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‘Soldiers of Culture’ and their ‘Little Comrades’: The International Brigades and the Children of Civil War Spain, 1936–1939

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 August 2022

Adrian Pole Open the ORCID record for Adrian Pole [Opens in a new window]
Adrian Pole*
Affiliation:
School of History, Classics and Archaeology, University of Edinburgh, William Robertson Wing, Old Medical School, Teviot Place, Edinburgh, EH8 9AG, UK
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

The volunteers of the International Brigades are well known for their participation in the battles of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939), yet their encounters with the people, places and politics of Spain are yet to receive substantial attention from historians. This is the first interpretive analysis of their wide-reaching work with children, which spanned from the holding of fiestas to the establishment of costly homes. By considering these cross-cultural encounters, it highlights how they understood themselves to be members of a unified anti-fascist community in which Spanish children themselves had a key role to play. While these children were invariably regarded as the principal victims of ‘fascism’, they were also encouraged to take an active interest in the violent struggle of the Brigades as well as the building of an anti-fascist ‘New Spain’. Their own letters and drawings show the surprising extent to which the volunteers succeeded in their efforts.

Type
The Contemporary European History Prize
Information
Contemporary European History , Volume 33 , Issue 2 , May 2024 , pp. 383 - 397
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

1 Letter from Club Infantil Ferrer Guàrdia, Centre d'Histoire Sociale (CHA), Fond Andre Marty, 2AM.4A.2, Box 11.

2 For examples of narrative accounts which present the English-speaking volunteers’ fight in Spain as an extension of an anti-fascist struggle begun in their home countries see Richard Baxell's Unlikely Warriors: The Extraordinary Story Of The Britons Who Fought For Spain (London: Aurum Press, 2014) and James K. Hopkins’ Into the Heart of the Fire: The British in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), both dealing with British volunteers; Eby, Cecil D., Comrades and Commissars: The Lincoln Battalion in the Spanish Civil War (Pennsylvania: Penn State University Press, 2007)Google Scholar for Americans; Hywel Francis, Miners Against Fascism: Wales and the Spanish Civil War (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1984) for the Welsh, and Michael Petrou Renegades: Canadians in the Spanish Civil War (Vancouver: UBC Press, 2008) for Canadians. Peter N. Carroll in The Odyssey of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade: Americans in the Spanish Civil War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994) is particularly culpable of conflating the volunteers’ own interpretation of the war as a struggle for the ‘Spanish People’ against ‘Fascism’ with the far more complex reality of the conflict, hinted at by his insistence on referring to the Nationalists as ‘Fascists’ as well as the Abraham Lincoln Battalion as a ‘Brigade’. Although considerably more balanced as a work of historical research, the subtitle of Baxell's bestselling book on the British volunteers – ‘the Britons who fought for Spain’ – makes much the same mistake.

3 For an informative if methodologically unimaginative survey of international humanitarian aid during the Spanish Civil War see Gabriel Pretus, Humanitarian Relief in the Spanish Civil War (New York and Ontario: Edwin Mellen, 2013). For humanitarianism in the wake of the First World War and the focus on children as a route to reconciliation, see Barnett, Michael, Empire of Humanity: A History of Humanitarianism (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2013), 83–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Verónica Sierra Blas, ‘A Lost Generation? Children and the Spanish Civil War’ in James Matthews, ed., Spain at War: Society, Culture and Mobilization, 1936–44 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), 158–76.

5 For a compelling application of the concept of the ‘military man of feeling’ to the Crimean War, see Holly Furneaux, Military Men of Feeling: Emotion, Touch, and Masculinity in the Crimean War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

6 For more details on the work of these theorists in a German context, see Van Der Haven, Cornelis, ‘Military Men of Feeling? Gender Boundaries and Military-Civil Encounters in Two German Soldier Plays (1760–80)’, Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, 41, 4 (2018), 511–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7 Julia Welland, ‘Compassionate Soldiering and Comfort’ in Linda Åhäll and Thomas Gregory, eds., Emotions, Politics and War (New York: Routledge, 2015), 115.

