Joe Zameret, An Unknown Family Hero

Published by Yair Zameret at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Yair Zameret



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Introduction

(Written in March, 2009)

April 1st 2009 is the 71st anniversary of Joe’s death.
Until a year ago, we did not know the exact circumstances of his death.
In 1942, my father found that a few years earlier his brother had been killed as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War. No more information was known. Even about other areas of Joe’s life, not much was known. In the biography of my father, published after his death, only a few details appeared about Joe.
It was said there that in the visit my father made in 1932 to his family in L.A., he met Joe (see picture) and was surprised and impressed by him - the child he left seven years previously had become an energetic activist, involved in struggles for the rights of workers and blacks.

Several years later this brother volunteered to fight against Franco in Spain and has been killed.
My father, my mother, Aunt Rose, Grandfather Meir, grandmother Bathya, all died long ago.
Letters, photographs, and detailed information about Joe were not available to me.
For years I felt, even with what little I knew, that Joe was a hero who deserved to be remembered.
So I started to look for more information, and began by posting a question on a Spanish Civil War internet site. It yielded an answer:
His name appeared in the list of volunteers of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade.
This was an exciting beginning to the trail. I kept looking, and got more pieces to the puzzle. A photograph of the brothers’ meeting in L.A. in 1932; a photo of Joe leading a demonstration of unemployed workers; a photo from a Leftist archive in New York, in which he holds a Longshoreman hook.
I enlarged the face of this last photo, printed it, and put it on the shelf near my computer desk.
Throughout the last year this picture has reminded me that a story needs to be told here.
Finally, I found a list that had been concealed for years in Moscow, and was only revealed recently - a causalities list of the Lincoln battalion in the retreat they had on April 1, 1938, near Gandesa.
There, on page 30, Joe’s name appeared.

No graves remained from that terrible battle. Most of the soldiers were killed, and only a few were able to save themselves by swimming to the other side of the Ebro River. The dead remained where they fell, and were probably buried later in mass graves, with no markers, no gravestones.
Spain is full of such unknown mass graves.
As the 71st anniversary of his death approached, we created a site and a book, a memorial to Uncle Joe, with all the information we could gather.
Due to the lack of information, I allowed myself to interpret those details we did have by the context of the historical circumstances, and even made some assumptions regarding Joe’s possible responses to those circumstances.
There are many ‘holes’ in the ‘puzzle’, and so this memorial describes less of the ‘real’ Uncle Joe, and more of the Uncle Joe who lives inside me.
The Uncle Joe with whom it is possible to make an ‘internal’ dialogue.
To ask questions and to listen for answers.
To argue, and to be quiet with.
To touch.
Beyond the seventy year gap.


Addition, July 20, 2009

After the site was published, we received additional materials about Joe: letters (mainly his letters to Shmarya during the years 1925-1935), audio-taped-interviews of Aunt Rose, and pictures.
These materials contained hitherto unknown facts, causing us to change several chapters.
Roses’ recording has yet to be fully transcribed. Once done, it is likely that additional updates will be needed to the website.
We are also planning to add a chapter for comments received after the publication of the memorial. You are all invited to send your comments and thoughts.

Joe’s Childhood

Joe was born in 1912, in Cleveland, Ohio, to Bathya and Meir Zameret (Gelfand), Jewish immigrants from Russia that were just recently married (a Shiduch marriage, with no prior introduction). Shmarya, the elder brother, was born two years before, and the young sister, Rose, was born five years after Joe.
Meir, who was a Zionist (and even changed the family name from ‘Gelfand’ to ‘Zameret’, a Hebrew abbreviation for ‘Zion will be a sovereign country’), made a journey in 1920 with Shmarya to his desired land, Palestina-Israel, following that he intended to make an Alyah (emigration to the land of Israel).
Unfortunately, upon returning from the trip, Meir contracted tuberculosis, and instead of Alyah, the family moved to Los Angeles, a more suitable place for the severe illness.

