an irrigation project—and, in 1936, take up arms to defend their newly-earned emancipation against the Nazi- and Fascist-supported Nationalists who are bent on turning back the clock. The film moves between the battle front in the Spanish capital and Fuentidueña del Tajo, a rural town strategically located near the road from Madrid to Valencia.

In 2017, the veteran Canadian filmmaker Peter Davis premiered Digging the Spanish Earth, a documentary that is both a tribute and an on-theground investigation of the circumstances under which Ivens made his film. Davis’s fascination with The Spanish Earth dates back decades. In fact, he began shooting in the 1980s. (Among the film’s most valuable scenes are interviews from that decade with Ivens, Van Dongen, and the American journalist George Selden.) As Davis and his crew—which include the Hemingway scholar Alex Vernon and Almudena Cros, the president of the Association of Friends of the Inter-

national Brigades—visit Fuentidueña del Tajo, they uncover unknown details that help resolve some of the unanswered questions that have long fascinated scholars. In an article for the Hemingway Review they suggest, for instance, that the irrigation project featured in the film may have been partly set up for the story’s sake. Before going into distribution in the U.S., Ivens’s film was screened at the Roosevelt White House in July 1937.

Last September, I spoke with Davis, who was born and raised in England and who has written, produced, and directed more than 70 documentaries on topics ranging from CIA spies and World War II to South Africa and the Jewish experience in the Catskills.

In your film, you call The Spanish Earth a masterpiece.

What makes it so?

Perhaps the contrapuntal structure—town and country— in the war context; perhaps the avoidance of expression of hatred for the opposing side, or even of Fascism per se. Looked at now, of course, it lacks the personal. Nowadays, stories are told through a handful of personalities, or even just one, who drive the narrative. The old style was largely dictated by the equipment, which stamped a certain “distance” on the subject and demanded intervention of an explanatory narration.

What, if anything, can young documentary filmmakers today learn from studying Ivens’s film?

Hemingway and Ivens in Spain, Photo by John Ferno

14 THE VOLUNTEER December 2018

The Spanish Earth showing at the 55th St Playhouse. Photo Ivens Foundation.

“I am conscious of the lost lessons of history.”

I have full admiration for the present generation of documentary filmmakers.

Their work is often sublime.

But I have a qualified admiration for the generation that includes my grandchildren, in that there is a general lack of interest in history. They live in the eternal present, and exciting future, and hold almost total disregard for the past. I don’t know how to counteract this dangerous tendency, which makes films like mine seemingly redundant.

Do you think documentary film as a genre can help counteract this tendency? Or does this new generation need different narrative format or production values to draw them in?

I feel very strongly that I belong to a past generation. Drawing on an analogy that has been often mentioned, the change in human communication that occurred with the introduction of printing altered the mode of human thinking and consequently the course of history, and the digital age has I believe a far greater impact. I am a babe in the woods in this new era in which my grandchildren roam free. I think that the diligent teaching of history, always drawing lessons for the present, is essential; but the mode, the medium, to deploy is beyond my ken. Personally, I feel I am redundant, but I am doomed to work in the way I have done for the past 50-plus years. The present generation has the tools and the intelligence—whether they will be used for the perpetuation of the human race through teaching the lessons of history, I don’t know.

Your film was three or four decades in the making.

When I undertook my documentary, the concept was originally to cover reportage of the Spanish Civil War in toto. That is, it was to include the reporting of both sides, and in general to deal with how war is reported, intending to reflect on the reporting of the Vietnam War. This concept was whittled down drastically when I started

with The Spanish Earth, which in itself offered much of the story I wanted to tell. I of course was not working on Digging since I started in 1981. I never raised any money for my project at that time, and so put it on hold. Now, at this last stage of my life, I am trying to complete unfinished projects.

Waugh, in his review in Cinéaste, doesn’t like that your voice-over mentions the fact that Ivens “staged” some scenes. For Waugh, to call it staging is anachronistic.

He is right that what we now call staging was rather the rule in that era, due mainly to the problem of the kind of camera used. Professional 35mm cameras would pretty much demand tripod-use, which means that you had to set up, which meant that you had to direct the action. The war sequences differ in this regard since there was action going on most of the time and impossible to direct. Since the introduction of 16mm hand-held cameras for professional use—especially for television—it has been possible to capture live action, all the more so with the arrival of video.

