Vol. XXXIV, No.

2 June 2017

PUBLISHED BY THE ABRAHAM LINCOLN BRIGADE ARCHIVES

Proactivas
scar Camps:
Angel of
the Sea
Jay Allen on Spanish Refugees (p. 12)
Hemingway in Madrid (p. 17)
The U.S. and World
Fascism (p. 7)

scar Camps
 Founded by the Veterans of the
Abraham Lincoln Brigade
799 Broadway, Suite 341 New York,
NY 10003 (212) 674-5398
www.alba-valb.org
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.eyestormonline.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. ALBAs 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 Universitys 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.
Dear Friends and Comrades:
Every day we are inspired by the millions in this country and around the world
who engage in acts of resistance against racists and oppressors. Like many of
you, we worried about the recent elections in France and the Netherlands and
were relatively relieved by the outcome. We were also thrilled to see the New
York Times publish an op-ed citing Henry A. Wallaces 1944 The Danger of
American Fascism. Then-Vice President Wallace warned against right-wing
leaders who pursue political power by poisoning the channels of public
information in order to use the news to deceive the public to protect their
own wealth and privilege. Seventy-three years later, Wallaces words continue
to resonate. Fittingly, his article is one of several documents we shared with
teachers who attended our recent institutes in Massachusetts and New York.
We will continue to hold conversations on the nature and dangers of fascism
with more educators at our forthcoming institutes in Ohio, Wisconsin, and
New York this fall.
ALBA proudly identifies with the international movement that fights for social
justice and human rights. On April 16, at our annual event, we conferred the
ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights Activism on Proactiva Open Arms, the
group of brave internationalists and human-rights activists who play a central
role in rescuing thousands of refugees who attempt to cross the Mediterranean
to flee war and oppression.
Our own educational activities are also gaining international recognition.
In May, The Guardian highlighted our teachers institutes. Titled Fighting
Fascism: Americans in the Spanish Civil War Have a Lesson for Today, the
article described how ALBA has taken the stories of the Lincoln volunteers
along with propaganda posters, letters and other document to high schools
around the US, to help teachers confront the resurgence of alternative facts
and extreme politics in American life.
None of this would be possible without your support. As we confront the
challenges ahead, ALBA will remain steadfast in its work to ensure that
the experiences of the men and women of the Lincoln Brigade continue to
resonate and inspire current and future generations of activists.
We know where we stand.

IN THIS ISSUE In the words of the Italian antifascist Pietro Calamandrei, for us it will always
p 3 New York Celebration be now and forever Resistance.
p 5 Angels of the Sea
p 7 America and World Fascism Salud,
p 9 A Teacher Responds
p 11 New York Institute
p 12 Hostages of Appeasemen
p 17 Hemingway in Madrid
Fraser Ottanelli
p 20 Michigan and the SCW Chair of the Board Marina Garde
of Governors Executive Director
p 22 Book Reviews
p 23 Contributions

2 THE VOLUNTEER June 2017

 ALBAS 81ST ANNUAL CELEBRATION HONORS PROACTIVA
OPEN ARMS REFUGEE RESCUE WORK

On April 16, scar Camps, Gerard Canals, and Laura Lanuza of Proactiva Open Arms joined ALBAs
annual celebration at the Museum of the City of New York to receive the 2017 ALBA/Puffin Award
for Human Rights Activism. Before the main award ceremony, they were interviewed by Emma Daly,
communications director at Human Rights Watch. The main event featured an introduction by human
rights activist Amy Rao, speeches by ALBA Chair Fraser Ottanelli, ALBA ED Marina Garde, and the
Puffin Foundations vice-president Neal Rosenstein, as well as music by Brooklyn-based band Barbez.
The events Honorary Committee included Vinie Burrows, Richard Serra, and Emilio Silva; the Host
Committee included Peter N. Carroll, Burt Cohen, Dan Czitrom, Anthony Geist, Jeanne Houck, Jo
Labanyi, Fraser Ottanelli, Ellyn Polshek, and Amy Rao.
Proactiva Open Arms

Neal and Gladys Rosenstein, scar Camps, Gerard Canals, Laura Lanuza, Marina Garde, Perry Rosenstein Barbez

Filmmaker Celia Novis

ALBA crew John Kailin with friend ALBA crew

June 2017
September 2016 THE VOLUNTEER 3
 Photos by Jessie Addler and Alejandro Fernndez Carrasco

ALBAS 81ST ANNUAL CELEBRATION HONORS PROACTIVA

OPEN ARMS REFUGEE RESCUE WORK

Emma Daly with Proactiva Neal Rosenstein, Jay Halfon, Sabine Rosenstein

Proactiva Open Arms

ALBA board Henry Yureck, Barry Cohen Board member Kate Doyle

Board member Ellyn Polshek Chair of the board, Fraser Ottanelli Neal Rosenstein

Amy Rao Neal Rosenstein Gerard Canals

4 THE VOLUNTEER June 2017
 Human Rights Column

Angels of the Sea

By Amy Rao
Amy Rao, a member of the international Board of Directors of Human Rights Watch, gave the
introductory address at the presentation of the seventh ALBA/Puffin Award for Human Rights
Activism to scar Camps and Gerard Canals, the founders of Proactiva Open Arms, at the award
ceremony held at the Museum of the City of New York on April 16. Here she offers an eyewitness
account of how she met these remarkable volunteer lifeguards in action as they struggle to rescue
huge numbers of refugees from drowning.

scar Camps

I
met scar, Gerard, of the international Board of Directors
and the Proactiva Open Arms team in October 2015. The
head of the emergencies division at Human Rights Watch,
Peter Bouchaert, was covering the crisis as it was playing out:
dozens of boats filled with refugees arriving on the shores of
Lesbos, Greece, around the clock.I had been following Peters
Twitter and Facebook posts from Greece and very early one
morning an email came from Peter asking for help. There was
a need to quickly get some funding to the only organization
on the ground saving lives, a small group of lifeguards from
Barcelona, Spain, Proactiva Open Arms.Their immediate need
was for jet skis with sleds.The lifeguards had come weeks
before, equipped only with wetsuits and finsbut with water skills
worthy of Olympians.
I arrived on Lesbos October 26, and as I drove along the sandy
beach road to reach the lifeguards in the small coastal village
where they were based, I was followed by a truck pulling a
trailer with two jet skis. Gerard had already asked Paris, the
handy proprietor at the small inn where they were bunking
to build ramps for the jet skis so that they could be launched
directly from where the lifeguards were housed. Within two days
the ramps were built and placed into the water from the rocky
beach directly in front of the inn.

