This space is dedicated to the proposition that we need to know the history of the struggles on the left and of earlier progressive movements here and world-wide. If we can learn from the mistakes made in the past (as well as what went right) we can move forward in the future to create a more just and equitable society. We will be reviewing books, CDs, and movies we believe everyone needs to read, hear and look at as well as making commentary from time to time. Greg Green, site manager
*****President Obama Pardon Chelsea Manning Now!-The Struggle Continues ….We Will Not Leave Our Sister Behind
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Updated-September 2015
A while back, maybe a year or so ago, I was asked by a fellow member of Veterans For Peace at a monthly meeting in Cambridge about the status of the case of Chelsea Manning since he knew that I had been seriously involved with publicizing her case and he had not heard much about the case since she had been convicted in August 2013 (on some twenty counts including several Espionage Act counts, the Act itself, as it relates to Chelsea and its constitutionality will be the basis for one of her issues on appeal) and sentenced by Judge Lind to thirty-five years imprisonment to be served at Fort Leavenworth in Kansas. (She had already been held for three years before trial, the subject of another appeals issue and as of May 2015 had served five years altogether thus far and will be formally eligible for parole in the not too distant future although usually the first parole decision is negative).
That had also been the time immediately after the sentencing when Private Manning announced to the world her sexual identity and turned from Bradley to Chelsea. The question of her sexual identity was a situation than some of us already had known about while respecting Private Manning’s, Chelsea’s, and those of her ardent supporters at Courage to Resist and elsewhere the subject of her sexual identity was kept in the background so the reasons she was being tried would not be muddled and for which she was savagely fighting in her defense would not be warped by the mainstream media into some kind of identity politics circus.
I had responded to my fellow member that, as usual in such super-charged cases involving political prisoners, and there is no question that Private Manning is one despite the fact that every United States Attorney-General including the one in charge during her trial claims that there are no such prisoners in American jails only law-breakers, once the media glare of the trial and sentencing is over the case usually falls by the wayside into the media vacuum while the appellate process proceed on over the next several years.
At that point I informed him of the details that I did know. Chelsea immediately after sentencing had been put in the normal isolation before being put in with the general population at Fort Leavenworth. She seemed to be adjusting according to her trial defense lawyer to the pall of prison life as best she could. Later she had gone to a Kansas civil court to have her name changed from Bradley to Chelsea Elizabeth which the judge granted although the Army for a period insisted that mail be sent to her under her former male Bradley name. Her request for hormone therapies to help reflect her sexual identity had either been denied or the process stonewalled despite the Army’s own medical and psychiatric personnel stating in court that she was entitled to such measures.
At the beginning of 2014 the Commanding General of the Military District of Washington, General Buchanan, who had the authority to grant clemency on the sentence part of the case, despite the unusual severity of the sentence, had denied Chelsea any relief from the onerous sentence imposed by Judge Lind.
Locally on Veterans Day 2013, the first such event after her sentencing we had honored Chelsea at the annual VFP Armistice Day program and in December 2013 held a stand-out celebrating Chelsea’s birthday (as we did in December 2014 and will do again this December of 2015). Most important of the information I gave my fellow VFPer was that Chelsea’s case going forward to the Army appellate process was being handled by nationally renowned lawyer Nancy Hollander and her associate Vincent Ward. Thus the case was in the long drawn out legal phase that does not generally get much coverage except by those interested in the case like well-known Vietnam era Pentagon Papers whistle-blower Daniel Ellsberg, various progressive groups which either nominated or rewarded her with their prizes, and the organization that has steadfastly continued to handle her case’s publicity and raising financial aid for her appeal, Courage to Resist (an organization dedicated to publicizing the cases of other military resisters as well).
At our February 2015 monthly meeting that same VFPer asked me if it was true that as he had heard the Army, or the Department of Defense, had ordered Chelsea’s hormone therapy treatments to begin. I informed him after a long battle, including an ACLU suit ordering such relief, that information was true and she had started her treatments a month previously. I also informed him that the Army had thus far refused her request to have an appropriate length woman’s hair-do. On the legal front the case was still being reviewed for issues to be presented which could overturn the lower court decision in the Army Court Of Criminal Appeals by the lawyers and the actual writing of the appeal was upcoming (expected in the Winter, 2016) . A seemingly small but very important victory on that front was that after the seemingly inevitable stonewalling on every issue the Army had agreed to use feminine or neutral pronoun in any documentation concerning Private Manning’s case. The lawyers had in June 2014 also been successful in avoiding the attempt by the Department of Defense to place Chelsea in a civil facility as they tried to foist their “problem” elsewhere.
On the political front Chelsea continued to receive awards, and after a fierce battle in 2013 was finally in 2014 made an honorary grand marshal of the very important GLBTQ Pride Parade in San Francisco (and had a contingent supporting her freedom again in the 2015 parade). Recently she has been given status as a contributor to the Guardian newspaper, a newspaper that was central to the fight by fellow whistle-blower Edward Snowden, where her first contribution was a very appropriate piece on what the fate of the notorious CIA torturers should be, having herself faced such torture down in Quantico adding to the poignancy of that suggestion. More recently she has written articles about the dire situation in the Middle East and the American government’s inability to learn any lessons from history and a call on the military to stop the practice of denying transgender people the right to serve. (Not everybody agrees with her positon in the transgender community or the VFP but she is out there in front with it.)
[Maybe most important of all in this social networking, social media, texting world of the young (mostly) Chelsea has a twitter account-@xychelsea
Locally over the past two year we have marched for Chelsea in the Boston Pride Parade, commemorated her fourth year in prison last May [2014] and the fifth this year with a vigil, honored her again on Armistice Day 2014, celebrated her 27th birthday in December with a rally (as we did this past December for her 28th birthday).
More recently big campaigns by Courage To Resist and the Press Freedom Foundation have almost raised the $200, 000 needed (maybe more by now) to give her legal team adequate resources during her appeals process (first step, after looking over the one hundred plus volumes of her pre-trial and trial hearings, the Army Court Of Criminal Appeal)
Recently although in this case more ominously and more threateningly Chelsea has been charged and convicted of several prison infractions (among them having a copy of the now famous Vanity Fair with Caitlyn, formerly Bruce, Jenner’s photograph on the cover) which could affect her parole status and other considerations going forward.
We have continued to urge one and all to sign the on-line Amnesty International petition asking President Obama to grant an immediate pardon as well as asking that those with the means sent financial contributions to Courage To Resist to help with her legal expenses.
After I got home that night of the meeting I began thinking that a lot has happened over the past couple of years in the Chelsea Manning case and that I should made what I know more generally available to more than my local VFPers. I do so here, and gladly. Just one more example of our fervent belief that as we have said all along in Veterans for Peace and elsewhere- we will not leave our sister behind… More later.