How does your own view and practice of documentary filmmaking relate to Ivens’s?

I pretty much go along with Ivens’s practice, which is close to my own. The subject will dictate my approach.

In at least one of my documentaries—in an anti-Vietnam War film—I have used still photos to illustrate something that the photos did not in fact relate to. To that extent, I am a “propagandist”, although I don’t think I would conceal a valid opposing view.

All in all, apart from what I take to be a fascinating subject—I am almost alone in this, it appears, judging by the lack of interest in Holland or anywhere else for my film—I am also conscious of the lost lessons of history.

We live in what looks like a revival of Fascism. I hope that the viewer can see that.

Hemingway, Ivens and Republican officers. Photo Ivens Foundation December 2018 THE VOLUNTEER 15

The American Medical Bureau. Front, left to right: Lini Fuhr, Paterson, N.J.; Salaria Kea, New York; Frederica Martin, New York; Ray Harris, New York; Anna Taft, Brooklyn, N.Y.; and Rose Freed, New York.

My Cousin Fredericka Imogene Martin

By Barbara Martin

Freddie Martin traveled to Spain as part of the delegation of the American Medical Bureau to Aid Spanish Democracy. After returning from Spain, she moved to Mexico. Barbara Martin reflects on her cousin’s life. This is an excerpt; for the full-length article, see the online edition at albavolunteer.org.

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I never met Freddie in person, I corresponded with her from June 1981 until August 1987. I also spoke to her once shortly after an earthquake had hit Mexico City in 1985. Her voice was as strong and clear and though she had lived in Mexico since 1950, she retained her New York accent. The Freddie I came to know was an independent person who had great courage, a wonderful sense of humor and a great love of family. hile

Freddie was born June 2, 1905, in Cooperstown NY, the daughter of Lydia C. Pennington and her husband Frederick Alfred Martin. Her parents, Lydia and Frederick were married in June 1904 in Cooperstown, NY. Within six months, Freddie’s father had been killed in a horrible railroad accident leaving his young expectant wife alone. Fred had just begun a job working for the D & H railroad as a fireman. (…)

Freddie remembers being a “tomboy” interested in the wonders of nature: not the ladylike child which society expected.

Freddie recalled being fascinated climbing in the mountainous woods behind her Aunt Mary’s home in Great Barrington, MA and the conversations with her cousin Tim, a local forest ranger. (…)

During the early 1930s, Freddie became involved in the nurse’s union and started participating in classes at the Labor Temple in NYC. The Labor Temple was sponsored by the Presbyterian church and it was a place where working people of all religions could express their thoughts. There she took classes in Russian and Yiddish. (…)

With a passport marked “Not Valid for Travel in Spain”, Freddie was one of the 17 people in uniform on the first ship bringing medical volunteers, supplies and ambulances to Spain via France. They departed on January 16, 1937. Nine additional groups would eventually bring aid to Spain.

By the end of 1937, Freddie had organized between six and nine hospitals (sources vary), and worked with Dr. Barsky and others to set up two mobile operating units which went to the front. Her small black workbooks are filled with details of the supplies needed and the work that she and the staff completed.

16 THE VOLUNTEER December 2018

The work was harrowing, stressful and often heartbreaking, the hours were long, and the triage units they operated would have to move over and over again. It was inevitable that feelings would be hurt, or staff would feel unappreciated and Head Nurse Fredericka would have to intervene and try to soothe feelings or solve problems like who would be assigned to burn the dead bodies. (…)

I lost touch with Freddie in the late 1980s when she stopped responding to letters and Christmas cards. Freddie died in Mexico on October 4, 1992. Her daughter Tobyanne brought her ashes to Alaska to be buried on St. Paul Island, Alaska. Her epitaph was approved by the people of St Paul Island, it reads: FREDERICKA I. MARTIN, June 2, 1905-October 4, 1992, An Internationalist who fought for peace in the Spanish Civil War and for the rights of the Aleut People of the Pribilof Islands.

For a full version of this article, see the online edition of The Volunteer at albavolunteer.org

Griff Maclaurin around the time he left Britain for Spain.

New Archive Traces New Zealand Volunteer in the IBs

By Mark Derby

An archival donation reveals new details about Griff Maclaurin, a charismatic New Zealander who left Cambridge, England, to serve as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War, where he fought alongside the poet John Cornford and died in the battle for Madrid. “When he was wounded he propped himself up against a tree and continued to fire his gun … [H]e was found standing there days later so riddled with machine gun bullets that his body fell apart when they tried to pick it up.”