June 2017 THE VOLUNTEER 5

Proactiva Open Arms in action before the coast of Lesbos, Greece. Photo courtesy of POA.
I can remember all of us admiring how quickly it was done.
That morning, October 28, started as all the days before it
and since the lifeguards had arrived. They guided boats in all
morning, full of families. They unloaded the babies and toddlers
first and worked their way through the disabled, those missing
limbs from the bombings in their countries, to the women and
lastly to the men. They wrapped all in blankets and administered
first aid as needed. It was non-stop and to the unsuspecting
volunteer, the situation would appear chaotic and without end.
But the Proactiva team was
always focused, calming,
with great purpose and
grounded in what needed
to be done moment by
moment to save lives.
At 3 p.m. that day, we sat
down for a late lunch at the
taverna on the ground floor
of the inn. There were six
lifeguards from Proactiva
on the island that week. I sat
with four of them for lunch
andtwo remained out on
the beach road that circled
the island, keeping watch
for boats in distress.Just as
our food began to arrive,
Fio, the only female lifeguard that week, picked up her phone to
hear one of her colleagues say, bodies in the water. He gave
the location from a road along a cliff. We jumped in two cars
and sped a couple of kilometers up the road where we saw a
Proactiva vehicle and the lifeguards looking out with binoculars.
Something had gone very wrong. Looking out toward Turkey,
one kilometer from the Greek shore, I could see hundreds of
orange life preservers sprinkled like confetti bobbing up and
down on the whitecaps. It was an instant shock to the system.
From unloading boats with the lifeguards for the past couple of
days, I knew that a good amount of those lifejackets were on
small children, and that babies usually had no life-preserving
device.
In what seemed like an instant I heard the screeching of tires
peeling out, and off went all six lifeguards.Within 10 minutes, I
could see the jet skis racing to the scene.
A large wooden fishing boat with more than 300 Syrian
refugees aboard had collapsed and sunk off the coast of Lesbos.
The tragedy happened at about 3:30 in the afternoon, and it
remains the deadliest day on the Aegean since 2015. On that
day in very cold weather, Gerard and scar and Niko and
Dani all went out on the two jet skis in rough seas and heavy
wind, and remained out there for nearly five hours, well into a
chilly dark night. They pulled 243 survivors out of the water.
I cant bear to share the number of babies and children they
worked tirelessly to save, but who are now painfully counted
among those that perished.
When the four lifeguards came back that night at nearly 9
p.m., they were chilled to the bone, their faces red. No words
6 THE VOLUNTEER June 2017
could come from their mouths. What they had witnessed was
a warzone on water the likes of which they hope to never
experience again. It was a sadness that permeated the entire
island and a sadness without measure for the parents who
survived.
I learned the next day that when they came back that night they
went straight to their rooms and put the shower heads into the
neck of their wetsuits to try to warm their bodies.
The next night I sat down with
Gerard as he shared what
had been his experience out
in the water. Who did they
go to first, with victims floating
everywhere and countless
children and babies? How
did they do it? How did they
manage to work in such cold
conditions for so long? Each
response was painfully difficult,
but critical if they were to alter
the future.
But on that day began a new
readinessthe lifeguards
would get more equipment,
faster rescue boats, better
ropes and ladders to arm the
Greek coast guard vessels,
more communication equipment and commitments from Frontex
[the European Unions border agency] and the coastguard
to coordinate rescues. And all the rescue workers were to get
trained on open water rescue and first aid. Because out on the
sea that day, the only people equipped to pull people from the
water were the Proactiva lifeguards.Although other fishing boats
and coast guard boats had come out to help, no one on those
boats knew CPR or first aid. No one on those boats was able to
actually get into the water and help victims that couldnt swim to
a boat or pull themselves aboard. All 243 survivors were pulled
out of the water by four lifeguards who know what is required to
do successful rescues in open water.
What happened on October 28 would never again be
repeated if Proactiva could get the essential resources they so
desperately need to respond most effectively.
Proactiva posted a single online message following the October
28 tragedy:
There are no words as our hearts are broken. We think only of
those whose feet will never touch the dream that is Europe.
You call them lifeguards; I call them the angels of the sea.
It is an honor to pay tribute to these heroes.
Amy Rao is the founder and CEO of Integrated Archive Systems
(IAS) in Palo Alto, California. She is a member of the board of
the Fund for Global Human Rights, the International Board of
Directors of Human Rights Watch, and the board of the Schmidt
Family Foundation.
 America and World Fascism
ALBA Takes Its Teaching in a New Direction
By Sebastiaan Faber

ALBA has expanded the scope of its teaching institutes, moving

from the Spanish Civil War to a broader and more ambitious focus
on the role of the United States in the world, as well as the moral,
political, and judicial aspects of the struggle for human rights. The
time is right: Fascism was among the most looked up words in
the dictionary last year.
Springfield institute. Photo R. Cairn

Recent political developments have moved large numbers of citizens to again appreciate the relevance of
political organizing, judicial independence, and an independent media.

W hat happens if we look at

American history and U.S. foreign
policy not as a struggle between isolation-
ism and internationalism but through the
lens of fascism and anti-fascism? How
can we responsibly speak about fascism in
the present? How do we help middle and
high school students appreciate the past in
all its complexity through the concept of
historical empathy? How do we help them
understand what fascism might look like
today?
These were the questions that Peter
Carroll and I spent two intense days con-
sidering together with some 30 History
and Spanish teachers from Massachusetts
public schools. With the invaluable help
of master teacher Kelley Brown and Rich
Cairn from the Collaborative for Edu-
cational Services, we considered a broad
set of primary source documents rang-
ing from letters of Lincoln veterans to
speeches by F. D. Roosevelt, Charles Lind-
bergh, and Martin Luther King.
In consultation with Cairn and Brown,
ALBA has expanded the scope of its
teaching institutes, moving from the
Spanish Civil War to a broader and more
ambitious focus on the role of the United
States in the world, as well as the moral,
political, and judicial aspects of the strug-
gle for human rights. The time is right for
such a reorientation. Recent political de-
velopments have moved large numbers of
citizens to again appreciate the relevance
of political organizing, judicial indepen-