****The Latest From The Partisan Defense Committee-The Cause That Passes Through The Prison Walls-With The Old International Labor Defense in Mind
From The Pen Of Frank Jackman
Sam Eaton had to laugh when he heard the news, the news live and in person on cable news by the current Attorney-General of the United States (no names needed since this is the position of every one of those guys, and now gals when primed by curious reporters who if they have done their homework already know the answer) that there are “no political prisoners in the United States prison systems, certainly not the federal systems and as far as is known not in the states either.” And on some level, not on the level of candid truth but some level lower than that, the A-G in question (and all previous A-Gs) is right since every prisoner, every political prisoner is behind bars for some “crime” against society’s norms. Take the case of Chelsea Manning (known until her thirty-five year sentencing to Fort Leavenworth in Kansas for multiple conviction against military and federal law as Bradley Manning thereafter as Chelsea in case there is any confusion about who we are talking about) which was the case the A-G in question was referring to in that newspeak commentary. Private Manning, is the heroic Army soldier who blew the whistle to Wiki-leaks on the atrocities committed by the American military in Iraq and Afghanistan and the duplicity of the Hillary Clinton-run State Department even before Benghazi. The charges against Chelsea were “crimes,” you know “stealing” government files and “committing” acts of espionage but her motivation had nothing to do with crime, at least crimes that working people and leftists need worry about. Her leaks were a breath of fresh air in counter-point to the “slam-dunk’ mentality that has pervaded both the Bush II and Obama administrations. But Chelsea is nevertheless a political prisoner with a capital “P.”
Sam had to laugh again about the nefarious and spurious doing of the American justice machine (thoughts on that “machine” bringing to Sam’s mind the words of sardonic comic Lenny Bruce, a man not unfamiliar with that system and in his own way a political prisoner as well about how “in the hall of justice the only justice is in the halls-nicely said, Brother, nicely said) when a few nights after this newscast he was sitting in Jack’s, the long-time radical hang-out bar in Harvard Square which he frequented, talking to Ralph Morris who had come to town on one of his periodic visits from his home in Troy, New York about what he had heard that other night. And this was not mere idle talk between that pair because the whole Easton-Morris friendship had its start when they were political prisoners of a sort back on May Day 1971 when they had met on the floor of RFK Stadium in Washington for the “crime” of disorderly conduct and creating a public nuisance when they and thousands of others tried to shut down the American government if it did not shut down the Vietnam War which they were desperately for their own reasons trying to stop. So, yes, they were “criminals,” maybe just petty criminals by the standards of the charges but no way in hell had they hitchhiked from Cambridge and Albany, New York respectively (and wherever else those thousands came from and how they got there) to “walk in the streets” of D.C. for the hell of it, to litter the boulevards with leaflets let, to thumb their noses at the government, or the like. Sam and Ralph that day had been political prisoners with a small “P” nevertheless. (They would later do some actions in solidarity with the Black Panthers, with the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, and with the African National Congress in South Africa which would “win” them their capital “Ps.”)
All of this old-timey bar talk had a purpose though (they by the way were no strangers to strong drink as part of their political camaraderie from early on in their working-class lives but now they drank high-shelf stuff delivered by Jimmy the bartender rather than that rotgut low-shelf, no-shelf Thunderbird wine and Southern Comfort which got them through their no dough youths). Or rather two purposes. First, Ralph had come to town to join Sam in the annual Sacco and Vanzetti commemoration in honor of the two anarchist political prisoners who had been railroaded by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts to their executions on August 23, 1927. Troy and most other places in the nation and the world paid have paid no particular attention to such events but in Boston the scene of the crimes against the two immigrant anarchists there had been a generally on-going commemoration since the 1920s, although not always on in the streets like the past several years. Over their long and hard fought battles around prisoners’ rights which formed a majority of the work they had done over the years, in good times and bad, Sam and Ralph made sure that they attended this commemoration.
The second event that brought Ralph to town was a conference to be held in Boston to see about reviving the old International Labor Defense (ILD), the 1920s Communist International (CI)-initiated political prisoner defense organization which coincidentally had cut its teeth when founded in 1925 on the Sacco and Vanzetti case. Under the circumstances over the past quarter of a century plus for the international working class not so much reviving it exactly as in the old days since the organization had gone out of business in 1946 a few years after Joe Stalin over in Russia had liquidated the Communist International as part of some Soviet foreign policy sop to his allies in World War II (the CI had pretty much gone out of the business of directing international revolution well before than anyway) but reviving the spirit that drove it in its best days around the Sacco and Vanzetti case, the Angelo Herndon case, a bunch of other lesser well known labor cases like that of Tom Mooney and assorted IWWers (Industrial Workers of the World, Wobblies) and most famously the Scottsboro Boys case in the 1930s.
In those days as Sam had mentioned while talking to Ralph at Jack’s since he had been looking up information about the old ILD, what it did and how it was organized (and how much the old American Communist Party/CI controlled the operation in its sunnier days) the ILD had had no problem living up to the idea of a non-sectarian labor defense organization that took on the tough cases, the political cases and tried to garner union and progressive support in America and internationally through the CI to free the class-war prisoners behind the walls. Sam and Ralph had been involved in many cases of political prisoners on the seemingly endlessly dwindling left, especially black liberation fighters and labor organizers but those operations usually concerned a specific political prisoner (like the Manning case) or were run as campaigns by particular organizations which tended to “protect” their turf, protect their unique relationship with their poster child political prisoner.
While both Sam and Ralph had been snake-bitten a few times when somebody called a conference only to find out that the operation was being built to “protect turf” or using the campaign as an organizational recruiting tool (Sam mentioned that someone should tell such organizations and individuals with ideas like that to give pause since the recruitment rate, or better the retention rate of such projects after a while is abysmal) they liked the call for this one which included a bunch of small leftist organizations and some independent labor organizers and unions. Whether absent an international organization with the resources of the old CI a new ILD could catch fire is problematic. There in any case with the downward pressure of social flare-ups likely in the near future certainly is a need for such an organization. Ralph made Sam laugh as they finished their last high-shelf whisky that night by saying –“Hell there aren’t any political prisoners, I have it on the authority of the U.S. A-G.” But just in case those A-Gs were being less than candid they agreed that they would show up bright and early for the meeting the next morning.
From Hell To Eternity-With The Film Adaptation Of James
Jones’ From Here To Eternity In
Mind
By Zack James
“You know I never got too deeply involved in the nuts and
bolts of Army life when I was drafted into that branch of the service in 1969
during the heart of the Vietnam War but I do know that down at the base of the
Army, down at the platoon, company, brigade level that the “top kick,” the
First Sergeant was the guy who made everything work. Forget the supply
sergeants who just stole whatever was not nailed down and sold what they could
to whoever would buy it. How do you think all those Army-Navy stores that we
bought our de riguer World War II surplus Army jackets, knapsacks and boots got
their inventory? Forget that foolishness too about how an “army travels on it
stomach,” the mess sergeants put out swill, keeping the good stuff for themselves
and the officers, always the officers getting their kick-backs, and there is
special place in hell for every freaking “mess” the way they have ruined
generations of young men’s appetites. It was the “top kick” and no other who
kept things going. That part of the film was straight up as far as I could
tell,” long-windedly as was his wont when he got “tagged” on a common subject answered
Sam Lowell to the question that Laura Perkins his long-time companion had asked
about the movie that they had just watched.