Bathya, Meir, Shmarya and Joe

The Break

The disease caused a conflict in the Zameret family, which rapidly widened into a deep, tragic rupture. A triple rupture. One that was never mended.
It had an ideological dimension: While Meir was an enthusiastic Zionist, to whom the realization of the Zionist ideology by an Alyah was of highest priority, Bathya, as most Jews then (and now), was much less committed to the practical realization of the Zionistic vision.
Actually, emigration to Palestine looked to her as a groundless adventurism, and when comparing the situations then of Palestine and America, it would be hard to disagree with her view.
There was also, it seems, a personal gap. The marriage, as mentioned, was a ‘Shiduch’, one arranged without prior acquaintanceship, and probably without much suitability.
The disease itself also forced an impossible conflict between the couple - tuberculosis was deadly and incurable in the days prior to penicillin’s discovery. Meir’s staying with the family endangered the children, so he had to leave; and what followed was a divorce. But then Shmarya, only 12 years old, but already possessing much maturity and leadership, turned everything upside down.
He said that if Meir were to leave, then he would go with him, which is what he did, and in the next two years, Meir and Shmarya migrated between medical institutions, with Shmarya nursing his dying father.
Meir died early in 1925, in Denver, Colorado, and was buried in Los Angeles. His last request of Shmarya was that Shmarya would actually make the postponed Alyah.

Meir’s funeral

Most of (the very few...) Meir’s possessions and properties were left to Shmarya, and as custodian Meir nominated his Zionist friend Sheff (who appears, quite often, in the letters detailed later on this memorial).
At the end of 1925 Shmarya, then a 15 year old boy, went to Palestina, alone, in spite of the fierce objection of his mother Bathya, causing a complete split with her.
The split began to be repaired only several years later, at first indirectly, through the correspondence of Shmarya and Joe, which later became a direct correspondence between Bathya and Shmarya. Then came, in 1932, the reconciliatory breakthrough, when Shmarya made a visit to America.

It seems, however, that the traumatic break was never really fully repaired, and even though it wasn’t mentioned in Joe’s correspondence, it doubtless continued to always exist in the depths of his being.
A strong sense of family can be felt through Joe’s letters, and it shows up very clearly that Bathya, Rose, and Shmarya made up the core of Joes world. Meir, however, almost never appears there.

And the breakdown, derived from the illness, the divorce, the splitting of the family, the death of Meir, and the traumatic departure of Shmarya, left the family not only with no male authority figure, but also with no maintainer, and so Joe had to fill both roles. At the age of 13 he began to sell newspapers on a street corner, and throughout his entire high-school period, he always spent a significant time of his days doing all kinds of odd jobs to support the small family. All his entire life he made it very clear: his real priority was to support the living and happiness of Bathya and Rose.

Rose and Bathya, the mid 30s

The relationship with Shmarya, however, was more ambivalent.
From the letters it emerges that, hidden beyond a tough facade, there existed a deep love.
There are in the letters also a lot of pride and admiration towards the senior brother, the greater-than-life hero, who, in those days, seemed to be growing greater and stronger, helping to build the Jewish nation and settlement, defending and saving Jews, implementing a universal socialistic utopia.

Shmarya in Palestina

There can also be seen, emerging from behind the letters texts, a competition with the senior brother (who was, actually, only a year and a half older), and a determined will to accomplish nothing smaller then this brother, even though in a different way - in Joe’s way.
It seems: the subsequent Joe’s actions which the following chapters will detail, his intensive political activity, his determined desire for Tikkun Olam (repairing the world), his volunteering to fight in the Spanish war (which finally brought about his end), they all were well rooted in his childhood experiences described in this chapter.