June 2017 THE VOLUNTEER 7


An essay by Henry Wallace showed how the premature anti-fascism of the Lincoln volunteers
had become mainstream by 1944.
dence, and an independent media. There
is also a new thirst for historical knowl-
edge to understand the present. Fascism
was among the most looked up words in
the dictionary last year. At the same time,
the fact that the White House is occupied
by a president who flouts the fundamental
values of intellectual inquiry and integrity
on a daily basis, poses new challenges for
school teachers everywhere.
Five central questions guided the
workshop: What is fascism? Who are its
victims? What does it mean to resist fas-
cism, and how were its leaders judged in
the wake of the Second World War? What
can we say about the presence of fas-
cism in the postwar period? And, finally,
how does the study of fascism in the past
inform how we understand the present?
In addition, master teacher Kelley Brown
guided the participating teachers through
various exercises in historical empathya
concept meant to help high school stu-
dents avoid the temptation of judging the
past as critically separate from the present.
Rich Cairn led an excursion through the
hundreds of hate groups active in the
United States today, as mapped by the
Southern Poverty Law Center.
Grounding the workshop was an
anthology of compelling primary sources.
A letter by Lincoln vets Hy Katz and Ca-
nute Frankson underscored the fact that
many of those who volunteered to fight
in Spain did so because they felt fascism
constituted a global threat. A fireside chat
by President Roosevelt and a speech by
Charles Lindbergh, both from September
11, 1941, made clear that fascism had im-
portant American supporters. An essay by
Henry Wallace on the Dangers of Ameri-
can Fascism showed how the premature
anti-fascism of the Lincoln volunteers had
become mainstream by 1944.
8 THE VOLUNTEER June 2017
The rise of fascism created a new aware-
ness of the need to assist civilian victims,
including political refugees. This is clear
from compelling reportage from 1939 by
Chicago journalist Jay Allen on the Span-
ish Republicans held in French refugee
camps (see page #12 for Allens piece).
Two excerpts from testimonies delivered
at the Nuremberg trials sparked discussion
about the complications of judging politi-
cal crimes, and the way in which concepts
like genocide and crimes against humanity
helped reshape international law. A speech
by the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., read
alongside a speech by the historian (and
Lincoln vet) Robert Colodny, helped
bring home the connection between the
Springfield institute. Photos R. Cairn
1930s and the Vietnam War. We discussed
the effect of surveillance and political
persecution in the United States during
the Cold War through Crawford Morgans
testimony before the Subversive Activi-
ties Control Board and a poem by Ray
Durem dedicated to the FBI agent who
tracked his every step for years. A recent
report about U.S. volunteers fighting
ISIS in Syria, finally, served to prompt a
discussion about the value and limitations
of historical analogies. The teachers spent
the last part of the second day working on
a lesson plan design incorporating these
primary sources.
Thoughtful, relevant, practical, and in-
spiring, wrote a teacher in charge of 10th
and 11th-grade U.S. and Global History
in his evaluation, adding: The workshop
was highly applicable for my classroom
practice as well as inspiring politically.
The depth of the content was immensely
helpful in educating me on this event
and its ties to other events, a 10th-grade
U.S. history teacher wrote; So amazing
the knowledge the instructors shared with
us. I already have plans to use this in a
lesson for this year! a 9th-grade Western
Civics teacher said. This was the best
professional development workshop I can
remember (and I have taught for over 20
years).
This two-day institute was made pos-
sible by generous support from the Puffin
Foundation, the University of Massachu-
setts, and the Collaborative for Educa-
tional Services.
Sebastiaan Faber, former chair of ALBAs
board, teaches at Oberlin College.
Springfield institute. Photo S. Faber
The Massachusetts
Institute:
A Teacher Responds
Karen Pleasant, History Department Chair at
Stoneleigh Burnham School in Greenfield, Mas-
sachusetts, participated in ALBAs two-day institute
this spring. A 17-year veteran in the classroom, she
teaches U.S. History and several history classes in
the International Baccalaureate curriculum.
time divided into lecture, practical teaching exercises, reading
time of various source materials, and the hands-on creation of
a lesson plan. The source material that we were given was excel-
lent, and so were the digital resources. I was intrigued by the
notion of having my students contribute to the ALBA Data-
base, though I am not quite sure how to go about this type of
research with a class of high school students.
I am interested in the event of July 6, 1935, which is covered
in the film The Good Fight, when a group of American protesters
tore the Nazi flag off the German ship the SS Bremen while it
was docked in New York City. I am hoping to develop a lesson
that revolves around point of view. Students would have mul-
tiple sources to work with, from multiple viewpoints, to answer
the question: What happened on this day? I hope that by the
end of the lesson, students would realize that answering how
and why things happen directly relates to the perspective of who
is telling the story and where it is being reported.

I
am quite embarrassed to say this, but before this work-
shop I really did not know anything about the Spanish
Civil War, beyond seeing the painting of Guernica by
Pablo Picasso and visiting the Valley of the Fallen when I was
a student in college studying in Madrid. I had not heard of the
Lincoln Brigade.
I very much enjoyed the historical content of the workshop:
the Spanish Civil War in generalbut particularly from the
anti-fascist point of view. It was interesting to look at a civil war
in Europe from the perspective of American participants. What
worked well for my learning style was to have the workshop
I have time to teach one more unit in my IB History Stan-
dard-Level class and I have decided to teach the Spanish Civil
War. I have the option to teach this within the broader world
history topic: Causes and Effects of 20th-Century Wars. Before
this workshop, I was not going to teach the Spanish Civil
War, but I am now very enthusiastic to devote four weeks to
the study of this conflict. There seems to be a wealth of great
resources at the ALBA website, and I will definitely use some of
the lesson plans in my new unit.

Open Call - Human Rights

Documentaries
Deadline: July 10, 2017
Open call for documentary filmmakers worldwide with
productions made in 2016 and 2017, addressing any issue
related to human rights.
Deadline for submissions: July 10
Notification of selection: July 31
Festival: September 22-34, DCTV New York

Jury: Spanish investigative documentary filmmaker Montserrat Armengou [Francos Forgotten

Children, The Institutions of Fear]; Emmy-winning filmmaker Laurens Grant [Stay Woke: The
Black Lives Matter Movement, The Black Panthers: Vanguard of the Revolution]; and Director
Emeritus of the New York Film Festival Richard Pea.
More information at www.alba-valb.org

Impugning Impunity: ALBAs Human Rights Documentary Film Festival is made possible in part
by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Andrew M. Cuomo
and the New York State Legislature.

June 2017 THE VOLUNTEER 9

 Direct your assets
to the people and
BOARD OF GOVERNORS

causes you care

EXECUTIVE COMMITTEE
Fraser Ottanelli, Chair
about most
Peter N. Carroll, Chair Emeritus
Dan Czitrom, Chair Emeritus
Sebastiaan Faber, Chair Emeritus
James D. Fernandez, Vice-Chair
Gina Herrmann, Vice-Chair
Ellyn Polshek, Vice-Chair
Joan Levenson-Cohen, Treasurer
Aaron Retish, Secretary
Kate Doyle
Anthony L. Geist
Jo Labanyi

BOARD HONORARY BOARD

John Brickman Larry Cox
Christopher Brooks Baltasar Garzn
Robert Coale Adam Hochschild
Burton Cohen Joyce Horman
Angela Giral Gabriel Jackson
Peter Glazer Robin D.G. Kelley
Jeanne Houck Howard Lurie
Tim Johnson Judy Montell
For more information please contact
Peter Miller Antonio Muoz Molina ALBAs executive director
Josephine Nelson-Yurek John Sayles Marina Garde
Julia Newman James Skillman 212-674-5398
Nancy Wallach Bryan Stevenson
Nancy Yanofsky mgarde@alba-valb.org

In loving memory of our

friend and colleague
Xochitl Gil-Higuchi
(1972 - 2017)

Vuela alto, mariposa!