The movie; the classic black and white film adaptation of
James Jones’ just prior to American involvement via the dastardly deeds at
Pearl Harbor World War II book, From Here
To Eternity. Laura had at fist nixed the idea of seeing this film (brought
to them via the beauties of Netflix mail delivery-not streaming) because the
way the film had been described in the blurb it was a “war” film something she
shied away from. Sam told her that while it was a war film in the generic sense
it was much deeper than that, not some The
Longest Day or Saving Private Ryan
“blood and guts” and so he had persuaded her to watch it with him one Saturday
night after she had come home from a short but necessary stay in the hospital
and they had decided to just take it easy that night. She had liked the film so
much that she had immediately afterward asked the question about how true to
life it had been and had not been peeved as she had occasion to be many times when
he did his long-winded wont.
Knowing only a little of Sam’s checkered military career,
knowing basically that he had been in the military during the Vietnam War
period like her younger brother and a lot of other guys from Riverdale where
she and Sam had grown up during that turbulent time Laura had asked the
question after observingthat “Top,” Sergeant
Warden played by hulky Burt Lancaster (“hulky” Laura’s term) seemed to have
been running the show quite nicely and efficiently while the philandering
Captain went off base to some rendezvous with some dishy dame (Sam’s term).
That seemed counter-intuitive to her since she had thought that officers, the
higher up the better, ran the show.
You know Sam’s answer and for a guy who was seven kinds of
hell to the Army in his time he had the “Army way” down pat. That was what
amazed Sam about seeing the film again after maybe forty years. How despite the
difference in time periods (pre-World War II and Vietnam, hell, from stories
that he had heard from younger “vets” from Afghanistan and Iraq in his work for
Veterans for Peace later too), the pre-war voluntary army versus a basically
conscripted army, and advances in the killing machine methods the same
“chicken-shit” stuff had happened back then. The same freaking stupid stuff
down at the base of the Army where it lived.
“Sure I knew guys like Prewett, the main antagonist played
by Montgomery Clift who was given the “treatment” because he did not want to
box for the company, a company whose only existence seemed to be so they could
win the regimental boxing tournament for the Captain who figured to ride that
to a Major’s rank, The tourney set for, get this, December 15, 1941, you knew
once you saw that date no damn tournament was going to happen. Yeah there was
no damn place for an odd-ball like Prewett despite the fact that he loved the
Army. Not many guys during my short time were thinking about making it a
career, about being “lifers” but Prewett out of the sticks down in Kentucky
where he probably didn’t even have shoes, didn’t get three “squares” a day
[three meals a day, okay] had it all mapped out. Figured on thirty years and an
easy grift. But he was only fooling himself, because even “from hunger” guys
who don’t toe the line don’t have long careers in that man’s Army-where do you
think the whole idea of “go along, to get along” came from. Sure the Army, the
politicians just picked it up later.”
“Guys like Maggio too?,” echoed Laura [Played by Frank
Sinatra in a great and underrated performance which should be mentioned since
we are now in the centennial of his birth.]
Sam chuckled, “Especially guys like Maggio, guys who half
the time like my brother had the “choice.” “The “choice”? queried Laura. “Yeah,
guys, guys for the neighborhoods, working-class ethnic guys, Italians, Irish,
maybe Eastern European, would get the choice. Not blacks, not many anyway who
were in segregated units at the time period of the film, although not in my
time hell blacks and Latinos were over-represented since the kids from the good
schools and neighborhoods took a pass on induction. You noticed you didn’t see any
black faces in high or low places in the film. Usually a guy like Maggio, my
brother, got into some trouble short of murder, one. My brother’s was for armed
robbery of a gas station for about fifty stinking bucks. He was seventeen and
so the judge, like a million judges handed the “choice” out. In my brother’s
case it was either three to five hard at Norfolk, you know about Norfolk,
right? [Laura nods silently.] Or join the Army, no that was not the way it was
put my brother told me, you would sign up for military service and you could s
choose the branch.”
“Needless to say that didn’t happen as much during the later
stages of the Vietnam War when going to that country was like a death warrant
but it happened. Still does even with a volunteer Army,” Sam continued. He
could see though that Laura’s eyes were glassing over so he moved on to some of
the other aspects of the film that seemed true.
“You know every guy was forever thinking about weekend
passes, passes to get away from the bases. Passes to go into some Army town
like in the film, or like Anniston down in Alabama where I took Advanced
Infantry Training (AIT) which would have put me in a unit just like Prewett’s
and Maggio’s except in 1968, 1969 nobody, no grunt, no canon-fodder, was being
sent to Hawaii as a final destination. The only place, or practically the only
place where 11 Bravos, infantry, were wanted and needed was hell-hole Vietnam.
Period.,” Sam prattled on nervously.
“You didn’t go to Vietnam, did you? You never told me much
about your military stuff, said it was in the past. Said the Veterans for Peace
stuff was what was important when we reconnected after all those years at our
fortieth class reunion back in 2006.I
heard something about you back then, back in about 1971 I think, about you
being arrested in some protest but I thought that was after you got out of the
service. My brother said something about it, and not in a nice way either. You
know how gung-ho he was.”
Sam red-faced as he answered said “he would talk about it
later.” “Yeah, going to town even in the hell-hole Deep South was something to
look forward to, to see girls, even if they were tramps and ‘skags’ Go get
drunk and drown in the sorrows of the hard fact that they were being trained to
be nothing but killers.” [Laura laughed remembering that old time term for the
less attractive girls in the class back in the 1960s.]
Then Sam turned sullen as he thought about the question that
was really being posed that night, posed beyond the film and the true aspects
of the film from the parade marching and drilling, the chow lines, the
rinky-dinky stuff, and the overlay of romance-Army style-foremost between “Top”
and the Captain’s wife, played by Deborah Kerr and in the background between
Prewett and Lorene, played by Donna Reed who would in turn in the 1960s become
a very loud Hollywood opponent of the Vietnammadness. He chuckled silently no way the Army, peacetime or wartime, was
built for romance. Those love affairs were doomed just as his marriage to his
first wife was doomed when they hastily decided to do get married during the
heat of the Vietnam War. Mistake.
That was not what was agitating him just then but that scene
of Maggio escaping from the stockade all battered and half-dead (a few moments
later he would be dead but “free,” free from the brutal stockade). This night
under the spell of this film he would finally tell Laura about the end of his
Army career and be done with it.
“I freaked out a little at that scene of Maggio all battered
and bloody after he escaped from the stockade. I “served” two terms in the Army
stockade up at Fort Devens, you know up in Ayer mostly gone now as far as I know
so I know that it was no easy trip. I never ran into anybody as brutal as Sergeant
Judson (played by Ernest Borgnine) but it was no picnic even though I was being
held in a separate area for “political prisoners” and other malcontents whom
they didn’t want in the “general population” of the stockade.
Laura interrupted, “Are you serious?”