Joe’s Political Activity

The first Years of the Thirties were a dramatic period, filled with tremendous ideological struggles, both in America and worldwide.
Right-wing totalitarian ideologies, Nationalism, Fascism and Nazism, were gaining power. The idea of World Communism, embodied by the Comintern, had spread, and so had the struggles between Trotskyism and Stalinism. The Weimar regime in Germany had collapsed, wounding severely the idea of democracy, and the mighty force of the Great Depression had hit, threatening the capitalist system itself.
The approaching world catastrophe was clear. The feeling was one of a global life-or-death, to-be-or-not-to-be struggle.
These were the years in which Joe grew from a boy to a man, and when he chose the political path.
Sure enough, the mainstream Democrats and Republicans weren’t for Joe, nor were the Communists. Rather, he joined the Socialist party, and soon became a significant activist there. At the age of 20 he was already a Californian delegate for the 1932 Milwaukee convention, and soon he was holding the role of National Industrial Organizer for the Young People’s Socialist League, eager to combine American workers with the party’s activities and ideology.
In the chaotic crisis of those years, many youngsters joined the well-established party, but not a few of them thought that while the party was in the right place, it was not stepping in the right direction nor going at the right pace. They therefore joined not as toeing the line disciplined members, but as rebels, and the revolution they wanted had to start within the Party itself.
In April 1934, these young recruits, these ‘Militants’ and ‘Anarchists’ (as they been called by the party’s ‘old guards’), or ‘romantic rebels’ (in the eyes of the charismatic leader Norman Thomas, who liked their energy, even while disagreeing with some of their extreme positions), addressed a 12 page petition to the party members, where they called for ‘revolution’ - a worldwide ideological revolution, as well as an internal upheaval in the party itself. Eighty militants signed the petition; four of them considered particularly prominent, and one of these four was Joe.
In addition to differences in age and temperament, the militants and the old guards differed also in several concrete issues. While the old guards supported parliamentary democracy in all circumstances, the militants thought that the chaotic situation of the world, the collapse of capitalism, and especially the enormous power of the Nazi-Fascist aggression might defeat the parliamentary democracy.
To avoid this, they thought, the Socialists should be ready to act, if necessary, through violations of the law, and even with armed power.
As part of this approach, the militants, despite their opposition to Stalinism, and contrary to the party’s Old Guards, supported a tactical alliance with the American Stalinist-communists.
In addition, unlike the Old Guards, they also sided with allowing anti-Communist Trotskyites into the party, as long as they kept its discipline.
In the party convention held in Detroit in June 1934, the radical positions of the militants became the dominant force in the party. The Old Guards left, and the Trotskyites entered and stayed in the party until 1937.

Joe with friends, probably some of the ‘Militants’ (and don’t ask who the girl on Joe’s lap is...)

For Joe, however, this victory was too little and too late.
In the same 1934 summer of the Detroit convention, there was a huge strike of the Californian longshoremen, and Joe, who was active in organizing the strike, saw how the struggle was pushed mainly by the Communists, not by the Socialists.

The great 1934 Longshoremen strike

And these differences in enthusiasm and commitment were not limited to worker’s issues.
The brutal oppression of the opposition and Jews in Germany was another issue in which Joe felt that while the Communists struggle, the Socialists do nothing.
The discrimination of blacks was yet another point of frustration for Joe. In the book about my father, my mother indicated that in those years Joe struggled for the blacks, and even mentioned a newspaper piece she had, in which Joe appeared negotiating for Blacks rights.
We know, however, that while the Communists were leaders in this struggle then, the Socialists refrained from active participation. The old Socialist party was well rooted in the unions, which many times were quite racist, and the party didn’t want to confront them.

Racism in America

This may have made sense to many, but not to Joe and his friends, who saw it as mere opportunism, and many of them left the party and joined the Communists.
For Joe such a move was not easy, but at some point in 1935 he made it anyhow.
The Communists were defamed and hated, but they better fit his ideology and temper, and he was ready to pay the price.
We have several photographs of him from this period.
In one, he dressed in typical longshoreman clothes, and holds a hook indicating the profession of longshoreman. This allowed for his activity as an Industrial Organizer, and maybe provided him with some cover for his political activities, which many times were not legal.

In another photograph, he is leading a demonstration of unemployed people. On the back of the photograph he explains: it was an attempt to march on City Hall, which failed, as the police had machine guns...