8 Dominique Marshall, ‘Humanitarian Sympathy for Children in Times of War and the History of Children's Rights, 1919–1959’ in James Marten, ed., Children and War: A Historical Anthology (New York: New York University Press, 2002), 184.

9 Andy Byford, Science of the Child in Late Imperial and Early Soviet Russia (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 3–21.

10 Meda, Juri, ‘Los dibujos infantiles como fuentes históricas: perspectivas heurísticas y cuestiones metodológicas’, Revista brasileira de história da educação, 14, 3 (2014), 139–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

11 Xosé Manoel Núñez Seixas, ‘Nations in arms against the invader’, in Chris Ealham and Michael Richards, eds., The Splintering of Spain (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 45–67.

12 Mednikov, Igor, ‘Los Limites de una renovación: la historiografía actual rusa sobre la Guerra Civil Española’, Stud. Hist. H. Cont., 32 (2014), 411–26Google Scholar.

13 Quoted in Ian MacDougall, ed., Voices from the Spanish Civil War (Edinburgh: Polygon, 1986), 92.

14 Paul Preston, ‘Italy and Spain in Civil War and World War’ in Sebastian Balfour and Paul Preston, eds., Spain and the Great Powers (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 151; Pierpaolo Barbieri, Hitler's Shadow Empire: Nazi Economics and the Spanish Civil War (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2015).

15 Interview with Albert Prago, 1986, Centro Documental de Memoria Histórica, PHO_ABAL_84.

16 Interview with Anthony McClean, Reel 3, 1986, Imperial War Museum Collections [IWM], Catalogue No. [CN] 19991.

17 Amery, letter dated 13 May 1937 in Cary Nelson and Jefferson Hendricks, eds., Madrid 1937: Letters of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade from the Spanish Civil War (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), 99.

18 Interview with George Leeson, Reel 2, 1976, IWM, CN. 803.

19 For a good overview of the commissar system, see Matthews, James, ‘‘The Vanguard of Sacrifice’? Political Commissars in the Republican Popular Army during the Spanish Civil War, 1936–1939’, War in History, 21, 1 (2014), 82–101CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Evidence of this activity abounds in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History [RGASPI]. See for example Luis Encima, ‘La fiesta del día siete’, Nuestra vida, no. 6, RGASPI 545.2.418, 12, and Report on Activities of the XI Brigade, RGASPI 545.3.8. For reports in the Volunteer for Liberty see ‘Un exemple de fraternisation’, French Volunteer for Liberty [hereafter VFL], 7 Feb. 1937, RGASPI 545.2.370, 4.

21 Letter to Alfred Brauner on a children's fiesta held in Vich, 21 July 1938, RGASPI 545.3.708.

22 ‘Informe sobre el trabajo de la XI Brigada entre la población civil’, 18 May 1938, RGASPI 545.3.59.

23 This literature is extensive but largely descriptive. For a good overview of the colonias see Navarro, Rosalía Crego, ‘Las colonias escolares durante la Guerra Civil (1936–1939)’, Espacio, Tiempo y Forma, Historia Contemporánea, 5, 2 (1989), 299–328Google Scholar.

24 Peter Anderson has very recently situated the war within an age of mass child removal. See The Age of Mass Child Removal in Spain: Taking, Losing, and Fighting for Children, 1926–1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021). For the civil war years see 162–3.

25 Sjaak Braster and María del Mar del Pozo Andrés, ‘Education and the Children's Colonies in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939): The Images of the Community Ideal’, Paedagogica Historica, 51, 4 (2015), 455.

26 ibid, 456.

27 Ibid, 455.

28 Soria, Juan Manuel Fernández, ‘La asistencia a la infancia en la Guerra Civil: Las colonias escolares’, Historia de la educación, 6 (2010), 97Google Scholar.

29 For groups operating out of Spain, see Fernández Soria, ‘La asistencia a la infancia en la Guerra Civil', 83–128. For international humanitarian assistance, see Pretus, Humanitarian Relief in the Spanish Civil War.