“Yes, let me tell the highlights now and some other time
when I have thought about how much I more I want to tell you I will go into
more detail. I am only going to tell you this much because of this damn film,”
Sam told Laura with a certain dry-voiced low tune.
“I didn’t resist the draft, didn’t have my head on straight enough
before I got inducted, got drafted, like your brother, like a million other guys
who when called-went-like it, hate it, you went and you know that was true in
Riverdale like in a million other towns. I had my anti-war views more lightly
held then, not enough to be a conscientious objector, a Quaker or so I thought.
About three days into basic I knew that I had made a mistake that my anti-war
views were a lot stronger than I realized (mixed in with confusion, a desire
not to die and a few other not always unconfused feelings). Needless to say as the
die got cast with me as an 11 Bravo my reactions got more intense. But not
enough until I got orders for Vietnam in the summer of 1970 to do anything
about it.
“Then I got “religion,” decided to go see the Quakers in
Cambridge that somebody told me about to see if they could help. In the meantime
I got married to Josie and I don’t want to talk about that tonight, please, okay.
I was supposed to report to Fort Lewis in Washington state for transport to
Vietnam but I was “advised” that if I went absent without leave (AWOL, like
Prewett) for a period that I would be “dropped from the rolls” out there and
could turn myself in to Devens and up there place my conscientious objector application
in. I did so. As basically a Catholic “just war” objector then the damn thing
was turned down then and I was set for orders back to Vietnam again.
“In those days, 1969, 1970 the war had gone on so long that anti-war
protestors were tired of the same old, same old demonstrations in Washington each
spring and fall and were beginning to demonstrate at military bases. I joined in
one of those in front of Devens one weekday-afternoon in my uniform. That was
the first special court-martial- (and stockade time-six months the maximum for
such a tribunal). At this time I had been given a civilian lawyer through the
Quakers who was pursuing my CO case in the federal court in Boston in a habeas
corpus action for illegal detention-basically that they should have approved my
CO application which was kind of a complicated legal argument more suitably to
be told later.
“I did the time without too much hassle, actually did a lot
of reading and thinking so it wasn’t a total bust. Then I got released after my
six months were up-no good time either since I refused to work and so on so I
got the full kick. When I got out though I was right back in because I refused to
wear the uniform. I am getting tired so let me finish up. I got another six
month sentence most of which I served when the federal courts came through on
that habeas action, I was discharged and told never to darken their, the Army’s,
doors again. Get this-with an honorable discharge which was right since they
should have discharged me prior to the stockade-that is what the court said. I’ll
tell you more sometime but just remember that look on Maggio’s face when he broke
out of the stockade. Free, free at last. That was me when I got out, okay.
Josh Breslin, as he drove in the pitch black night up California Highway 156 to connect with U.S. 101 and the San Francisco Airport back to Boston. On arrival there then from there up to his old hometown of Olde Saco to which he had recently returned after long years of what he called “shaking the dust of the old town” off his shoes like many a guy before him, and after too, thought that it had been a long time since he had gotten up this early to head, well, to head anywhere. He had in an excess of caution decided to leave at three o’clock in the morning from the hotel he had been staying at in downtown Monterrey near famous Cannery Row (romantically and literarily famous as a scene in some of John Steinbeck’s novels from the 1920s and 1930s, as a site of some of the stop-off 1950s “beat” stuff if for no other reason than the bus stopped there before you took a taxi to Big Sur or thumbed depending on your finances and as famed 1960s Pops musical locale where the likes of Jimi Hendricks and Janis Joplin roe to the cream on top although now just another tourist magnet complete with Steinbeck this and that for sullen shoppers and diners who found their way east of Eden) and head up to the airport in order to avoid the traffic jams that he had inevitably encountered on previous trips around farm country Gilroy (the garlic or onion capital of the world, maybe both, but you got that strong smell in any case), and high tech Silicon Valley where the workers are as wedded to their automobiles as any other place in America which he would pass on the way up.
This excess of caution not a mere expression of an old man who is mired in a whole cycle of cautions from doctors to lawyers to ex-wives to current flame (Lana Malloy by name) since his flight was not to leave to fly Boston until about noon and even giving the most unusual hold-ups and delays in processing at the airport he would not need to arrive there to return his rented car until about ten. So getting up some seven hours plus early on a trip of about one hundred miles or so and normally without traffic snarls about a two hour drive did seem an excess of caution.
But something else was going on in Josh’s mind that pitch black night (complete with a period of dense fog about thirty miles up as he hit a seashore belt and the fog just rolled in without warnings) for he had had the opportunity to have avoided both getting up early and getting snarled in hideous California highway traffic by the expedient of heading to the airport the previous day and taken refuge in a motel that was within a short distance of the airport, maybe five miles when he checked on his loyalty program hotel site. Josh though had gone down to Monterey after a writers’ conference in San Francisco which had ended a couple of days before in order travel to Big Sur and some ancient memories there had stirred something in him that he did not want to leave the area until the last possible moment so he had decided to stay in Monterrey and leave early in the morning for the airport.
That scheduled departure plan set Josh then got an idea in his head, an idea that had driven him many times before when he had first gone out to California in the summer of love, 1967 version, that he would dash to San Francisco to see the Golden Gate Bridge as the sun came up and then head to the airport. He had to laugh, as he threw an aspirin down his throat and then some water to wash the tablet down in order to ward off a coming migraine headache that the trip, that this little trip to Big Sur that he had finished the day before, the first time in maybe forty years he had been there had him acting like a young wild kid again.
Funny as well that only a few days before he had been tired, very tired a condition that came on him more often of late as one of the six billion “growing old sucks” symptoms of that process, after the conference. Now he was blazing trails again, at least in his mind. The conference on the fate of post-modern writing in the age of the Internet with the usual crowd of literary critics and other hangers-on in tow to drink the free liquor and eat the free food had been sponsored by a major publishing company, The Globe Group. He had written articles for The Blazing Sun when the original operation had started out as a shoestring alternative magazine in the Village in about 1968, had started out as an alternative to Time, Life, Newsweek, Look, an alternative to all the safe subscription magazines delivered to leafy suburban homes and available at urban newsstands for the nine to fivers of the old world for those who, by choice, had no home, leafy or otherwise, and no serious work history.
Or rather the audience pitched to had no fixed abode, since the brethren were living some vicarious existences out of a knapsack just like Josh and his friends whom he collected along the way had been doing when he joined Captain Crunch’s merry pranksters (small case to distinguish them from the more famous Ken Kesey mad monk Merry Pranksters written about in their time by Tom Wolfe and Hunter Thompson) the first time he came out and found himself on Russian Hill in Frisco town looking for dope and finding this giant old time yellow brick road converted school bus parked in a small park there and made himself at home, after they made him welcome (including providing some sweet baby James dope that he had been searching for since the minute he hit town).