Another picture shows him in a street gathering, talking to the people about the freeing of the anarchist Thomas Mooney (who was released from jail several years later).

A more detailed description of these stormy, revolutionary years can be seen in the letters we presented on the last chapter of this memorial.

Within the context we described here, here are a few more comments:

* It is interesting to note the similarities of the determined revolutionary Militants, with their firm leftist ideology and their self-vision as an elitist vanguard that is supposed to lead the world (and the Left, as a vanguard of the vanguard), and between a similar Israeli group established in Palestina during those exact same years by Joe’s bother, Shmarya and his friends, called ‘Hamachanot Haolim’.

* There was a disagreement between the Zameret brothers about the right way to implement socialism:
through a parliamentary democracy, or through revolution. It seems, however, that a more fundamental disagreement between them was in regards to Zionism, where Shmarya was more Nationalistic, and Joe an Internationalist.
Reading Joes letters, however, clearly show his deep concern regarding the Jews. It may well be then, that the real source of their disagreement actually regarded the better way to save the Jews from the disaster both brothers felt was coming. According to this interpretation, while Shmarya thought a Jewish territory might save them (which led him to the Mosad Lealyah in the years 1938-1947), Joe thought that only a Socialist rule would do, which contributed to his volunteering to go to Spain during the years 1937-1938. Painfully, both ways failed in preventing the disaster.

* The Trotskyites - Joe’s relation to the Trotskyites wasn’t completely clear to me. From one side, his sister Rose, who was a Trotskist, indicates his negative ideological relation to them (which did not hurt their personal relationship), and from the other side the Socialist Militants, of which Joe was one of the leaders, sided in joining with the Trotskyites.
This issue, which may have been seen as quite insignificant in America, became a crucial Life-or-Death issue in the international Brigades, to which Joe would soon join. It was found there that the Stalinists, who ruled the brigades in Spain, hated (and even killed) Trotskyites no less then they hated Fascists. This fierce internal hatred within the Spanish Republicans, and how Joe dealt with it, is detailed in other parts of this memorial.

All these struggles may have seemed a ‘typical polemic intellectual leftism’ or a ‘typical small political power-games’, but they were not. What they really represented was an authentic anxiety of caring idealists who saw very clearly how the catastrophe was drawing near, threatening to destroy the world, unless they would fight to prevent it.

The events that very soon after followed proved that the progressive anxieties were fully justified, even if the reality which hit the world soon messed up all the details of their prognoses.

In February 1936, a leftist coalition won the Spanish elections, and in July a right-wing rebellion under Franco’s leadership broke out against the government.
Hitler and Mussolini supported the Fascists, Russia sided with the government, and Britain, France and America took on a nonintervention policy.
At the beginning of the war many immediately volunteered to help the government. The great masses, however, including the large organized groups of the International Brigades, entered the action not before October 1936.
The first wave of Americans, almost all of them Communists, arrived in Albacete, Spain, in January 1937. Joe arrived shortly after that, in early April, and immediately was pulled into the huge swirl that destroyed beliefs, ideologies and Millions of lives, and generated another world... a completely different world...

Going to Spain

A passport was issued to Joe in early March 1937. The place of issue was San Francisco, and the indicated ‘living address’ was San Pedro, California. San Pedro is a big port in Southern California, where Joe probably worked as part of his role as an Industrial Organizer, and as a cover for his sometime illegal political activities (actually, the information regarding the passport was taken from a list prepared in 1951 by the McCarthy Committee for Anti-American activities...).
In the Brigades archives in New York, there is a document, gained from sailing lists published during that time by the New York Times, where Joe’s name appears as voyaging on March 27 on the boat Paris.
A few days before the voyage he made his way from the West to the East coast. On the way, he took a one-night stop in Charleston, Virginia, in some friends’ house, probably fellow party members. Their young daughter, Judy, then 8 years old, remembers a handsome, smiling man. She also remembers that he was on his way to New York, and that his final destination was Spain. He must have left a mighty impression on her; otherwise it is difficult to explain why she sent a letter, 60 years later, to the Lincoln Brigades archives in Brandeis University, Massachusetts, investigating what happened to him. We discovered her letter in his file, together with their sad answer informing her of his death. If alive, she should be about 80 years old today...