10 THE VOLUNTEER June 2017

Back in School: The New York Institute
By Peter N. Carroll

ALBA will be incorporated to the Humanities curriculum of the Seccin Internacional Espaola (SIE) at United Nations
International School (Grade 10) [] Please, spread your work to Spain!!! Thank you for your generosity and for keeping all of
this alive. Salud y Repblica!
NYC High School Teacher of Humanities in Spanish, 12 years teaching experience

This training has influenced directly a significant amount of what I do in an 11-12th grade European History elective. The
materials enable me to link American and European history, allows the students to engage in authentic research with primary
sources, and introduces students to normal people influencing the course of history. I cannot praise this program as much as it
deserves. NYC High School Teacher of History, 41 years teaching experience
I really appreciate that the materials provided traced fascism and anti-fascism from the 20s and 30s all the way to today,
touching on the many fascinating case studies along the way.
NYC High School Teacher of Spanish Language and Culture, 6 years experience

R
eflecting a growing interest among Americans
about the history of fascism and anti-fascism, and
resulting struggles for the rights of citizens and civil-
ians in wartime, ALBA launched a three-day symposium for
high school teachers of New York City to explore these themes
using primary sources that remain accessible and challenging
for their students.
With the welcome mat out, over 30 teachers of social stud-
ies, Spanish language, and literary arts enrolled in a series of
seminars spread over two weekends in May, led by Professor
James Fernndez of New York University, Peter N. Carroll,
Juan Salas, and ALBA Board Chair Fraser Ottanelli. This pro-
gram was supported, in part, by public funds from the New
York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with
the City Council.
Among the major topics were two questions: Who were
the first Americans to recognize fascism as a threat? Why did
it take so long for Americans to form a consensus about this
threat?
In answering these questions, ALBA introduced teachers to
key documents including President Franklin D. Roosevelts
so-called Quarantine speech of 1937; the response by major
newspaper editorials; an essay by radio priest, Father Charles
Coughlin; letters from U.S. volunteers in the Lincoln Brigade;
and radio broadcasts by FDR and the America First spokes-
man Charles Lindbergh.
Continuing the story through World War II and its
aftermath, the Teaching Institute addressed the Nuremberg
Tribunals, the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights
and the postwar struggles for civil rights, resistance to McCar-
thyism, and the anti-war movement of the 1960s, including
historian Robert Colodnys (a Lincoln vet) pamphlet Spain
and Vietnam, first published by the Veterans of the Abraham
Lincoln Brigade.
Underlying all these issues is the current political climate
that the teachers said affects how they and their students view
the world. Questions involving the rights of refugees, for ex-
ample, exhibit common themes whether the uprooted peoples
are Spaniards in 1939, Jews in Europe during World War II
and the Holocaust, or victims of bombings in the Middle East
today. By placing the Spanish Civil War in the context of such
broad themes, ALBAs seminars emphasize the importance of
educating students and citizens everywhere about basic hu-
man rights.
Most satisfying are the responses of ALBAs alumni, the
teachers who are eager to study these subjectsindeed, many
of our teachers this year had attended earlier institutesand
to bring these lessons into their own classrooms in the bor-
oughs of New York.
Special thanks to the Puffin Foundation, the King Juan Carlos
I of Spain Center and the Tamiment Library

June 2017 THE VOLUNTEER 11

Hostages of
Appeasement
By Jay Allen

Do refugees have rights? If so, who is responsible to

protect them? These contemporary questions are not new.
Indeed, they were raised eloquently by the American
journalist Jay Allen in November 1939 in Survey Graphic,
a monthly magazine edited by Paul Kellogg, illustrated
with images by Ione Robinson (1910-1989), an American
photographer and artist. Allen (1900-1972) had reported
the atrocities committed by Francos armies during the
Spanish Civil War for the Chicago Tribune. He well
understood the perils facing Spanish refugees who had fled
to France. He himself would be imprisoned by Hitlers
German officials after the fall of France in 1940. We can
ask today, as he did then: What can Americans do?

12 THE VOLUNTEER June 2017

 Jay Allen

On French soil are close to 300,000 refugees, the flower and sap of
the Republic and the sole hope of the millions still in Spain under
General Francos ruthless improvisations.

June 2017 THE VOLUNTEER 13

 A page from the November 1939 Survey Graphic below.

T
he experiment which opened to such bright hopes workers, 17,000 builders and masons, 10,272 mechanics and
in the spring of 1931 has been destroyed . . . chiefly 45,918 peasantsthe enlightened workers who were the back-
by the fact that it was born into a fiercely illiberal bone of the second andoh so moderateSpanish Republic,
world which betrayed it at every step. New York Herald Tri- who thought of progress not in terms of revolution but in terms
bune, February 7, 1939. of the development of their own capacities.
Resurrection of the Spanish Republic is not on the war pro- And there are dentists, pharmacists, nurses, opticians,
gram of the Allies. architects, engineers, silk workers, topographers, agronomists,
Mr. Chamberlain has expressed his regrets to Czechoslovakia horticulturists, philologists, museum directors, aviation mechan-
and to Poland and promised them that they will rise again. The ics, viticulturists, distillers, tailors, hatmakers, musicians, lock-
way things are shaping up even this is a large order. But there makers, blacksmiths, breeders of Arabian horses, psychiatrists,
was also Spain. It may well be that the redemption of Czecho- bullfight surgeons and, in modest proportions, army and navy
slovakia and of Poland will call for a military triumph on a officers. These were the riches and the hope of a people whom
grand scale over the conquerors who now hold them. It is not so Havelock Ellis found to be the firmest-fibered race of all. This
with Spain. For the Span- was the capital with which
ish Republic lies physically, they sought, pathetically,
as well as in a moral sense, to establish a pleasant 19th
in the hands of those who century republic in the 30s
betrayed it. It can be saved of this terrible century. In
by humanitarian endeavor, other countries such talents
not by battle. For on French are taken for granted and
soil are close to 300,000 sometimes ignored; in Spain
refugees, the flower and sap preparation for even the
of the Republic and the sole humblest task was the prom-
hope of the millions still in ise of a rebirth of a people
Spain under General Francos that was poor in everything
ruthless improvisations. Save but genius.
them and the Spanish Re- They were the Spain that
public is saved for the future, wanted only to live and let
no matter what the political live. But when this was not
exigencies that maintain the allowed them they fought,
generalissimo precariously in as no people have fought in
power for a time. our time. And because they
It is a commonplace to say fought against fascism they
that during centuries there were called Reds. Strange
were two Spains in a state of that in the debris of the
permanent civil war, but for Republic, the debris that is
being a commonplace it is also its hope, there should
no less true. The dwindling turn out to be only some
minority of one of those eight percent of communists
Spains set upon the other and they, for the most part,
and sought, with help from men who had accepted a
the most surprising sources, discipline that called for the
to annihilate it once and for maintenance of the political
allto do with machine gun and social status quo.
and bomb and foreign com- Beaten, the Spanish
plicity what its predecessors Loyalist refugees came out
with fire and stake had so signally failed to do long ago. of the war more of a nation than ever in their history. They were
In concentration camps, in labor battalions in France, in exile the first victims of appeasement and now, with appeasement
in the New World are the victimsthe other Spain that had presumably dead, they are still its victims and, for the first time,
proved itself so generous in the brief years of the Republic. They their very survival is in doubt.
are more than a cross-section of the Republic; they are its core. France, at war, finds them an even greater problem. The
Spain was not a large country for all her imperial heritage; and children are being sent back to Spain when Franco authorities,
among her 23 millions, there were few who were, as Spaniards claiming the parents to be there, ask for them. And remember
say, prepared. In the camps of France there are 2,063 school that Francos punitive Law of Political Responsibilities applies
teachers; the Spanish Monarchy could have done wonders with to everyone down to the age of 14. All adults are under fear-
that many school teachers had it approved of education. There ful pressure to go back. Franco has promised immunity from
are 2,440 printersprinters always seem to carry the spirit of his purification processes if they are not guilty of what he
1789 in old societies. There are 2,809 electricians, 5,922 wood- calls crime. The sincerity of such an amnesty would have to