Still the iterant, the travelling nation hippie itinerants of the time to draw a big distinction from the winos, drunks, hoboes, bums and tramps who populated the “jungle” camps along railroad tracks, arroyos, river beds and under bridges who had no use for magazines or newspapers except as pillows against a hard night’s sleep along a river or on those unfriendly chairs at the Greyhound bus station needed, wanted to know what was going on in other parts of “youth nation,” wanted to know what new madness was up, wanted to know where to get decent dope, and who was performing and where in the acid-rock etched night (groups like the Dead, the Doors, the Airplane leading the pack then). That magazine had long ago turned the corner back to Time/Life/Look/Newsweek land but the publisher Mac McDowell who still sported mutton chop whiskers as he had in the old days although these days he has them trimmed by his stylist, Marcus, at a very steep price at his mansion up in Marin County always invited him out, and paid his expenses, whenever there was a conference about some facet of the 1960s that the younger “post-modernist” writers in his stable (guys like Kenny Johnson the author of the bests-seller Thrillwere asking about. So Mac would bring out wirey, wiley old veterans like Josh to spice up what after all would be just another academic conference and to make Mac look like some kind of hipster rather than the balding “sell-out that he had become (which Josh had mentioned in his conference presentation but which Mac just laughed at, laughed at as long as he can keep that Marin mansion. Still Josh felt he provided some useful background stuff now that you can find lots of information about that 1960s “golden age” (Mac’s term not his) to whet your appetite on Wikipedia or more fruitfully by going on YouTube where almost all the music of the time and other ephemera can be watched with some benefit.
Despite Josh’s tiredness, and a bit of crankiness as well when the young kid writers wanted to neglect the political side, the Vietnam War side, the rebellion against parents side of what the 1960s had been about for the lowdown on the rock festival, summer of love, Golden Gate Park at sunset loaded with dope and lack of hubris side, he decided to take a few days to go down to see Big Sur once again. He figured who knew when he would get another chance and at the age of seventy-two the actuarial tables were calling his number, or wanted to. He would have preferred to have taken the trip down with Lana, a hometown woman, whom he had finally settled in with up in Olde Saco after three, count them, failed marriages, a parcel of kids most of whom turned out okay, plenty of college tuitions and child support after living in Watertown just outside of Boston for many years.
Lana a bit younger than he and not having been “washed clean” as Josh liked to express the matter in the hectic 1960s and not wanting to wait around a hotel room reading a book or walking around Frisco alone while he attended the conference had begged off on the trip, probably wisely although once he determined to go to Big Sur and told her where he was heading she got sort of wistful. She had just recently read with extreme interest about Big Sur through her reading of Jack Kerouac’s 1960s book of the same name and had asked Josh several times before that if they went to California on a vacation other than San Diego they would go there. The long and short of that conversation was a promise by Josh to take her the next time, if there was a next time (although he did not put the proposition in exactly those terms).
Immediately after the conference Josh headed south along U.S. 101 toward Monterrey where he would stay and which would be his final destination that day since he would by then be tired and it would be nighttime coming early as the November days got shorter. He did not want to traverse the Pacific Coast Highway (California 1 for the natives) at night since he had forgotten his distance glasses, another one of those six billion reasons why getting out sucks. Had moreover not liked to do that trip along those hairpin turns which the section heading toward Big Sur entailed riding the guardrails even back in his youth since one time having been completely stoned on some high-grade Panama Red he had almost sent a Volkswagen bus over the top when he missed a second hairpin turn after traversing the first one successfully. So he would head to Monterrey and make the obligatory walk to Cannery Row for dinner and in order to channel John Steinbeck and the later “beats” who would stop there before heading to fallout Big Sur.
The next morning Josh left on the early side not being very hungry after an excellent fish dinner at Morley’s a place that had been nothing but a hash house diner in the old days where you could get serviceable food cheap because the place catered to the shore workers and sardine factory workers who made Cannery Row famous, or infamous, when it was a working Row. He had first gone there after reading about the place in something Jack Kerouac wrote and was surprised that the place actually existed, had liked the food and the prices and so had gone there a number of times when his merry pranksters and other road companions were making the obligatory Frisco-L.A. runs up and down the coast. These days Morley’s still had excellent food but perhaps you should bring a credit card with you to insure you can handle the payment and avoid “diving for pearls” as a dish-washer to pay off your debts.
As Josh started up the engine of his rented Acura, starting up on some of the newer cars these days being a matter of stepping on the brake and then pushing a button where the key used to go in this keyless age, keyless maybe a metaphor of the age as well, he had had to ask the attendant at the airport how to start the thing since his own car was a keyed-up Toyota of ancient age, he began to think back to the old days when he would make this upcoming run almost blind-folded. That term maybe a metaphor for that age. He headed south to catch the Pacific Coast Highway north of Carmel and thought he would stop at Point Lobos, the place he had first encountered the serious beauty of the Pacific Coast rocks and ocean wave splash reminding him of back East in Olde Saco, although more spectacular. Also the place when he had first met Moonbeam Sadie.
He had had to laugh when he thought about that name and that woman since a lot of what the old days, the 1960s had been about were tied up with his relationship to that woman, the first absolutely chemically pure version of a “hippie chick” that he had encountered. At that time Josh had been on the Captain Crunch merry prankster yellow brick road bus for a month or so and a couple of days before they had started heading south from Frisco to Los Angeles to meet up with a couple of other yellow brick road buses where Captain Crunch knew some kindred. As they meandered down the Pacific Coast Highway they would stop at various places to take in the beauty of the ocean since several of the “passengers” had never seen the ocean or like Josh had never seen the Pacific in all its splendor.
In those days, unlike now when the park closes at dusk as Josh found out, you could park your vehicle overnight and take in the sunset and endlessly listen to the surf splashing up to rocky shorelines until you fell asleep. So when their bus pulled into the lot reserved for larger vehicles there were a couple of other clearly “freak” buses already there. One of them had Moonbeam as a “passenger” whom he would meet later that evening when all of “youth nation” in the park decided to have a dope- strewn party. Half of the reason for joining up on bus was for a way to travel, for a place to hang your hat but it was also the easiest way to get on the dope trail since somebody, usually more than one somebody was “holding.” And so that night they partied, partied hard.
About ten o’clock Josh high as a kite from some primo hash saw a young woman, tall, sort of skinny (he would find out later she had not been so slim previously except the vagaries of the road food and a steady diet of “speed” had taken their toll), long, long brown hair, a straw hat on her head, a long “granny” dress and barefooted the very picture of what Time/Life/Look would have used as their female “hippie” poster child to titillate their middle-class audiences coming out of one of the buses. She had apparently just awoken, although that seemed impossible given the noise level from the collective sound systems and the surf, and was looking for some dope to level her off and headed straight to Josh. Josh had at that time long hair tied in a ponytail, at least that night, a full beard, wearing a cowboy hat on his head, a leather jacket against the night’s cold, denim blue jeans and a pair of moccasins not far from what Time/Life/Look would have used as their male “hippie” poster child to titillate their middle-class audiences so Moonbeam’s heading Josh’s way was not so strange. Moreover Josh was holding a nice stash of hashish. Without saying a word Josh passed the hash pipe to Moonbeam and by that mere action started a “hippie” romance that would last for the next several months until Moonbeam decided she was not cut out for the road, couldn’t take the life, and headed back to Lima, Ohio to sort out her life.