It is not clear where the ship anchored, nor is it clear how he crossed the border into Spain. Was it by a train to Barcelona, like the first group of volunteers, three months before? Or was it, (which is more likely, in light of the non-interventionism policy just then declared by France), by sneaking through the Pyrenees, a track described by another Jewish-American volunteer, Milton Wolf, who came to Spain about the same time, and who described his journey in a book called ‘Another Hill’. (The name stands for the endless walk through the mountains while smuggling across the border, and also for the last battle of the Americans in Spain, a year and a half later, when Wolf, then no longer a newcomer, but the legendary commander of the legendary Lincoln battalion, fought on Hill 666 near Gandesa, in the same vineyards area where Joe was killed 4 months earlier).

Without a doubt, the Spain that Joe found was different from America in almost every aspect. Yet, if there is in America an area that is similar to Spain, this is its South-West corner where Joe spent most of his life.
The Mediterranean Weather. The Spanish architecture and language. The nearby sea. The hilly topography. The pine trees and grapevines. The chrysanthemum and poppies in the spring. If Joe was as sensitive to nature and its vistas as his brother was, Spain must have produced in him strong feelings of home...

Spanish spring - poppies field

And at the end of the long journey what awaited the newcomers was the recruiting and training base (and the Brigades’ headquarter) Albacete, 150 kilometers west of Valencia.

As mentioned, the first American volunteers had come to Spain three months before. There is a description of their encounters with Albacete, and probably Joe’s group went through a similar experience:
All 20 volunteers were placed in a single room originally intended for four. The second floor of their room served as a prison for rebelling citizens, who offered the newcomers money to help their escape. The toilets’ walls were covered with blood, like a slaughterhouse. It was explained to them that at the beginning of the war, a few month earlier, there had been there a difficult battle with the fascists, who eventually surrendered. The captives were then taken to the toilets, where they were slaughtered, and the blood was never cleaned up. Probably this was the way of their commanders to quickly teach the newcomers just where they had arrived.

The Lincolns’ Battles

The first initiation-by-fire of the International Brigades was in November 1936, in Madrid.
The American Lincoln battalion entered the fighting in Jarama, near Madrid, in the middle of February 1937, a battle in which almost two thirds of the soldiers were killed or wounded.
The beginning of April, when Joe arrived at Albacete, had been for the battalion somewhat of a ‘recovery period’, in which they held the Jarama front, while receiving new recruits and filling in the missing lines.
Joe, Milton Wolf, and the other newcomers completed the Albacete training and soon joined the Americans at the Madrid front.
However, while for the Lincolns these months had been a relatively relaxed time, for the Republican side in general they weren’t relaxed at all - crucial battles took place then in other parts of the country.
In the North, The Basques were defeated by the Nationalists (the Fascists). The involvement of Franco’s allies, the Italian Fascists, and the Nazi Condor Legion, with their modern technologies and advanced tanks and airplanes, was overwhelming.
The Total War, which so much characterized the coming World War II, was first exercised in Spain, and brutality towards civilians became an integral part of the strategy, as was famously exposed in the Basque village of Guernica, on April 27th of that year.
At the end of June, the battalion pulled off the Jarama front for a few weeks, then joined the deadly Brunet offensive, the first big battle in which Joe participated.
Causalities of the Lincoln battalion (combined then with its ‘twin’ Washington battalion) were much fewer then in Jarama, but still bad enough to necessitate re-merging the two American battalions into one.
On July 19th, the merged battalion left the Madrid area and moved to the Aragon front, near Saragossa. Between July 24th and September 6th, the battalion fought in Quinto and Belchite. Causalities of the battalion in both locations were 250 soldiers, about half of the populace. Joe was wounded and evacuated to the American hospital near Albacete, and after a short recuperation period returned to the front.