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New Zealand has recently received the voluminous correspondence between Joan Conway, sister of New Zealand volunteer Griffith Maclaurin, and her US-based friend Gwen Davies Koblenz. Their letters paint a fascinating portrait. public archive in

Griff Maclaurin had been a brilliant student of mathematics at Auckland University College in 1928-1931 and took up a postgraduate scholarship at St John’s College, Cambridge in England. Although initially of conservative views, he became deeply immersed in the radical politics of the 1930s and joined the British Communist party. In one of her letters, Joan says her brother’s radicalization stemmed from encounters with Nazism during a three-month tour of Germany in 1933. The following year he opened a leftwing bookshop in All Saints Passage, near the university.

Maclaurin’s Bookshop was Cambridge’s first progressive bookshop and became extremely popular. One customer, the historian Eric Hobsbawm, considered it “the center of left literature in Cambridge.” The orange-covered Left Book Club titles published by Victor Gollancz were a large part of its stock in trade. Gollancz later wrote that Griff’s “letters to us with their idealism and enthusiasm were a constant source of inspiration.”

Among Griff’s circle of friends at Cambridge was Gwen Davies, who grew up in north Wales and whose father was a professor of Celtic Studies. She took a degree in botany at Oxford University in 1931, and joined the staff of the Low Temperature Research Station at Cambridge. There she be-

came active in leftwing politics, meeting the poet John Cornford and the philosopher and publisher Maurice Cornforth, among others.

Soon after the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, Griff was recruited to the International Brigades by Harry Pollitt, head of the British Communist party, because of Maclauren’s experience with a WWI-era Lewis machine-gun while serving in the officers’ corps at Auckland Grammar School. He arrived in Spain in October 1936 and served with a small machine-gun unit of Britons attached to the Commune de Paris Battalion.

One of his British comrades, David MacKenzie, said Griff had “a splendid capacity for distracting our minds from the more unpleasant realities of life; from the small, kind ever-laughing face it would have been difficult to identify him as a military hero; but such he proved to be.”

The machine-gun unit was stationed in the University City, on the western side of the capital adjoining a wooded area, the Casa de Campo.

On the evening of November 7, 1936 Griff and three other machine-gunners, including fellow New Zealander Steve Yates, left the comparative safety of the university buildings to establish a defensive position within the wood.

Mackenzie later wrote: The fascists were cleared out of it in the evening without much difficulty. Maclaurin with Steve Yates took their Lewis gun along the right hand side of the wood. They had no-one to carry their ammunition, and Maclaurin carried it all and his rifle as well. He was wounded almost

Waiting to return home from Spain in October 1938 are New Zealanders Bert Bryan (front centre) and William “Murn” MacDonald (back, third from left) with Australian International Brigaders. Alexander Turnbull Library

December 2018 THE VOLUNTEER 17

Maclaurin and friends on Cam River, 1936

immediately, but it was at the far end of the wood that his body was found, dead beneath a tree with the Moorish sniper whom he had shot down beside him. Yates continued alone with the machine gun and the ammunition.

He was the first to reach the gate at the end of the wood, giving covering fire as our men passed through it. When he was wounded he propped himself up against a tree and continued to fire his gun, firing from the hip at the Moors round the house, and he was found standing there days later so riddled with machine gun bullets that his body fell apart when they tried to pick it up.

Gwen Davies Koblenz c. 1931

Another member of this unit was the young English poet John Cornford. After this effective but extremely costly defensive action he wrote to his fiancée, saying that Maclaurin had been “continuously cheerful, however uncomfortable, and here that matters a hell of a lot… if you meet any of his pals, tell them he did well here and died bloody well.”

Maclaurin’s family was not aware that he had traveled to Spain, and did not receive news of his death until a month later. Although both parents were from politically conservative backgrounds, they were deeply proud of their son and became active fundraisers for the Spanish Medical Aid Committee, the main New Zealand organization providing support for the Republican cause.

During the war, Gwen Davies also organized shipments of food, clothing and medical supplies for the relief of Spanish civilians and helped to resettle a group of Basque children in Cambridge. She later met Sidney Koblenz, a US Airforce sergeant stationed near Cambridge, through their mutual interest in Maclaurin’s Bookshop, which remained in business after its founder’s death in Spain. They married in 1947 and spent the rest of their lives in the US, where Gwen worked as a medical technician in Albany, NY. She and Joan Conway evidently maintained a lifelong interest in the Spanish Civil War and in other leftwing and progressive issues.