30 María Isabel Esteve Torres, Los Hogares Infantiles y las Brigadas Internacionales, 1936–1939 (Valencia: Asociación de Amigos de las Brigadas Internacionales, 2014) 8–30.

31 Alfred Brauner, ‘Enfants evacues’, Ayuda Medica Internacionale, 1 Jan. 1938, RGASPI 545.3.737, 14–15; ‘Kinderheim “Solidaridad” im Genesungshospital Benisa’, German VFL, 2 Dec. 1937, RGASPI 545.2.367, 13; Letter to l'office d'enfance, 18 May 1938, RGASPI 545.1.75.

32 Los niños españoles y las Brigadas Internacionales, July 1938, RGASPI 545.2.404; Report on the work of the Comité Pro-Niños, 13 July 1938, RGASPI 545.1.76.

33 ‘Número de heridos en los hospitales de las Brigadas Internacionales […] durante el año de 1937’, Archivo General Militar de Ávila [AGMAV], C.1094, 11, 1, document 1.

34 Founding Statute of the Comité Pro-Niños, undated, RGASPI 545.1.75.

35 Alfred Brauner, ‘Enfants evacues’, AMI, 14–15, RGASPI 545.3.737.

36 Ibid.

37 Alfred Brauner, ‘La Labor del Comité Pro-Niños Españoles’, Boletín: Diario del Comisariado del XII Brigada Garibaldi, no. 92, 9 Aug. 1938, RGASPI 545.3.193, 4; For the efforts of distinct companies at an International Brigade base in Olot to assist children see ‘Todo para ayudar a los niños refugiados’, Nuestra Vida, No. 6., undated, RGASPI 545.2.418, 11; for an article which listed the amounts raised by each company of the H. Vuillemin Battalion, see ‘Les filleuels de notre brigade’, Adelante: Journal of the XIII International Brigade, no. 5, 4 July 1937, RGASPI 545.3.345, 5.

38 Alfred Brauner, report on relations between SRI and the Comité Pro-Niños, C. Aug. 1938, RGASPI 545.1.76; Report concerning personnel of the Comité Pro-Niños, 6 Aug. 1938, RGASPI 545.1.75; Report on the work of the Committee Pro-Niños, 13 July 1938, RGASPI 545.1.76.

39 Esteve Torres, Hogares infantiles, especially 30–5 and 54–6.

40 Booklet produced by the Hogar García Lorca, CHA, Fond Andre Marty, 2AM.4A.2, Box 11.

41 Fernández Soria, ‘La asistencia a la infancia en la Guerra Civil’, 90–6.

42 Report on the work of the Comité pro-Niños españoles, 1 July 1938, RGASPI 545.1.76.

43 Ibid.

44 Report on the work of the Comité pro-Niños españoles, 13 July 1938, RGASPI 545.1.76.

45 Album with letters and drawings of the children of Mataró, RGASPI 545.2.210, 11, 22.

46 Ibid, 44.

47 Biography of Alfred Brauner in support of PCE application, undated, RGASPI 545.6.1096.

48 Biography of Henry Stuart, undated, RGASPI 545.1.75.

49 Biography of Anja Hammerman, undated, RGASPI 545.1.76.

50 Report concerning personnel of the Comité Pro-Niños, 6 Aug. 1938, RGASPI 545.1.75.

51 Report on the personnel of Pro-Niños institutions, undated, RGASPI 545.1.76.

52 Alfred Brauner, report on relations between SRI and the Comité Pro-Niños, undated, RGASPI 545.1.76.

53 Letter from Socors Roig de Catalunya, 11 Aug. 1938, RGASPI 545.1.76.

54 ‘Kinderheim “Solidaridad” im Genesungshospital Benisa’, German VFL, RGASPI 545.2.367, 13.

55 John Sorkson, ‘Americans and Canadians in the Internationals Brigades’, undated article draft, C. 1937, RGASPI 454.3.470.

56 Report on work at Benicàssim between Dec. 1937 and Jan. 1938, RGASPI 545.2.72.

57 Our Bulletin, RGASPI 545.1.66, 42.

58 ‘Unser comidor der niños in St. Coloma del Farnes’, 10 Aug. 1938, RGASPI 545.3.65.