But while they were on their “fling” Moonbeam taught “Cowboy Jim,” her new name for him many things. Josh thought it was funny thinking back how wedded to the idea of changing their lives they were back then including taking new names, monikers, as if doing so would create the new world by osmosis or something. He would have several other monikers like the “Prince of Love,” the Be-Bop Kid (for his love of jazz and blues), and Sidewalk Slim (for always writing something in chalk wherever he had sidewalk to do so) before he left the road a few years later and stayed steady with his journalism after that high, wide, wild life lost it allure as the high tide of the 1960s ebbed and people drifted back to their old ways. But Cowboy Jim was what she called Josh and he never minded her saying that.
See Moonbeam really was trying to seek the newer age, trying to find herself as they all were more or less, but also let her better nature come forth. And she did in almost every way from her serious study of Buddhism, her yoga (well before that was fashionable among the young), and her poetry writing. But most of all in the kind, gentle almost Quaker way that she dealt with people, on or off drugs, the way she treated her Cowboy. Josh had never had such a gentle lover, never had such a woman who not only tried to understand herself but to understand him. More than once after she left the bus (she had joined the Captain Crunch when the bus left Point Lobos a few days later now that she was Cowboy’s sweetheart) he had thought about heading to Lima and try to work something out but he was still seeking something out on the Coast that held him back until her memory faded a bit and he lost the thread of her).
Yeah, Point Lobos held some ancient memories and that day the surf was up and Mother Nature was showing one and all who cared to watch just how relentless she could be against the defenseless rocks and shoreline. If he was to get to Big Sur though he could not dally since he did not want to be taking that hairpin stretch at night. So off he went. Nothing untoward happened on the road to Big Sur, naturally he had to stop at the Bixby Bridge to marvel at the vista but also at the man-made marvel of traversing that canyon below with this bridge in 1932. Josh though later that it was not exactly correct that nothing untoward happened on the road to Big Sur but that was not exactly true for he was white-knuckled driving for that several mile stretch where the road goes up mostly and there are many hairpin turns with no guardrail and the ocean is a long way down. He thought he really was becoming an old man in his driving so cautiously that he had veer off to the side of the road to let faster cars pass by. In the old days he would drive the freaking big ass yellow brick road school bus along that same path and think nothing of it except for a time after that Volkswagen almost mishap. Maybe he was dope-brave then but it was disconcerting to think how timid he had become.
Finally in Big Sur territory though nothing really untoward happen as he traversed those hairpin roads until they finally began to straighten out near Molera State Park and thereafter Pfeiffer Beach. Funny in the old days there had been no creek to ford at Molera but the river had done its work over forty years through drought and downpour so in order to get to the ocean about a mile’s walk away Josh had to take off his running shoes and shoes to get across the thirty or forty feet of rocks and pebbles to the other side (and of course the same coming back a pain in the ass which he would have taken in stride back then when he shoe of the day was the sandal easily slipped off and on) but well worth the effort even if annoying since the majestic beauty of that rock-strewn beach was breath-taking a much used word and mostly inappropriate but not this day. Maybe global warming or maybe just the relentless crush of the seas on a timid waiting shoreline but most of the beach was un-walkable across the mountain of stones piled up and so he took the cliff trail part of the way before heading back the mile to his car in the parking lot to get to Pfeiffer Beach before too long.
Pfeiffer Beach is another one of those natural beauties that you have to do some work to get, almost as much work as getting to Todo El Mundo further up the road when he and his corner boys from Olde Saco had stayed for a month after they had come out to join him on the bus once he informed them that they needed to get to the West fast because all the world was changing out there. This work entailed not walking to the beach but by navigating a big car down the narrow one lane rutted dirt road two miles to the bottom of the canyon and the parking lot since now the place had been turned into a park site as well. The road was a white-knuckles experience although not as bad as the hairpins on the Pacific Coast Highway but as with Molera worth the effort, maybe more so since Josh could walk that wind-swept beach although some of the cross-currents were fierce when the ocean tide slammed the defenseless beach and rock formation. A couple of the rocks had been ground down so by the oceans that donut holes had been carved in them.
Here Josh put down a blanket on a rock so that he could think back to the days when he had stayed here, really at Todo el Mundo but there was no beach there just some ancient eroded cliff dwellings where they had camped out and not be botheredso everybody would climb on the bus which they would park by the side of the road on Big Sur Highway and walk down to Pfeiffer Beach those easy then two miles bringing the day’s rations of food, alcohol and drugs (not necessarily in that order) in rucksacks and think thing nothing of the walk and if they were too “wasted” (meaning drunk or high) they would find a cave and sleep there. That was the way the times were, nothing unusual then although the sign at the park entrance like at Point Lobos (and Molera) said overnight parking and camping were prohibited. But that is the way these times are.
Josh had his full share of ancient dreams come back to him that afternoon. The life on the bus, the parties, the literary lights who came by who had known Jack Kerouac , Allan Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and the remnant of beats who had put the place on the map as a cool stopping point close enough to Frisco to get to in a day but ten thousand miles from city cares and woes, the women whom he had loved and who maybe loved him back although he/they never stayed together long enough to form any close relationship except for Butterfly Swirl and that was a strange scene. Strange because Butterfly was a surfer girl who was “slumming” on the hippie scene for a while and they had connected on the bus except she finally decided that the road was not for her just like Moonbeam, as almost everybody including Josh figured out in the end, and went back to her perfect wave surfer boy down in La Jolla after a few months.
She replied with a wicked smile that her name was Morning Blossom, didn’t he like that name. [Yes.] She had been born and raised in Big Sur and planned to stay there because she couldn’t stand the hassles (her term) of the cities, places like San Francisco where she had gone to school for a while at San Francisco State. Josh thought to himself that he knew what was coming next although he let Morning Blossom have her say. Her parents had moved to Big Sur in 1969 and had started home-steading up in the hills. They have been part of a commune before she was born but that was all over with by the time she was born and so her parents struggled on the land alone. They never left, and never wanted to leave. Seldom left Big Sur and still did not.
Josh said to himself, after saying wow, he had finally found one of the lost tribes that wandered out into the wilderness back in the 1960s and were never heard from again. And here they were still plugging away at whatever dream drove them back then. He and others who had chronicled in some way the 1960s had finally found a clue to what had happened. But as he got up from the counter, paid his bill, and left a hefty tip, he though he still had that trip out here next time with Lana to get through. He was looking forward to it though.
Click on the headline to link to a Leon Trotsky-related post from his Internet Archives.
Markin comment:
This is an excellent documentary source for today’s militants to “discovery” the work of our forbears, whether we agree with their programs or not. Mainly not, but that does not negate the value of such work done under the pressure of revolutionary times. Hopefully we will do better when our time comes.