Around New Zealand, memorials to local veterans of the Spanish Civil War have begun to appear in recent years. As reported in The Volunteer June 2018, a plaque was recently unveiled to the battlefield surgeon Doug Jolly in his home18 THE VOLUNTEER December 2018

town of Cromwell. A number of New Zealanders, including Griff Maclaurin’s relative Max Maclaurin, share the opinion of Griff’s parents that this short-lived yet spirited and inspiring figure also deserves to be remembered in the city where he grew up and studied. They are planning to install a memorial plaque to him, perhaps at the Auckland War Memorial Museum, the country’s largest regional museum.

Maclaurin provided his own best epitaph as he left for Spain in September 1936. Farewelling his fellow New Zealander Paddy Costello from a departing train at London’s Victoria Station, he prophesized that he would have “a short life, Paddy, but a merry one.”

Mark Derby is currently writing a biography of Doug Jolly, a New Zealand surgeon who served with distinction in the Spanish Civil War. Left: Poster advertising a memorial meeting to the New Zealanders who died fighting in the Spanish Civil War (Auckland, May 1939).

Clipping from “La Batalla,” the POUM’s newspaper, May 20th, 1937. (Archivos de la Fundació Andreu Nin.)

Bob Smillie’s Prison Dossier Conjures up Questions

By Mariado Hinojosa

M

after Bob Smillie’s mysterious death in Valencia during the Spanish Civil War, his prison dossier has finally surfaced. Robert Ramsay “Bob” Smillie was a Scottish volunteer who joined the Spanish Civil War in the contingent of the Independent Labour Party (ILP) and who died in 1937 under strange circumstances.

Although the documents uncovered require further analysis, they allow for some preliminary conclusions about Smillie’s fate, particularly the reasons for his arrest by the Republican authorities. The dossier was found in September 2018 in the official archive of the Valencia region (Archivo del Reino de Valencia), a building that retains a multitude of historical documents going back to the thirteenth century. Among them, too, are part of the archives of the old Modelo-Celular Prison of Valencia. ore than eighty years

As I explained in an earlier piece for The Volunteer (see the December 2017 issue), the precise circumstances of Smillie’s death are still open to speculation. This is primarily due to the lack of clarity of the Spanish institutions of the time. While official sources identified the cause of Smillie’s death in prison as natural—peritonitis—some comrades and witnesses always maintained that Smillie was a victim of the Stalinist purge in Spain and the related efforts to eliminate the POUM following the internal fighting within the Republican side in Barcelona in May 1937 (the socalled May Days).

The official version of Smillie’s death was communicated mainly by David

Murray in 1937, a delegate appointed by the ILP to manage Smillie’s detention in Spain. Murray claimed that Smillie had been detained almost

to Valencia, the Republic’s capital.

Murray stated that Smillie faced several charges: he lacked proper papers when crossing the border and he was carrying war material, specifically some empty grenades. The prison dossier, however, reveals inconsistencies with Murray’s official version.

What first jumps out in Smillie’s dossier is that his detention was carried out by the Spanish Republic’s Dirección General de Seguridad (DGS). The first page of the file states that on May 12th, 1937 Smillie “Enters this prison (Modelo Prison-Valencia) coming from the Dirección General de Seguridad, delivered by agents of the same Institution, as a detainee.” The file also states that his arrest warrant was linked to the arrest of a certain Domingo Aliaga Sánchez. Aliaga’s own file confirms this linked arrest.

The Dirección General de Seguridad was a public service agency, an internal national corps on which the police security forces directly depended. The Delegate of the DGS in Barcelona was Ricardo Burillo Stholle, who would be best known for his role in the repression of the POUM.

randomly in Figueres, at the FrenchSpanish border, on May 10th, 1937, when he was about to return to his country. From there he was transferred

Page from Smillie’s penitentiary file. (“Expediente Penitenciario de Robert Ramsay Smillie.

Fondo documental del Archivo del Reino de Valencia”.)

Smillie’s arrest, in other words, was by no means a casual detention at the border prompted by his lack of papers. The fact that Smillie’s detention depended on the DGS and, moreover, was linked to that of another man, suggests that his arrest was not a random event.

