Travel
The Spanish Civil War drew volunteers from far and wide in the fight against fascism – today its history has become emblematic of struggles around the world. By Kurt Johnson.
The art of not forgetting in Barcelona
We’re running late. By the time we have woven through central Barcelona’s warren of alleys and plazas to reach Plaça de Sant Felip Neri, the square’s entrance is fenced off by a flimsy yellow barricade. Beyond, a dozen schoolkids squeal and chase a ball over the grimy paving stones, dodging around a dormant fountain where a lone girl sits. Except for a few leafless trees, nothing dampens the crack as the ball ricochets against the façade of the Sant Felip Neri church, its sandstone rudely gouged and cratered. From behind the barricade our guide, historian Nick Lloyd, explains that on the morning of January 30, 1938, Italian fascist aeroplanes bombed the church, which was being used as an air-raid shelter. Everything but the façade collapsed, burying all inside.
The children playing around us make this history very real and one of our party hangs back, moved to tears. Lloyd compares this bombing to the conflicts in Ukraine and Gaza, joining the present day to the Spanish Civil War, a conflict that presaged World War II, drew volunteers from around the globe and cost half a million lives. A panel fixed to the wall recounts the bombing in Catalan, Castilian and English. The panel also notes that for 35 years Franco’s regime explained the brutalised façade as a site where priests were executed.
Lloyd is originally from Stockport, Greater Manchester, and has retained a northern lilt, which in his lively accounts takes on the cadence of a union leader addressing a crowd of comrades. Among the dozen Americans and Canadians who now fill the alley are a socialist, a retired human rights lawyer and a labour organiser. Michelle from Seattle interviewed Abe Osheroff, a member of the Lincoln Brigade of 3000 Americans who travelled to Spain in 1937 to fight fascism. Tim came after reading about Chinese volunteers – “mostly medics”, he tells me – who served on the Republican side. Everyone has come with curiosity, hoping that place may provide the answers missing in books.
We started out in the crowded Plaça de Catalunya, where the jostling signage of overtourism obscures a historical record warped by what scholars now call “Spanish-style fascism”. Lloyd fishes out a black-and-white photograph of the Hotel Colón, which today is draped in an advertisement for the new Samsung Galaxy, but back then was bedecked with portraits of Stalin and Lenin, and a Catalan banner declaring allegiance to the Comintern. We consider a plinth pockmarked with bullet holes, proving that here in July 1936 the Plaça de Catalunya was engulfed in violent street battles.
Lloyd connects the bustling present to history’s stills, animating black and white with powerful quotes and personal accounts. He calls this tour a “walking museum”, and over its 15 years he has filled a bulging tote bag with photographs, maps, postcards and artefacts, such as a lighter embedded with a bullet (we don’t know if the owner survived). A hand-drawn placard decodes the constellation of leftist political parties that ranged from social democrats to Stalinists and anarchists – a precarious balance that imploded, playing right into Franco’s hands.
A walking museum is important in a country where no dedicated cultural institution memorialises its civil war. A National Museum of the Battle of Teruel and the Civil War is currently under construction, but has become the focus of disputes between right-wing regional governments and the socialist national government, casting doubt on the project’s future.
This contest over history is longstanding. After Franco died in 1975, Spain transitioned to democracy with the Pact of Forgetting, a political decision that led to a 1977 amnesty for perpetrators of political violence and forbade the exhumation of the mass graves that the regime filled with up to 114,000 of its “disappeared” enemies. This continued right up until 2007, when the Historical Memory Law was passed to recognise these victims. Fifteen years later, the Democratic Memory Law made the government responsible for recovering and identifying them. The right has opposed these laws, and today three autonomous regions are proposing “harmony laws” seeking to undermine the task of investigating and memorialising.
At the beginning of the tour, Lloyd asked why we came. Answers included historical curiosity, political interest and one fanboy tracing the footsteps of Orwell (me). More than one American wondered aloud whether what happened here could soon happen back home.
“At least Trump won decisively, so there won’t be a civil war, this time at least,” a woman whispers to me.
Lloyd later tells me such concerns are coming up more often among his groups, “after the first Trump victory but also the feeling in the last few years of an impending civil war”. He says there is nothing new about the outside world projecting its own struggles onto the Spanish Civil War, which he calls “the most international conflict in any one country”.
When we stop at the cavernous cafe Granja Dulcinea, to escape the chill with coffee and churros dipped in thick chocolate, he explains how 35,000 volunteers from around the world took up the struggle against fascism – and in some cases for it. He shows photographs of volunteers, among them nurses from Australia and an overexposed pic from the Battle of the Ebro showing Sydneysider Jack Franklyn and Bert Bryan from New Zealand firing into the scrub. The overexposure reflects the heat of battle, Lloyd says.
Most volunteers arrived from Europe, cast out by the Great Depression and political turmoil. Lloyd paraphrases historian Helen Graham: “Those young boys from the new states of the old Austro–Hungarian Empire – and by extension Germany, Poland, Greece and Italy – whose lives had been made a misery by local fascist bullyboys in provincial towns and are now living rather precarious lives in the Western democracies, wanted nothing better than to get even with those fellas… how could they do it? To Spain.”
The sentiment and ensuing horrors were immortalised in the era’s art and literature by the likes of Picasso, Hemingway and, of course, George Orwell. Almost all of us on the tour have read Orwell’s gonzo account of the war in Homage to Catalonia, and we are guided to salient locations such as the Hotel Continental, whose roof Orwell guarded while fighting for the anarchist POUM party. Lloyd explains that the POUM unit was desperately underequipped, echoing Orwell’s experiences of his unit’s high morale but shambolic organisation. Yet these experiences of war and its aftermath shaped Orwell’s politics and later writing. The rats that scurried over him in the Aragon trench surely seeded his nightmare vision of Room 101 in 1984, and the betrayal of a worker’s movement by Stalin-backed communists led him to identify the distinction between truth and lies as the basis for opposing totalitarianism.
But the central figure in Lloyd’s tour is Francisco Boix, who he first saw memorialised on a plaque in his neighbourhood of El Poble-sec. Boix was a professional photographer who fought for the Republican side, before fleeing to France where he fought the Nazis. He was captured and deported to the infamous Austrian Mauthausen concentration camp, where his work in a photo lab allowed him to smuggle out negatives that became crucial evidence in the Nuremberg trials.
Lloyd recently designed a dedicated Boix walking tour in Catalan for locals in conjunction with his library, which specialises in books on the Spanish Civil War and the Holocaust. For the tour guide, Boix’s story sets Spain within the broader European, and indeed global, contest between remembering and forgetting historical trauma.
In front of the library is a dedication to Boix on a Stolperstein, or stumbling stone – the cobblestones bearing brass plaques that are dotted throughout Europe to commemorate the Holocaust’s victims. Stumbling serves as a reminder, and the stones embed history in place, as Lloyd wants his tour to do. To him, history is “the art of not forgetting”.
This article was amended on January 28, 2025, to correct the surname of Jack Franklyn, who was misidentified in the photograph of the Battle of the Ebro.
This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on December 21, 2024 as "Art of not forgetting".
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