************* from What Next? No.13, 1999
A German Communist in the Spanish Civil War-Eva Eisenschitz
This article appeared originally in 1986, under the title At the Front During the Spanish Civil War – The Experience of a Communist Emigrant in the Civil War and the Prisons, in a special issue of the Tubingen University students journal Tüte which was devoted to the Spanish Civil War. The article provides a first-hand account of the early revolutionary phase of the war, and of the crushing of the revolution in 1937 at the hands of the Stalinist reaction. We are grateful to Mike Jones for providing a translation.
The author was born Eva Laufer in Berlin on 27 March 1912. She joined the Social Democratic school pupils’ organisation in 1927, and in 1929 became a member of the youth section of the KPD(O) (Communist Party of Germany – Opposition), the party led by Heinrich Brandler, August Thalheimer and others expelled from the official Communist Party of Germany for opposing its then ultra-left politics. In 1933, following Hitler’s rise to power, Eva emigrated to Holland. Along with her husband, Hans Sittig, in 1936 she went to Spain to assist in the resistance to Franco. There they worked with the POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification), a dissident Communist organisation with which the KPD(O) had links.
After her escape from Spain, Eva found refuge in Britain. She joined the ILP, which subsequently dissolved into the Labour Party. She worked for the BBC, as a teacher and, in the early 1970s, as a translator for Ian Mikardo MP. At the time the article was written, she was living as a pensioner in London, where she later died.
WE ARRIVED in Perpignan in August 1936, a month after the outbreak of the civil war in Spain. A lorry was to bring us (Hans, myself and a couple of comrades already waiting) to Port Bou. It was a hair-raising journey, sharp bends up in the Pyrenees and just as steep again going down, at a crazy speed. I would have prayed, had I been religious. But we arrived in Port Bou and journeyed on in a car to Barcelona, to the Hotel Falcón on the Rambla Catalunya, the POUM headquarters.
The atmosphere in Barcelona was indescribable. Today one would call it a ‘high’, as after taking drugs, intoxicating and intoxicated. From early in the morning to late at night, the barrel-organs on the Rambla played revolutionary songs. Of course, that could not continue; but while it lasted it was unrepeatable.
All of Barcelona’s 58 churches were burnt down; many still smouldered. Only the large ‘sagrada Familia’ cathedral by Gaudi withstood everything – if is made of cement. The militiamen, without uniform but with armbands of the POUM or the CNT (anarchists), rifle over the shoulder, go to the front early on, come home again for dinner, hold their siesta and towards four o’clock in the afternoon go off again.
The Hotel Falcón teemed with foreigners, mostly Americans, French, German and Italian emigrants. Many had been living in Spain for some years and immediately made themselves available. We were organised by Else, a German, who spoke fluent Spanish. Her husband Gerhard was a medical orderly at the front.
The big villas on the hills around Barcelona were abandoned by their owners and occupied. They now served the authorities as an administration centre. We were allowed to go in and readily shown around. The shooting of the priests, big farmers and factory owners was over and the revolution was under way. The anarchists and the POUM were the driving forces. The civil war was no longer regarded as a passing trifle; the militias exercised – though still without uniform – and one had to be very economical with the ammunition. Then a ship arrived from Mexico, the Magallanes, with 20,000 old Mauser rifles and 20,000,000 cartridges. It was not much, but it arrived at the right moment and there were no conditions attached. The celebration was indescribable. The first officers were elected and their orders – after detailed discussion – were followed.
We received some pocket money and made ourselves available. On the second evening we met a former school friend of mine from Berlin who, with her friend, had worked in Catalonia since 1933. Great joy. They invited us in and gave me a pair of shoes for the front. The next day I found a note in the hotel: ‘We have gone to Paris.’ I was extremely disappointed. Nothing had indicated that they were against the revolution. For us, as German anti-fascists, it was a moral duty to assist the Spanish Republic. And both had left! Perhaps we were naive.
I waited for the next ambulance going to the Aragon front. The first had been full. Ruth, a German nursing sister, had gone with it. We hoped that we would meet up. It never arrived. During the first night on the way to the front it was surprised by Franco’s Moors, with bare feet and curled knives, who cut the throats of everyone. I had to write to Ruth’s old father and describe her heroic death. We could not tell him the truth.
The first Spanish women with whom I spoke wanted to know how we succeeded in not having a child every year. They saved up money from the household budget to enable their husbands to visit the brothel. And only male children counted. A Spanish comrade told me that he had no children. His comrade laughed and said: he has six daughters.
Another point. They wanted to know why I had come to Spain, and why I was even prepared to separate from my husband in order to go to the front. It was surely not because of politics, it could only mean that I was looking for a man. And detailed propositions rained down upon me. We had hour-long discussions about the role of women in the socialist society. Lenin was right: ‘The emancipation of women must begin with the men.’
We were sixteen in the ambulance, which had been donated by the British ILP. We were stationed in Tierz, a village near Huesca, which was in Franco’s hands. The Aragonese Pyrenees, blue and covered with snow, stood in the background. The front stagnated. The first casualty I treated as a medical orderly was characteristic of the Spanish mentality. The ideal human type would unite Prussian disciple with Spanish individuality. For example, it was not considered ‘manly’ to use the latrines in the dugout. One did it outside in the fresh air standing up. We lost several good comrades that way. The digging of trenches also contradicted masculine dignity
I met Else’s husband Gerhard. He had been the manager of the Breslau Theatre, spoke fluent Spanish and could talk for hours about art We read Don Quixote together. The October nights were very cold and we all received long underpants.
I only experienced one real attack. Beforehand we got rum in our coffee and marijuana cigarettes. Neither affected me. Afterwards we had neither advanced nor retreated, but had many wounded and three dead. Gerhard and I were in the line of fire a few times. I was terrified!
As I am blood group ‘0’, I am a universal blood donor. There was no other test at that time, only the four groups. The blood was directly transferred. I lay beside the casualty and my blood flowed into his. It was very satisfying to see how a pale face with blue lips would gradually take on colour. After the attack, every week I gave around 200cc of blood.
Though we knew in our innermost thoughts that the war was already lost. For ten months a real socialism had existed, a system worth fighting for. Then the arrests of the POUM members and anarchists started. The Stalinists hated nothing so much as the socialist opposition. Their greatest fury was directed at the supposed or genuine Trotskyists.
I tried to alarm the consulates about the arrested foreigners. Most of them were ready to help, made visits and representations, and succeeded in getting those with valid passports deported to France. The British consul was the only exception: ‘Whoever is still in Barcelona is there at his own peril. Anyone with sense has gone long ago.’ I was not so easy to get rid of, but asked softly and modestly, who paid him and for what? Then he went red in the face and shouted: ‘You Communist, get out of here.’
In the meantime, Barcelona was bombarded from the sea. That was a new experience. It is curious how one can get used to air raids, but get horribly scared when the shooting is lateral and the front walls of the houses vanish.
In August 1937, it was my turn. I was arrested with six Spanish comrades in the home of Andres Nin, where I went to fetch a blanket for Hans.