Murray, of the ILP, seemed unaware of this information. At least, he never spoke about it. Murray’s statement on

December 2018 THE VOLUNTEER 19

Top: Bob Smillie. Bottom: First page of Smillie’s Penitentiary File. (“Expediente Penitenciario de Robert Ramsay Smillie. Fondo documental del Archivo del Reino de Valencia”.)

the detention claimed that Smillie “had … a permit signed by the Commander of the Lenin Division but had unfortunately forgotten it in Barcelona.” This affirmation now seems meaningless: this kind of information would have been registered in Smillie’s prison file. It is also unlikely that in the middle of a war and with the limitations of the time, such resources and personnel would be spent on moving a detainee from the border to Valencia if his offense were merely “administrative.”

a word or move on his own. In this same document, the prison doctor states that Smillie died on June 12th at the Provincial Hospital.

After this, the doctor on duty at the Provincial Hospital wrote that the de-

Another interesting fact to consider regarding Smillie’s detention is an article published on May 20th, 1937 in La Batalla, a newspaper associated with the POUM (and later prohibited). This article mentions that Fenner Brockway, General Secretary of the ILP, publicly stated on May 19th that Smillie, at the time of his arrest, was carrying documents about the May Days of Barcelona, specifically a report written by John McNair.

The reports from the prison doctor and the medical personnel at the Provincial Hospital contain the greatest number of contradictions. Smillie’s interrogation, led by the special court judging the May Days, began on June 4th. This was also the day that he began complaining of abdominal pain, according to the statement that a fellow prisoner gave to Brockway later. It seems that the prison doctor decided not to take action and Smillie continued complaining of abdominal pain during the days following.

On June 11th, a week later, the prison doctor requested transferring Bob to the Provincial Hospital because he presented symptoms of generalized peritonitis. The doctor also added: “I accompanied him to the ambulance to say goodbye, and he shook my hand. And with a grateful smile he said thank you very much.” It is hard to believe that a person in a state of generalized peritonitis and a few hours before his death was able to articulate 20 THE VOLUNTEER December 2018

several different documents held in the cemetery’s historical archives.

Although it is too early to draw final conclusions regarding the precise circumstances of Smillie’s death, the newly discovered prison dossier does provide new information. For one, the dates in the doctors’ reports contradict the statement on the first page of the prison file that dates Smillie’s death on June 13th. It seems obvious that some kind of medical negligence took place, but it’s doubtful that it depended only on the decisions of the doctors.

What we do know from the statements of some survivors and also witnesses, is that the interrogations carried out by the Special Services involved violent methods. Although appendicitis was often not diagnosed, leading to peritonitis and death it is also possible the “generalized peritonitis” that Smillie was diagnosed with was the result of such violent interrogations. In any case, while both negligence and abuse could be linked to this case, the dossier makes quite clear that the arrest of Bob Smillie was not accidental.

tainee was admitted on June 11th and “hospitalized in the Surgery Service, Room number 20, bed number 315 at 20.45 hours.” The following document in Smillie’s dossier is a report typed and dated the next day, June 12th, by the director of the hospital. It states that the detainee “entered these premises on the day of today, according to the doctor who admitted him, dying thirty minutes later today as a result of appendicitis.” Interestingly, the previous document, written by the doctor on duty who received Smilie, was written one day before. Meanwhile, the cemetery record states that Smillie was buried on June 14th 1937.

This date of burial is confirmed in

Reconstructing Smillie’s life and death is an exercise not only in memory but also in justice; it is a tribute to a young man who left everything behind to go to an unknown country to stop fascism in its tracks.

As George Orwell wrote in Homage to Catalonia, “Here was this brave and gifted boy, who had thrown up his career at Glasgow University in order to come and fight against Fascism, and who, as I saw for myself, had done his job at the front with faultless courage and willingness …” Independent from this research project, Smillie will be honored in Valencia next May with a commemorative plaque designed by the Scottish sculptor Frank Casey.

Mariado Hinojosa is a writer and activist. She has published in La Directa and Nueva Cultura and is coordinator of the traveling exhibit “Espacios de memoria: las Brigadas Internacionales.”

Book Reviews

Spain 1936: Year Zero, by Raanan Rein and Joan Maria Thomàs. Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2018.

Reviewed by Foster Chamberlin

T

he latest addition to the Nigel Townson’s Sussex Studies in Spanish History, Spain 1936: Year Zero compiles fourteen transnational views of Spanish history into one volume.