14 THE VOLUNTEER June 2017


be checked on the spot by an international commission which
would see to it that Francos definition of crime would not
endanger the refugees. Since being a freemason or a democrat or
a socialist is defined as crime in the statutes of Nationalist Spain,
an amnesty might prove to be a very frail guarantee indeed. Of
the 82,000 refugee militiamen, France has taken only 16,000
into industry and agriculture; 24,000 are in labor battalions; and
42,000 are still in concentration camps, where they have been
for over eight months. One hundred thousand old men, women
and children are also in camps. These are official French figures.
The point is not so much that these heroes of the first and, to
date, only real war against fascism in Europe have sunk deeper
into misery. It is that their hopes have been blighted. Their own
carefully devised plans to transplant their republic to the New
World, there to keep it alive until the day when it should live
again at home, have been cut short. Yesterday victims of ap-
peasement, today they are hostages of appeasement; held thus to
please General Franco who, if he so deigns, can one day become
the glorious ally of the embattled democracies. There is little
hope of a change in the French attitude. Help must come from
some other countries which are not yet so desperately engaged
in the struggle for democracy as to have to make such strategic
capitulations in its name.
The Spain That Was
From below the Pyrenees comes the echo of the firing squads
cleaning up the unfinished business encouraged by the Non-
intervention Committee, and the day may well come, and soon,
when General Franco will ask a price for joining in the crusade
to save democracy.
All this is a far cry from the epic days of the defense of Madrid
in 1936. The Spanish Republicans were very proud then. They
were sure, then, that they were fending off the menace for all of
Europe, and often in those early days you saw Spain pictured as
a bull standing bloody but defiant, with a Hitler caught on one
horn and a Mussolini on the other. That was in the days before
the thing called Non-intervention was shown up to be the begin-
nings of the formula for surrender that in its later, more brutal,
aspects came to be called Appeasement. There were still many
illusions in Spain then.
They thought that the western world would come to under-
Spanish refugees at Le Barcars, 1939. Photo Ione Robinson.
stand. They knew that they hadnt invented Spanish anarchism
and Spanish Marxism; they were trying to leave the sick society
that fostered them. They thought that the societies born of the
French Revolution and the 19th century would remember that
democracy and simple freedom had been thought worth fighting
for long before it had reached its higher and fancier capitalist
developments. And that once upon a time the defense of democ-
racy by embattled farmers and other rabble was not deplored.
When the earlier illusions had gone and they saw not only
Britain and France but the United States collaborating in a
conspiracy to deny them arms in the name of Non-Intervention
and Neutrality, while the generalissimos friends suffered from no
such inhibitions, they held on to the idea that the true demo-
crats of those three countries would understand that the con-
spiracy was not against Spain alone but all free men everywhere.
They may have dreamed, as was their right, of the day when
appeasement would blow up in the faces of its authors. But
when Munich came they knew it was the end for them. Never-
theless they fought on, in last ditches, having known the bomb-
ers, they knew that there was worse to fear.
And some of them, the very wise, knew that with Munich
the Soviet Union, which had helped from afar to hold the fort,
was lost to a dream called collective security, or with Munich it
was clear to everyone who wasnt led by a linethat the only
collective action since sanctions were abandoned was collective
security in reverse.
But when they went under they got some fine obituaries in
the papers. On February 7, 1939, when Catalonia was falling,
the New York Herald Tribune carried a moving editorial called
The Death of an Anachronism:
All day Sunday and yesterday the wreck of the Spanish Repub-
lic was streaming northward through the passes of the Pyrenees
the weary crowds of peasants and workpeople, the escaping
officials, the hungry women, the lost and orphaned children,
and the broken fragments of a valiant army in one vast tide of
disorganization and defeat. One thinks of the terrible retreat of
the Greek armies through Anatolia in 1922; one thinks of the
Belgian armies pouring down the roads from Liege in 1914; one
thinks of the wreck of the Grande Arme in the long twilight
at Waterloo or of the great defeats and routs of history and one
finds that none is quite a parallel for this mass fear and flight,
this simultaneous dissolution of an army, a government, a people
and an idea under the merciless blows of modern warfare . . .
June 2017 THE VOLUNTEER 15

the republic is dead. The experiment
which opened to such bright hopes in
the spring of 1931 has been destroyed
partly by its own ineptitudes and
excesses, partly by the blind recalci-
trance of the vested interests which
it challenged, partly by the brute
intervention of two alien dictators, but
chiefly by the fact that it was born into
a fiercely illiberal world which betrayed
it at every step.
The responsibility had been still
more clearly underlined by President
Roosevelt who, a few weeks before in
his message to Congress, admitted that
our neutrality had favored the ag-
gressor. During those eight years from
1931, he said, many of our people
clung to the hope that the innate
decency of mankind would protect the
unprepared who showed their innate
trust in mankind. Today we are all
wiser and sadder. []
The obituaries were premature.
When the Republican Army came out
of Catalonia it marched in formation,
flags flying, and its chief, Negrn, a biologist and physician who
had never asked more than to be left alone, was the last to cross.
They were proud. True they had yielded to the Condor Legion
and other phantom invaders whom the Non-Interventionists
had never been able to detect. (The Condor Legion has since
shown its substance in Poland.) They were proud because they
knew that in 33 months of war their nation had been reborn,
old Spain ground to bits, their return made inevitable.
What Americans Can Do
In France they were herded into concentration camps, quar-
antined for having fought too long and too well for democracy.
Darker days were to come, as appeasement tightened. The Span-
ish Republics gold that might have kept them sheltered and fed
was sent back to Franco. The generalissimo became a favorite
with nice people. The United States came forward with a loan of
$13,500,000 for the Spanish dictator and the U.S. State Depart-
ment admits no knowledge of executions.
When Hitler entered Prague the Spanish Republicans felt
certain that now would be an end to appeasement and they
prepared to put the army of 150,000 that had come out of Spain
at the service of France.
Appeasement, gold, loans all had failed to break the Axis.
Then Stalin turned around and broke it and, breaking it, he left
the British and French to fight Hitler and continue to appease
Mussolini and Franco. Not in all their nightmares had the
Spanish Republicans dreamed that the war bred by appeasement
would find them still quarantined, disqualified to fight for the
cause they had defended alone for so long, and barred from the
hopes of victory, if victory there could be.
They were never abandoned altogether. In England they found
16 THE VOLUNTEER June 2017
Spanish refugees at Le Barcars, 1939. Photo Ione Robinson.
such champions as the Duchess of
Atholl, General Molesworth, the
Dean of Canterbury, in Sweden
Senator Branting, in France Cardinal
Verdier who joined Academicians and
others to help the child refugees.
In this country, for some reason,
efforts by certain groups to label
all Spanish refugee relief activity as
something bordering on subversion
have been for a time more successful
than elsewhere. This factor, together
with the shift of interest and the
uncertainties of the outbreak of the
war, resulted in a ruinous falling off
of contributions. In England and
France the war has brought down
the contributions almost to zero. No
funds can be sent from England for
such purposes, and in France general
mobilization has paralyzed most of
the relief work.
The burden now rests largely on us.
All of the relief organizations are
determined to go on. The Spanish
Refugee Relief Campaign, of which
Secretary [of the Interior Department of the US, Harold] Ickes
is honorary chairman, has asked the American Friends Service
Committee (Quakers) to supervise the distribution of its funds
as an ultimate guarantee of its non-political character. The Span-
ish Confederated Societies have done likewise.[]
What can be done in this country?
We can, before loaning more money to General Franco, sug-
gest that he might prepare himself to take the veil of democracy
by granting an amnesty to the vanquished and in the meantime
cease the bloodlettings.
We can arrange to cooperate as a government with the Quak-
ers and other relief organizations that are now ready to help
settle Spanish refugees in the New World. []
Why should we do this? Debt of conscience. And self-interest
too. The democratic Spain, sole inspiration of 60 million Span-
ish speaking Americans at our borders cannot be allowed to die.
Suppose that in the 16th century the Spanish Armada had
succeeded in its enterprise to bring fire to England. Then there
would have been exiles or martyrs with such names as Spenser,
Marlowe, Bacon, Dekker, Jonson, Greene. A playwright from
Stratford might have been among them. And had they been
abandoned what would have been the loss to a liberal Anglo-
Saxon civilization as yet unborn!
We know what would be the loss to the Spanish-speaking
world today if the Spain that was never appeased is abandoned.
It will die if abandoned.
This is a problem for us. Our share in Non-Intervention
helped make them exiles. Now we have a chance, without going
to war, to retrieve the error, to consolidate what still remains.
Failure to do so and its consequences in Latin America would be
another error that we may never have a chance to retrieve. It is
up to us. The British and French have their hands tied. We have
not, as yet.
Hemingway in the
Martyred City, April 1937
By Martin Minchom