The first two months I was incommunicado. That is not as bad as it sounds. I would have received no visitors in any case – all my friends were in jail, except Gerhard. I only know that it was a military prison. I was interrogated a few times by a German Stalinist. He screamed that I was an agent of Franco and a German fascist spy. It paid not to reply: I had not known any important POUM officials – once I had sat for three hours on a bus with George Orwell, that was all. Only my connection to Landau could have been dangerous, but they knew nothing about it. At my interrogation, the Stalinist said that a bullet would be too good for me, ammunition was scarce!
Then I was moved to the official women’s prison, which was managed by a POUM comrade. She was the wife of Andrade, a top official. In a country where the women have very few rights, they keep their own name; therefore, nobody knew who she was. She could not grant us any relief, but as political prisoners we were not required to work and through her got to know what was going on outside. We were thirty ‘politicals’, living in a large hall with a magnificent view. Apart from an unpolitical German, whose husband was an anarchist, and a just as unpolitical French woman, we consisted of Spanish POUM or anarchist comrades. The prison held around six hundred women; the so-called criminals were originally nuns, or wives of small racketeers and war-profiteers.
Every morning we used the showers – never meeting any of the others. I heard that they thought we must have been horribly mucky, because we used so much water. In any case, they exchanged soap for bread. Not that we had plenty – I think it was 300 grams per day, two plates of rice or pea soup, and two cups of a brown, hot fluid. We were very hungry, but the civilian population had to work with the same ration.
The nuns were all middle-aged. Sister Teresa remains in my memory because of her great kindness, She looked after the scantily-supplied chemist’s shop. Never was she impatient or did she say a bad word. One would have thought that we socialists would have incarnated the devil on earth to her – on the contrary, she mothered us all and always knew best. I have often thought of her and would like to know how she ended her days.
MY friend was Maria-Teresa Sarda, who had been imprisoned as a POUM member together with her mother. She gave me Spanish lessons and I avenged myself with historical materialism. We attempted to learn an international shorthand, but it was a total failure. For two hours every day we ran round the long dining table and did gymnastics. Our stomachs had shrunk, so that after the first really hungry months we managed on our rations. In any case, it was easier to be hungry than to be without soap. Moreover, we had lice. Very rarely one of the Spanish comrades received a parcel. Everything was shared out. We had a doctor among us, a German, allegedly ‘political’, older than us. One day she received a parcel and vanished with it; nothing was said, but we never spoke to her again, she was excluded by everyone. She had broken a fundamental rule and had to pay for it.
A certain scene remains in my memory: the wives of about ten men – said to be fascists – had gone to the men’s prison early around 5 o’clock to say their goodbyes to them before they were to be shot. After an hour they came back, emitting heart-rending screams, tearing at their hair, tearing their clothes – it was terrible to have to hear it, and we all suffered with them. There was no talking and all activities stopped. Then came the afternoon: around 4 o’clock the same women entered with flowers in their hair. They had castanets in their hands and danced and sang. The dances were joyful. They had earlier manifested their sorrow – and now life carried on. This psychology will for ever remain incomprehensible to us.
Hans was released three weeks after my arrest and returned to France with his customary ‘visa sans arrêt’. In the summer of 1937, on the last day of the validity of his passport, he went back to Holland. Without a visa for a final destination one was not permitted to stay in France. My passport had run out. Whoever had arrested us had taken all our papers, which I, of course, have never seen again. The foreigners with valid passports were slowly released; only the German and Italian emigrants remained. The uncertainty over the length of the sentence was the most worrying. Wholly disregarding the gradual advance of Franco’s troops, something we of course never mentioned.
I loved Spain, the country, the people, the climate, the food, even the always recurring manana, with which they put off all decisions. But from the beginning of 1938 we all knew that Franco’s victory was only a question of time.
One day I was called into the office. An official from the British consulate was there with a parcel wrapped in newspaper. I had to swear to my identity. I took the parcel in my left hand, but he made it clear that it had to be the right hand. So I swore that I indeed was who I was. It was only later that I found out that I had sworn on the bible. He then went with me into the city to get me photographed. No word about what for, why, when, etc. Three impatient weeks elapsed; meanwhile, it was August 1938. Then an old motor car drove up: the consular official. He brought a British travel document, valid for three months. I had to pack my things in all haste – there was not much. I left my Spanish money in the prison; the peseta was not exchanged. A few quick tears were shed – and the thirteen months ended as they had begun, without transition.
At that time there were hardly any foreigners left in Barcelona. The British destroyer Imperial sailed between Barcelona, Valencia and Marseilles, and had evacuated all the British. If one more passenger had now been reported, this had to be an important person. So the crew were drawn up in lines under the leadership of the captain, and I boarded the ship in a thin skirt leather jacket and espadrillas. I was given the cabin of the second in command. After the meal – with knife and fork, after such a long time – I asked to speak to the captain and explained the mistake. He laughed, found it all very funny, and said that if I wanted I could remain aboard and sail round the Mediterranean with them. I politely declined and after seventeen hours I left the ship at Marseilles without a penny and sought out the British consulate.
Who could describe my dread as I was confronted with the horror from Barcelona? He glanced at me and said: ‘We already know each other’. And then began a cannonade of insults against all Communists and riffraff such as I. As it had become too dangerous to be in Barcelona, he had removed himself to the safety of Marseilles. I wanted only money enough to telegraph to Amsterdam and somewhere to stay overnight. I promised to pay the money back the next day – he was convinced that he would never see it again. But the money arrived, I repaid it and travelled to Paris.
September 1938 – Munich – the war had been averted once more, the French mobilisation was cancelled. Women cried tears of relief in the streets.
I was received with open arms by the German comrades, especially by Brandler and Thalheimer, for whom I was to give a detailed report. It was, of course, a bit disappointing – after all, I had spent the previous thirteen months in prison.
I could not go to Hans in Holland; the Dutch put Spanish volunteers immediately over the German border.
As soon as the first relief at being in a land at peace was over, I had the feeling that I should go back to Spain; I longed to be there, perhaps I could still help ... It was completely irrational, idiotic.
I have described the external events of this catastrophe, which the Spanish civil war and revolution was. But what I cannot describe is what the attraction of Spain consists of, the noise, the smell, the clear atmosphere of Barcelona in the early morning, and especially the sight of the milicianos and the comrades, which I could still describe now in the smallest detail. Spain had destroyed our marriage – we could not find any country where we could be together before World War II; afterwards it was too late. Nevertheless, I would not have missed the experience for the world.
Editorial Notes
1. The Soviet Union did, of course, send arms to Spain (although Stalin shipped the country’s gold reserves back to Moscow in payment). However, the arm were withheld from the anarchist and POUM militias at the Aragon front.
2. Katia Landau published an account of the repression of the left in Spain in her pamphlet Le Stalinisme en Espagne, Paris 1938, a translation of which appears in Revolutionary History, Vol.1 No.2, 1988.
The Irish Easter 1916 Uprising- From The British Broadcasting Company (BBC) Of All Places
Click on the link to hear about various aspects, including the key role of women as fighters and aid workers, of the Easter 1916 Uprising on the 100th Anniversary of the occasion.