In Townson’s words, the work “endeavours to revisit the early months of the Civil War in a dispassionate spirit that eschews the politically-charged approach of many other studies.” This volume focuses on topics and interpretations that still remain underexplored even in the crowded field of Civil War histories. The fact that this collection brings together a remarkably international group of researchers (scholars from Portuguese, Spanish, Israeli, Northern Irish, American and Japanese institutions are all represented), no doubt contributes to its variety. Michael Seidman’s chapter, for example, which is pointedly critical of the Republican government in the early months of the war, appears side-by-side with Raanan Rein and Manuela Consonni’s very sympathetic treatments of the ill-fated People’s Olympiad and the Italian International Brigade fighter Renzo Giua. This arrangement is possible because the editors, Rein and Joan Maria Thomàs, choose to favor new scholarly perspectives over tired, sometimes doctrinaire claims.

I believe four arguments found in the collection will prove particularly important for opening new directions in the field. First of all, Michael Seidman takes on the idea that the Republic lost the war because of a lack of support from the liberal democracies of Britain, France and the United States. Seidman does not deny the importance of non-intervention, but he also suggests that the causes of Republican defeat were not all external. The Republic’s toleration (at least at first) for rearguard militia pillaging and violence encouraged small landowners and Catholics to sympathize with the rebels. At the same time, while the Soviet Union may not have been seeking to spark revolution by aiding the Republic, its end goal, a so-called “democracy of a new type,” was far from a liberal-democratic Spain, which worried international observers. In sum, the Republic “alienated centrists, conservatives, and Catholics in Spain and abroad,” thereby depriving itself of the internal and external support it needed to win the war.

Secondly, Spain 1936: Year Zero is proof that transnational, comparative perspectives offer new insights on a well-trod subject. Again, historians often excoriate liberal-democratic signatories of the Non-Intervention Agreement for a willful abandonment of a democratically elected government. However, the diplomatic histories in this volume on France and Britain, by David A. Messenger and Emilio Sáenz-Francés San Baldomero, reveal that from a geo-strategic point of view, the choice these two countries had to make was not so simple. Open support for the Republic risked sparking a pan-European conflict and also presented domestic problems. If France’s León Blum had openly supported the Republic, it would have doomed his governing coalition with the Radicals, while British Conservatives feared they could end up supporting a regime in Spain that would slip into Communism. Hindsight is twenty-twenty, but at the time non-intervention was the only politically realistic policy for both Britain and France.

Spain 1936: Year Zero’s third innovation is simply the breadth of its international perspective. The volume contains chapters on all of the oft-cited key players in the Spanish conflict—Britain, France, the Soviet Union, Italy, Germany and Portugal. In addition, it also considers the lesser-known connections that Argentina and Japan had to the war. While these two countries were certainly not major players, Leonardo Senkman demonstrates that several people who became important to the Franco regime received aid from Argentina during the war, including Ramón Serrano Suñer and Pilar Primo de Rivera. Japan did not have an influence on the war, but Haruo Tohmatsu shows that the war did have an influence on Japan because it revealed German and Soviet weaponry and tactics to the Japanese and helped bring Japan into an alliance with Germany. These chapters demonstrate that the impact of the Civil War was truly global and suggest that the question of what effect the war had on other countries outside of those directly involved in the conflict deserves further study.

Lastly, there is the question, raised by the title of the collection, as to whether or not 1936 constitutes a “year zero,” a temporal dividing line that definitively marks the end of an old era and the beginning of a new one. Some scholars have already sought to elevate 1789 in French history and 1945 in German history to this status, for example. Of course, 1936 did not represent a complete break with the past, but the question of to what extent the military government on the Nationalist side and the “Spanish Revolution” on the Republican side were complete ruptures is worthy of further exploration. Yet after posing this tantalizing question in the collection’s title, only the Seidman piece takes on the subject directly, and many chapters do not even focus on the year 1936 alone. As a result, Spain 1936: Year Zero stands as a welcome resource for researchers searching for new areas of investigation regarding the Spanish Civil War, suggesting new international perspectives and challenges to conventional interpretations, but scholars will have to await future publications to receive complete answers to the questions raised here.

Foster Chamberlin is a visiting assistant professor of humanities at Boğaziçi University in Istanbul, Turkey. He holds a Ph.D. in modern European history with a specialization in Spain from the University of California, San Diego.