In April 1937, Ernest Hemingway filed a series of dispatches from

Madrid on the atrocious Nationalist bombing campaigns. Curiously,
he failed to mention the attack on Guernica.
Ernest Hemingway with Ilya Ehrenburg and Gustav Regler
during the Spanish Civil War, not dated, circa 1937.
Hemingway Photograph Collection, John F. Kennedy
Presidential Library and Museum, Boston. Public Domain.

A
lthough from December 1936
onwards Madrid received a
continuous flow of illustrious
foreign visitors, the historical context
of the war in the Spanish capital in
April 1937 has remained strangely out
of focus. Ernest Hemingway arrived
in Madrid as the highly compensated
correspondent of the newspaper syndi-
cate, the North American Newspaper
Alliance (NANA). In the second week of
April, he and several friends set them-
selves up in what he called the Old
Homestead, a half ruined building
among the formerly elegant houses
on Madrids western plateau, with a
panoramic view of combat taking place
in the open countryside of the Casa de
Campo. The filmmaker Joris Ivens was
also in the group, and later incorporated
footage of battle scenes into his docu-
mentary The Spanish Earth, with which
Hemingway was closely involved.
In fact, these scenes were part of a
full-scale Republican military offensive
intended to wrest Garabitas Hill and
other strategic high ground in the Casa
de Campo from Francoist control.
On April 30, Hemingway linked the
fighting in central Spain to the Basque