59 ‘Quelques heures parmi les gosses de la XIeme Brigade’, French VFL, 23 Dec. 1937, RGASPI 545.2.370, 5–6.

60 Postcard from British volunteer ‘Arthur’, undated, Marx Memorial Library, SC.VOL.ART.3.

61 Brauner to Longo concerning the creation of a brochure on the International Brigades and Spanish Children, 1 Jan. 1938, RGASPI 545.1.76.

62 Los niños españoles y las Brigadas Internacionales, July 1938, RGASPI 545.2.404.

63 ‘Nuestros Peques’, Ádelante Palafox! no. 2, undated, 5, AGMAV,C.1097, 3, 1, document 5.

64 ‘La vida de la 4ª Cia.’, Nuestra Vida, No. 7, 1938, RGASPI 545.2.418, 9.

65 Interview with Emil Miltenbeger in Esteve Torres, Hogares Infantiles, 54.

66 Los niños españoles y las Brigadas Internacionales, RGASPI 545.2.404.

67 Radio message from Commissar Pimpaud to the children of Murcia, May 1938, RGASPI 545.1.76.

68 Gómez, Sergio Valero, ‘Educación republicana y politización’, Historia Social, 94 (2019), 102Google Scholar; Quance, Roberta Ann, ‘Maruja Mallo and the Interest in Children's Art during the Second Republic’, Bulletin of Hispanic Studies, 90, 7 (2013), 803–18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

69 Núria Padrós Tuneu et al studied drawings produced in one Catalan school as a means of gauging the daily lives of children in 'The Spanish Civil War as Seen Through Children's Drawings of the Time’, Paedagogica Historica, 51, 4 (2015), 478–95; Roth, Christian, ‘Trotz allem zeichnen sie: Der Spanische Bürgerkrieg mit Kinderaugen gesehen’, Paedagogica Historica, 45, 1–2 (2009), 191–214CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70 Nicholas Stargardt, Witnesses of War: Children's Lives Under the Nazis (London: Pimlico, 2006), 10.

71 Meda, ‘Los dibujos infantiles’, 161–2.

72 Valero Gómez, ‘Educación republicana’, 97–114.

73 The word ‘witness’ or ‘witnesses’ frequently appears in the titles of popular history books concerning children during war. See for example Nicholas Stardgardt, Witnesses of War, mentioned above; Emmy E. Werner, Reluctant Witnesses: Children's Voices From the Civil War (Colorado: Westview Press, 1998) and Svetlana Alexievich, Last Witnesses (London: Random House, 2020).

74 Album with letters and drawings of the children of Mataró, RGASPI 545.2.210, 11.

75 Ibid, 7.

76 Ibid, 9.

77 Album with letters and drawings of the children of Mataró, RGASPI 545.2.210.

78 Antonio Viñao, ‘Politics, Education and Pedagogy: Ruptures, Continuities and Discontinuities (Spain 1936–1939)’, Paedagogica Historica, 51, 4 (2015), 47.

79 Ibid, 22.

80 Ibid, 6.

81 for a particularly effusive letter of thanks sent from one children's home to a Brigade commander see ‘El trabajo de los garibaldinos en la retaguardia’, Italian VFL, 24 Sept. 1938, RGASPI 545.2.365, 8.

82 ‘Soldiers of the XI Brigade Maintain a Home for Children who are Victims of War’, English VFL, 27 Dec. 1937, RGASPI 545.2.362, 8–9.

83 Album with letters and drawings of the children of Mataró, RGASPI 545.2.210, 30, 31, 32, 36.

84 Ibid, 14.

85 Quoted by Vincent in ‘Histoire d'une colonie d'enfants espagnols’, RGASPI 545.2.187, 67–8.

86 Rose Duroux and Célia Keren, ‘Retours sur dessins: Fred/Alfred Brauner 1938, 1946, 1976, 1991’, in Rose Duroux and Catherine Milkovitch-Rioux, eds., Enfances en guerre. Témoignages dénfants sur la guerra (Geneva: L’Équinoxe/Editions Georg, 2013), 99–119.