December 2018 THE VOLUNTEER 21

History Lessons: A Memoir of Growing Up in an American Communist Family, by Dan Lynn Watt.

Bloomington, Indiana: Xlibris, 2017, 351 pp.

Reviewed by Fraser Ottanelli

History Lessons is the memoir of a ‘red diaper” baby, the child of devoted and active members of the Communist Party of the United States (CPUSA), from the post-World War II Red Scare to the Civil Rights movement in the early 1960s. Dan Watt’s parents and grandparents, as well as his aunts and uncles, were prototypes of the core membership of the Party in its heyday. First and secondgeneration immigrants from Eastern Europe, as Communists they combined a cosmopolitan and internationalist attention to world events with a support for the struggle for social justice and workers’ rights and against the racial discrimination so deeply rooted in US culture and politics.

Their faith that a better world was on the horizon was reinforced by an idealized view of the Soviet Union as a “workers’ paradise.”

In History Lessons Dan Watt provides a compendium of anecdotes detailing family stories along with his recollections of the experiences of a Communist family from the hopes and dreams of the Popular Front period and war years, to the repression, heartache and disillusionment of the 1940s and 1950s. Watt was born in 1940 and grew up in what he describes as a loving, supportive and militant environment steadfastly committed to helping build a socialist future. As a young child Dan, along with his activist parents, marched in May Day parades, picketed to protest police brutality and discrimination against African Americans in suburban Long Island, and carried signs in support both of Henry Wallace and Smith Act defendants, as well as against Taft-Hartley. Whether it be during demonstrations, while attending summer Communist youth camps or simply at social events at home or on family vacations, he recounts that songs of struggle and hope (many of which were popularized by Paul Robeson, Peter Seeger, and the Weavers) played an import role as performances of solidarity, ways to express a message and the foundations for building a community.

However, outside of this tightknit radical community growing up as a “communist kid” could be a frightening experience. The most compelling sections of the book are the ones in which Dan Watt describes the heavy toll the post-World War II Red Scare took on Communist families, including children. Specifically, he conveys the climate of fear and sense of isolation that came from having to conceal from neighbors, schoolmates and teachers his family’s politics and his own Communist youth activities.

The person that looms large over the story is Dan’s father George. As many readers of The Volunteer know, George Watt was a committed Communist, an unwavering antifascist and, 22 THE VOLUNTEER December 2018

by all accounts, as his longtime friend Saul Wellman once told me, “a genuinely good guy.” George Watt’s wartime experiences were the stuff of legend: at the age of twenty-four while fighting with the International Brigades in Spain, after barely escaping the Fascist onslaught during the Retreats by swimming across the freezing Ebro River, he was appointed political commissar of the Lincoln Battalion. During World War II, once again in the thick of the fight, George miraculously bailed out of a burning B-17 over Belgium and then, with the support of networks set up by the Resistance, traveled south crossing the Pyrenees once again back into Spain from where he was spirited back to England.

After the war George resumed his organizing activities for the CPUSA. In the repressive environment of the post-war Red Scare, George was among the small cadre of members selected to go underground to provide continuity and leadership should the party be declared illegal.

It is impossible not to read History Lessons as a son’s effort to make peace with his father’s towering presence in his life. With this memoir, Dan Watt comes out of the shadows to which he (and many other “red diaper babies” like him) had been relegated throughout the course of the Cold War. In the end, History Lessons is a statement of love, appreciation and pride for having grown up and come age in such a stimulating and supportive family.

Fraser Ottanelli teaches History at the University of South Florida.

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December 2018 THE VOLUNTEER 23

NOW AVAILABLE IN SPANISH! HOMBRES EN GUERRA (MEN IN BATTLE) BY ALVAH BESSIE $20 (includes shipping and handling within the US)

FOR THOSE WHO CAME AFTER: SONGS OF RESISTANCE FROM THE SPANISH CIVIL WAR A new interpretation of ten iconic songs from the Spanish Civil War

Recorded live at the Japan Society in 2016 commemorating the 80th anniversary of the war, the album features a fragment of an interview with Abe Osheroff and the voice of Delmer Berg, with liner notes by Adam Hochschild.

Now available at info@alba-valb.org $20 (for domestic orders. Price includes shipping & handling.) All proceeds from the record are being generously donated to ALBA.