Aaron Lopoff

hen the government of Catalonia decided to name

Wits program aimed at locating and recovering the remains of International Brigade volunteers who died there after Alvah Bessie, it did so because when Bessie returned to Spain in the 1960s, he had tried to find the grave of his friend and comrade Aaron Lopoff. He wasn’t able to, and the exact location of Lopoff’s burial place remained an unsolved mystery for decades. Recently, however, Ray Hoff found a document in the Comintern Archives from the Military Hospital authorities in Girona stating that Lopoff died in the town of Santa Coloma de Farners. Santa Coloma de Farners is a little town near Girona, in Catalonia. Its name during the Spanish Civil War was “Farners de la Selva.” A building that used to serve as a spa, called “Termes Orion,” served as an IB hospital known as the Clínica Militar number 5 from April 1938 until January 1939. Since it was a hospital for wounded who were recovering or in the process of being evacuated (it was close to the French border), the number of soldiers who died there is small in compared to base and campaign hospitals. Based on the documentation from Ray Hoff, we contacted the civil registry in Santa Coloma de Farners, which was able to locate Lopoff’s death certificate. The certificate gives Lopoff’s place and time of death as 4AM on September 1, 1938, in Termes Orion, and states that he was buried in the town cemetery. The document further identifies him as a lieutenant of the International Brigade, not married, who died without leaving a will.

Catalan Government Hosts Info Session on Retrieving IB Remains

On September 18, ALBA and the Catalan government hosted a joint information session about the Alvah Bessie Program, through which Catalan authorities seek to locate, exhume and—if desired— repatriate the remains of International Brigade volunteers who died in Catalonia during the Spanish Civil War. Based on the event, which was attended by close to 200 people, Jordi Martí and Eulàlia Mesalles Godoy of the Directorate for Democratic Memory have compiled a FAQ document that is available at albavolunteer.org.

Spanish Government Publishes ALBA Curriculum Guide for High Schools

The Spanish government has just published a 60-page guide and students as part of a new series, Cómo hacer memoria (How to Make Memory), designed for high school teachers and students interested in engaging with the Civil War and its aftermath. Authored by James D. Fernández and Sebastiaan Faber, the guide includes six modules featuring primary sources— including text and image— related to the U.S. volunteers in Spain, connecting them with contemporary questions. The guide closes with a series of prompts inviting students to develop their own projects. The guide will be made freely available under a Creative Commons license through the Spanish government and ALBA’s website.

New Spanish Memory Law Invites IB Descendants to Apply for Citizenship

Following a majority vote in the Senate, Spain’s new Law of Democratic Memory went into effect on October 21. Presented as an update to the 2007 memory law, the new legislation seeks to strengthen the support for victims of the war and the Franco dictatorship, including the exhumation of mass graves. The law also offers Spanish citizenship to those descendants of members of the International Brigades who have distinguished themselves through a “sustained effort to disseminate the memory” of the volunteers and “the defense of democracy in Spain” (“una labor continuada de difusión de la memoria de sus ascendientes y la defensa de la democracia en España”). The law stipulates a 2-year window for submitting an application. At press time, the Spanish consulates in the US are in the process of establishing procedures for Spanish nationality requests based on the new law. Until those procedures are set, the consular services will not respond to requests for information. At ALBA we will keep a close eye on developments and keep the ALBA community informed through The Volunteer and our email newsletters.