June 2017 THE VOLUNTEER 17

Nocturnal bombing at the Plaza Antn Martn, Madrid. Winter 1936.
(Photo Juan Miguel Pando Barrero. Museo Reina Sofa, Madrid.)
campaign: Madrid can only help
[Basque resistance to the Nationalists]
by attacking on the central front, as
they did in Casa de Campo three weeks
ago, to draw off troops from the north
(NANA, p. 37). This was indeed what
the Republic sought to do through a se-
ries of military initiatives, like the Sego-
via Offensive described in For Whom
the Bell Tolls, and the Battle of Brunete
in July 1937. The battle at the Casa de
Campo was the only one to take place
in the capital between the great Battle
of Madrid in November 1936 and the
end of the war. Still, the Republican of-
fensive fizzled rapidly, leaving barely any
trace in the historiography of the war.
Similarly, the intense bombardments of
Madrid in the same month also van-
ished from history.
These disappearances raise sig-
nificant questions about the reporting
and interpretation of the war. In one
sense, of course, the shelling of Ma-
drid is all too familiar thanks to some
of its surprising collateral effects, such
as its imagined aphrodisiac impact
on Hemingway and Gellhorn. But
while the shells landing in the center
of Madrid persistently beat time in
our soundtrack to the Spanish Civil
War, there is a contradiction in the
particularity of the April attacks, which
belonged to a short lived and highly
aggressive Francoist campaign resulting
in hundreds of victims. For news outlets
operating for an international mass
market, the problem with an artillery
campaign was that it was inherently
18 THE VOLUNTEER June 2017
Madrid bombed. (Archivo Rojo, Spanish Ministry of Culture.)
repetitive and predictable, lacking the
drama and existential terror of an aerial
bombardment.
Still, in the texts that Hemingway
sent from Madrid in April 1937, the
bombing of civilians often took center
stage. He wrote graphically of the shells
hitting Madrid, which killed an old
woman returning home from market,
dropping her in a huddled, black heap
of clothing, with one leg suddenly
detached whirling against the wall of
an adjoining house. They killed three
people in another square who lay like
so many bundles of torn clothing in the
dust and rubble (NANA, p. 27). In
reports sent on April 18 or 19 and April
20, Hemingway commented on the
stoicism of Madrids population once
the immediate danger had ended and
puzzled over the Francoist motivation
for terrorizing the city. He concluded
his text with an allusion to the martyr-
dom of Madrid (NANA, p. 36). The
impact of the bombardments on the
journalists congregated in Madrid was
clear from a cluster of reports in the
international press, April 18-20. This
was precisely the moment when Pablo
Picasso, then living in Paris, scrawled a
hammer and sickle over the front page
of Paris-Soir, a newspaper that chose to
highlight bland official observations on
non-intervention instead of the bomb-
ing of Madrid. (See the March 2011
issue of The Volunteer.)
Indeed, Hemingway was not the
only person to invoke the martyrdom
of Madrid. The French newspaper
Luvre, too, employed a similar ex-
pression just a day before Hemingway,
headlining its report Madrid, Martyred
City. The first to coin this trope was
the French journalist Louis Delapre in
his incandescent accounts of the aerial
bombardments of Madrid in November
1936. From January 1937, his reports
came out in five languages (including
English) in a widely distributed pam-
phlet called The Martyrdom of Madrid.
Rather than simply representing a
limited albeit highly destructive shelling
campaign, the new attacks tapped into
the mystique of martyred Madrid, the
city that had become synonymous with
the bombing of civiliansbefore, that
is, Guernica became the new point of
reference.
In late April, Hemingway made a
trip to the Guadarrama Mountains
northwest of Madrid (the terrain that
would partly inspire him when writing
For Whom the Bell Tolls), returning to
the city on the 29th. In the report sent
the day after (April 30), Hemingway
returned to the topic of bombardments.
For nearly three weeks, the shelling
of Madrid had been intermittently a
key news item, along with the military
course of the Basque campaign. On
April 28 and 29 the shelling of Madrid
was still news, but thanks especially to
the publication on April 28 of George
L. Steers reportin both The Times and
the New York Timeson the Guernica
bombing of April 26, the international
press began to highlight the attack on
the Basque town. Simultaneously, the
Ernest Hemingway with other American visitors to 15th International Brigade, Dec. 1937. (Tamiment Library, NYU, 15th IB Photo Collection,
Photo #11_1352)
shelling of Madrid came to an
unannounced end. Heming-
way noted that April 30 had
been a quiet day, imagining
that this was simply a lull.
But Madrids martyrdom had
ended. Perhaps the Francoists
feared a potential propaganda
disaster if they had to defend
or lie about the bombing of
civilians in both Madrid and
Guernica at the same time.
Strangely, however, in
Hemingways dispatch of
April 30 he failed to men-
tion the attack on Guernica
(NANA, p. 37). Why? It is
highly improbable that news
of the attack and emerging
controversy had not reached
him by that date. William
Braasch Watson suggests that
Hemingway preferred to
comment on information that
he had collected himself. We might add
that a Madrid-based journalist would
not normally cover news from the
Basque Country. But in this particular
text, as well as describing the bombard-
ments of Madrid, Hemingway provided
an overview of the war that ranged from
Francos Basque offensive to the strategic
position of the Madrid front and condi-
tions in the Guadarrama Mountains.
It would have been one thing to omit
news of the attack on Guernica in a re-
port on an unrelated subject, but it was
quite another that he did so in a piece
that actually referred to the Basque
campaign.
The aerial destruction of Guernica has
so overshadowed the attacks on Madrid
that it may seem absurd to insist that
there was a competing news story that
month. Many secondary accounts of
the war wrongly insist on the extent
to which the attack on Guernica was
unique and unprecedented, omitting
the recent attacks on the civil popula-
tions of Madrid and Durango. And yet
on April 28, the latest bombardment of
Madrid figured prominently among the
main headlines in the French newspaper
Le Matin, while the news from Guer-
nica was secondary. This bombardment
was even briefly mentioned on the
New York Times cover of the same day,
despite the fact that the newspaper had
Steers sensational scoop on Guernica to
showcase.
But all this is only surprising in
retrospect. Madrid had become the
archetypal heroic and martyred city
thanks to its successful resistance to
Franco and the bombardments that it
had suffered; its name took on the same
resonance that Sarajevo was to acquire
in the 1990s. Hemingway was clearly
conscious of this, making a small place
for himself on the roll call of observers
who had experienced and testified to the
citys destruction; hence his allusion to
Madrid as the martyred city, and his
insistence on the ferocity of the attacks
on the city. The North American jour-
nalist Herbert L. Matthews, thinking
back to his arrival in Madrid
in December 1936 when the
Battle of Madrid had already
ended, wrote that the city
had become the hub of the
universe the big story. But
Hemingway was defending
the primacy of Madridever
the stubborn competitor,
Hemingway knew about
Guernica but Madrid was his
storyon the very last day it
made sense. Aprils bombing
campaign against the city had
finally concluded while the
huge controversy over Guer-
nica had only just begun.
If we want to understand
how people experienced and
responded to the Spanish
Civil War, the contemporary
press helps us to understand
what people considered
significant more accurately
than a conscientious reading of later
secondary works. Perhaps in retrospect,
the artillery attacks on Madrid in April
1937 were only stoking the embers of
the fire that had enveloped the city a
few months before; but at the time they
renewed the martyrdom of Madrid,
one of the great motifs of the anti-
Francoist struggle. During the great
May Day demonstration in Paris in
1937, a speech by Pascual Toms of the
Spanish UGT evoked both the women
and children murdered by international
fascism in immortal Madrid, as well
as in Guernica. Thus, Madrid was not a
distant memory on May 1, 1937, but a
key part of a vigorous ongoing collective
response to the bombing of civilians. Pi-
casso reacted furiously to the attacks on
Madrid just a week before the destruc-
tion of Guernica. But even a few days
after that attack, Ernest Hemingway still
clung to his big story by summoning up
all the ghosts of the martyred city.
Martin Minchom is the author of Spains
Martyred Cities: From the Battle of
Madrid to Picassos Guernica (Sussex
Academic Press: Brighton, 2015).
Hemingway in Spain, Dec. 1937.
(Tamiment Library, NYU, 15th IB Photo
Collection, Photo #11_1353)
June 2017 THE VOLUNTEER 19
 Michigan students rally for Spain
during the Spanish Civil War. Photo
University of Michigan.

Standing with Spain: Michigan Students

and the Spanish Civil War
By Juli Highfill

After the 1936 outbreak of the war in Spain, students at the University of Michigan
rallied in support of the Republic. A symposium on March 23-25 featuring Peter
Carroll and Robert Cohen commemorated this history of political commitment.

D
uring the Spanish Civil War, a vibrant student movement
at the University of Michigan rallied in support of the
Republic. The Progressive Club, a local chapter of the
American Student Union, led efforts to mobilize the student body
and to connect with an international movement that hoped to
halt fascism in Spain. The Student Senate passed a resolution
urging the U.S. government to lift the embargo on selling arms to
the Spanish Republic. Students and faculty formed a medical aid
committee, held rallies, and raised funds to send an ambulance.
Three students volunteered for the Abraham Lincoln Brigade
and fought in SpainRalph Neafus, Robert Cummins, and Elman
Servicejoining an estimated 100 volunteers from Michigan.
After Neafus was captured by Nationalist forces in March 1938,
students on campus mobilized to pressure the State Department
to seek his release. Eventually, the government made inquiries
through the Consul in Seville, but in the meantime, Neafus was
executed along with the other International Brigaders captured
at the same time.
To commemorate this history of political commitment, students
and faculty held a symposium on March 23-25: Standing with
Spain: Anti-Fascist Student Activism and the Spanish Civil War
one of many events organized to mark the Universitys bicenten-
nial. In preparation, students conducted archival research in
the newly digitized student newspaper, Michigan Daily, in the
Bentley Historical Library, and in the ALBA database, as they
explored this largely forgotten history. The symposium provided

20 THE VOLUNTEER June 2017

 Michigan students rally for Spain during the Spanish Civil War. Photo University of Michigan.

