Retrophotograh of Hans Gutmann

Hans Gutmanns

Remarkable retrophotograph by Ulrich Eumann, an expert in the work of Hans Gutmann, better known in Spanish as Juan Guzmán. It shows several tiznaos (the name for vehicles armoured with steel plates) in Plaça Catalunya on 20 July 1936 combined with the square today complete with a Bus Turístic.  It is amazing that within one of day of the coup the anarchist workers set to welding these plates on trucks and luxury Hispano-Suizos. More here in German

Ione Robinson in Barcelona

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Child in Barcelona 1938 by Ione Robinson.

“In September 1938, Robinson arrived in Barcelona. Over the course of two months, Robinson produced a series of drawings and paintingsin the Catalan munitions factories, refugios, hospitals; and on the Ebro front with the Republican 5th Army . As she writes in her 1946 memoir, A Wall to Paint On, “…in the drawings I have made here in Spain I have tried to express-through simple line-the agonizing effect of war upon the innocent victims: the women and children…through what I felt and saw in their eyes-and hands.” She left Spain at the end of October, 1938.” More here http://ionerobinson.org/

Canute Frankson

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Above photo Afro-American members of the Abraham Lincon Brigade.
“Why I, a Negro, who have fought through these years for the rights of my people, am here in Spain today? Because if we crush Fascism here, [we] will build us a new society – a society of peace and plenty. There will be no color line, no jim-crow trains, no lynchings. That is why, my dear, I am here in Spain.”Canute Frankson.
(to my dear friend).
Albacete, Spain, July 6, 1937.

Street sign guerillas

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Somebody last year had the fun idea in Barcelona of sticking up the 1936-39 street names over the plaques with today’s names.  This particular street (Marqués de Campo Sagrado) was renamed after anarcho-syndicalist printer Tomás Herreros Miguel a month after he died in 1937. PS it wasn’t me.

Martha Gellhorn on the Spanish maquis

Referring to the contribution of the Spanish Maquis to the French resistance movement, Martha Gellhorn wrote in The Undefeated (1945):

“During the German occupation of France, the Spanish Maquis engineered more than four hundred railway sabotages, destroyed fifty-eight locomotives, dynamited thirty-five railway bridges, cut one hundred and fifty telephone lines, attacked twenty factories, destroying some factories totally, and sabotaged fifteen coal mines. They took several thousand German prisoners and – most miraculous considering their arms – they captured three tanks. In the south-west part of France where no Allied armies have ever fought, they liberated more than seventeen towns.”