87 Information on the planning of the exhibition can be found in correspondence between Socorro Rojo Internacional, the Comité Pro-Niños and the International Brigades in RGASPI 545.1.76.

88 Roberts, Siân, ‘Exhibiting Children at Risk: Child Art, International Exhibitions and Save the Children Fund in Vienna, 1919–1923’, Paedagogica Historica, 45, 1–2 (2009), 171–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

89 Instructions for drawing competition, 21 July 1938, RGASPI 545.1.75.

90 Picture book produced for children, RGASPI 545.2.382.

91 Vincent, ‘Histoire d'une colonie d'enfants espagnols’, Mar. 1939, RGASPI 545.2.187, 43. for attempts to place the war at the centre of the educational curriculum in both zones see Viñao, Antonio, ‘Politics, Education and Pedagogy: Ruptures, Continuities and Discontinuities (Spain 1936–1939)’, Paedagogica Historica, 51, 4 (2015), 406CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

92 See, for example, the photos accompanying the article ‘Gdy dabrowszczacy sa w rezerwie’, Polish VFL, 5 June 1938, 545.2.369, 1.

93 ‘Soldiers of the XI Brigade Maintain a Home for Children who are Victims of War’, English VFL, 27 Dec. 1937, RGASPI 545.2.362, 8–9.

94 Booklet produced by the Hogar Garcia Lorca, CHA, Fond Andre Marty, 2AM.4A.2, Box 11. Album with letters and drawings of the children of Mataró, RGASPI 545.2.210.

95 Mary Nash, Defying Male Civilization: Women in the Spanish Civil War (Colorado: Arden Press, 1995), 111–12.

96 Ibid, 120.

97 Report on the work of the Comité Pro-Niños, 13 July 1938, RGASPI 545.1.76.

98 Braster, Sjaak and Andrés, María del Mar del Pozo, ‘Education and the Children's Colonies in the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939): The Images of the Community Ideal’, Paedagogica Historica, 51, 4 (2015), 455–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The article ‘Soldiers of the XI Brigade Maintain a Home for Children who are Victims of War’ refers to the implementation of Europe's most progressive methods in the Madrid home and can be found in the English VFL, 27 Dec. 1937, RGASPI 545.2.362, 8–9.

99 Founding Statute of the Comité Pro-Niños, undated, RGASPI 545.1.75.

100 Los niños españoles y las Brigadas Internacionales, July 1938, RGASPI 545.2.404.

101 Braster and Pozo Andrés, ‘Education and the Children's Colonies’, 460.

102 Ibid, 114.

103 One Brigade collaborator wrote that the children of La Moraleja ‘write seriously and consciously like adults. The atmosphere of the war has made them encounter words which the young in normal circumstances would never think of. They are Little ‘políticos’ who know very well the reasons for fighting’. Quoted in Esteve Torres, Hogares Infantiles, 26.

104 Lisa A. Kirschenbaum, International Communism and the Spanish Civil War: Solidarity and Suspicion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).

105 Booklet on the Hogar Ernst Thaelmann, transcribed in Torres, Hogares Infantiles, 4–34.

106 ‘Unsere Kinder in Heim <<Ernst Thaelmann>>’, German VFL, 19 July 1938, RGASPI 545.2.368, 18.

107 Vincent, ‘Histoire d'une colonie d'enfants espagnols’, Mar. 1939, RGASPI 545.2.187, 102–5.

108 ‘Soldiers of the XI Brigade Maintain a Home for Children who are Victims of War’, English VFL, 27 Dec. 1937, RGASPI 545.2.362, 8–9; booklet produced by the Hogar García Lorca, CHA, Fond Andre Marty, 2AM.4A.2, Box 11.

109 Arielli, Nir and Rodogno, Davide, ‘Transnational Encounters’, Journal of Modern History, 14, 3 (2016), 317Google Scholar.

110 Esteve Torres, Hogares infantiles, 66.