undergraduates with the rare opportunity to present their original Have You Gone, Arthur Miller? Americas Forgotten Student
research to a broader public. Their papers included a variety Movement and the Spanish Civil War.
of topics: the Fighting Finns, on the Finnish-Americans from the Other events included a recital and lecture by the pianist and
Upper Peninsula who volunteered in the ALB; An Unexpected human rights activist Mara Isabel Prez Dobarro on the music of
Voice, on Chi Chang, a Chinese- the second Spanish Republic; and
American mining engineer in Michi- a screening of Invisible Heroes:
gan who volunteered in Spain; African-Americans in the Spanish
Elman Service on Campus, on a Civil War, followed by a discus-
student volunteer who returned as sion with the co-director, Alfonso
a professor; and The Michigan Domingo. On the final day, in a
Six, on the persecution that still round-table discussion, representa-
another Michigan volunteer, Saul tives from Students for Justice and
Wellman, endured during the Mc- scholars with expertise in radical
Carthy era. history examined the challenges
The symposium also gave facing activists today and the les-
students the opportunity to engage sons to be drawn from movements
in dialogue with two leading in the past.
scholars: Peter Carroll, an expert As part of an ongoing course on
on the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, student activism during the Spanish
and Robert Cohen, an authority on Civil War, future students will con-
student activism in the 1930s and 60s. In their keynote address- tinue to research these largely forgotten events and to contribute
es, both speakers presented new research on the contributions to the historical record by submitting their work to the University
of Michiganders in supporting the Spanish Republic. Carroll, in archives.
his addressFacing Fascism: Americans and the Spanish Civil
Warrecounted the experiences of Ralph Neafus, Saul Well- Juli Highfill is a professor of Spanish at the University of Michigan
man, and William Titus. Cohen discussed the radicalization of in Ann Arbor.
Arthur Miller at the University of Michigan in a talk titled, Where

Call for Entries George Watt

Essay Competition
Deadline: July 1, 2017
Students from anywhere in the world are invited to submit an
essay or thesis chapter about any aspect of the Spanish Civil
War, the global political or cultural struggles against fascism in
1920s and 1930s, or the lifetime histories and contributions of
the Americans who fought in support of the Spanish Republic
from 1936 to 1939.
Deadline for submissions: July 1
Notification of selection: Sept. 1

The George Watt Competition is awarded in three categories:

1. Pre-Collegiate
2. Undergraduate
3. Graduate

Three prizes of $250 will be awarded in each category. Winning essays are published on the
ALBA website and an excerpt of the essay is published in The Volunteer.

More information at www.alba-valb.org

June 2017 THE VOLUNTEER 21


Book
reviews
Julius Ruiz. Paracuellos: The Elimination of the
Fifth Column in Republican Madrid during
the Spanish Civil War Brighton, UK; Chicago;
Toronto: Sussex Academic Press, 2017.
By David A. Messenger
J ulius Ruiz has established
himself as a scholar well
versed in the repression and
violence of Madrid during and
after the Civil War, and especially
the violence against civilians
perpetrated by the Republican
side. In this book, he tackles the
case of Paracuellos, the mas-
sacre of some 2,500 political
prisoners by Republicans in the
small town of Paracuellos de
Jarama in November and early
December 1936. While no one
disputes that this crime occurred,
a considerable mythology has grown up around it. Many
Republican supporters, then and now, have stressed the role
of the Soviet NKVD in Madrid, but explain that they were
operating at a distance from their supposed Republican allies.
Francoist historians have also blamed the Soviets, but insist
that Soviet control of the Republic and Spanish Republicans
was the definitive part of the story. The argument of Soviet
design is prominent in recent works such as Paul Prestons The
Spanish Holocaust. Of particular interest to many was the role
of Santiago Carrillo, a Spanish Communist who at age 21 was
in charge of security in Madrid and subsequently a crucial fig-
ure in Spains transition to democracy. In this new work, Ruiz
seeks to separate fact from fiction and apply a non-ideological
eye to the evidence.
Ruiz first argument is that it is wrong to consider the
events at Paracuellos as somehow exceptional in the history
of Madrid in the fall of 1936. He argues instead that the
violence of Paracuellos was not masterminded by the NKVD
or the responsibility of anarchist and other uncontrollables
in Madrid. The violence was part of a process of terror moti-
vated by a fear that a Francoist fifth column was present and
active in the city. Ruiz centers his attention on the Comit
Provincial de Investigacin Pblica (CPIP) of the Popular
Front government, created in August 1936 to improve public
security well before the NKVD arrived. As Francoist forces
22 THE VOLUNTEER June 2017
came closer to Madrid, the fear of a fifth column increased
and by early November, 10,000 political prisoners were held
in Madrid jails, while another 8,798 were in foreign embas-
sies seeking asylum. A series of sacas, or killings of prisoners,
increased around Madrid that autumn. In this atmosphere,
policing was approached with a revolutionary vigor, and com-
plaints about arrests and violence from the British Embassy
were dismissed out of hand. Ruiz argues that the murders
that occurred at Paracuellos and vicinity were indeed unorga-
nized and chaotic, but were not surprising given the increase
in repression against suspected Francoists that marked the
autumn of 1936. The height of violence, November 7-8, saw
some 650 prisoners shot.
The blame associated with the Soviets, Ruiz says, was a re-
sult of a propaganda campaign that appeared after the killings.
This material argued that the Soviet intervention had brought
with it the effective removal of a Francoist fifth column in
Madrid. While the Soviets, like others, were genuinely con-
cerned with the potential of fifth column activists to weaken
the defense of Madrid, Ruiz effectively shows that the NKVD
and other Soviet advisors had little influence over the CPIP
in this period. He writes, Spanish Communists did not need
their Soviet comrades to tell them to act brutally against the
internal enemy. Ruiz focuses on Santiago Carrillo with this
line of argument, emphasizing that he and others acted with-
out formal approval from the national Directorate of Security
to round up and move out prisoners for murderorders that
Ruiz characterizes as from below. The CPIP and its leaders
like Santiago Carrillo pushed for radical action and Novem-
ber 1936 was the height of this; indeed, killings of prisoners
declined greatly in the months that followed. Opposition
to this violence emerged in the person of Melchor Rodr-
guez, appointed Inspector General of the Prison Service
on November 9, 1936; he sought, unsuccessfully, to end the
Paracuellos operation in early November, but later succeeded,
supported by colleagues such as Manuel de Irujo, who pub-
licly condemned similar violence in Barcelona. In emphasizing
these actions, Ruiz demonstrates the diversity of Republican
views on violence, repression and fifth column activism in
the intense early months of the Civil War while also arguing
that the Government, in the end, did not act itself to stop the
killings as they were occurring, thus making itself somewhat
complicit in the events.
Ruiz is not interested in a comparison of levels of violence
carried out by the Republicans vs. the Nationalist side. Rather
he seeks to put the events of Paracuellos in a context that in-
fluenced not just public order officials like Carrillo to advocate
for violence but also the Republican government to turn away
from what was happening, at least for a time. In this way, Ruiz
argues that Republican repression was fostered by the decision
to allow divisive rhetoric from anarchists and other leftists
antifascists to develop to such an extent that revolutionary acts
must follow. This was the atmosphere of Madrid in 1936.
David A. Messenger is a Professor and Chair of the Department
of History at the University of South Alabama. He is the author
most recently of Hunting Nazis in Francos Spain (LSU Press,
2014).
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