October 13 - The Lincolns, along with the Canadian McPaps, attack, unsuccessfully, in Puente-De-Ebro, near Quinto. Causalities, wounded and dead: about 300 soldiers.

October 19 - The Fascists complete the conquering of northern Spain, and on November 30th the Republican government withdraws from Valencia to Barcelona.

December 1937 to February 1938 - The Republicans, including the Lincolns, attack near Teruel, but withdraw back to Belchite under strong Fascist pressure. (Below - the last picture of Joe (marked), taken in the winter of 1938, with a group of Californian Lincolns, at Aqua Viva, Teruel front.)

March 10, 1938 - The Fascists attack in Aragon, prompting the start of the great Aragon Retreat (see map below). The Lincolns leave Belchite under the pressure, and many of them are taken prisoners.

March 15 - The Lincolns retreat to Caspe, 17 Kilometers East of Belchite. Of the 500 who started the retreat, only 100 reach Caspe.

March 18 - The Lincolns retreat to Batea, 40 Kilometers South-East of Caspe. 100 new recruits join them, as well as many others who lost their original units. The Lincoln Battalion now numbers about 400 soldiers.

April 1-2 - The Lincolns maintain a desperate, deadly retreat battle near Gandesa. Amongst the dead the battalion commander Merriman, and Joe. During the coming days about 120 battalion survivors mange to escape, both in groups and as individuals, to the other side of the Ebro, sometimes by swimming across the river. One of the survivors is Milton Wolf, who becomes the new battalion commander.

April through July 1938 - The Lincoln recruits and trains new soldiers, both Spaniards and Americans. The new recruits again raise the total to about 700 soldiers.

April 15 - The Fascists ‘cut’ through the Republican areas to the Mediterranean.

July 24 until the middle of August - The final Republican offensive. The Lincolns, now under Wolf’s command, goes back across the Ebro to its west bank to re-conquer Gandesa, and ensues there fierce fighting, resulting in the complete destruction of the entire village. Under overwhelming Fascist forces, the Lincolns eventually withdraws back to the Ebro’s east bank. Of the 300 Battalion survivors, only 100 are Americans.

September 6 - After recruiting new soldiers, the Lincolns fight in Corvera, near Barcelona.

September 27 - Juan Negrin, the Republican prime minister, declares an end to the international brigades.

September 30 - The Munich agreement. Chamberlin declares ‘Peace in our time’.

December 2 - 300 Lincoln survivors leave for France.

April 1 1939 - Franco declares a Fascist victory and an end of the war.

September 1 1939 - Hitler invades Poland. World War II Begins.

The Last Battle

Unfortunately, we don’t have many details on the precise circumstances of Joe’s death - it was a retreat battle, where most of the soldiers were wounded or killed, and the dead were left behind where they fell. However, both Joe and Captain Merriman, the battalion commander, were killed there at the same day, so the following description of Captain Merriman’s last moments, may be similar to Joe’s last moments as well.

‘The [fascist Aragon] offensive was directed towards the river that separates Aragon from Catalonia [the remaining republican area]. The last stronghold of the brigades before crossing the Ebro had been Gandesa, 20 Kilometers West of the river. Withdrawal instructions were given one after the other. Unable to hold the superior higher hills, due to the unceasing bombing of the Italian aircraft, the battalion took cover in the low vineyard area.
In an effort to organize the defense, Merriman was forced to leave the hideout, and then he was shot and killed’.

Gandesa vineyards

More precise details were added in 1998, by a Spaniard Republican, Villard, who fought nearby in this day.

‘It was on April 2, at 10 AM. Merriman and lieutenant Edgar James Codey, both Americans, looked desperate.
According to what they said, the night before, 1 April, the 700 battalion soldiers were forced to withdraw from Gandesa. Merriman, who was located in the front of the battalion, saw how officers of other units deserted their soldiers and escaped. But he chose to stay with his people and die with them, if necessary, and this is indeed what happened.
The enemy fighters were on the hills, shooting our soldiers who took cover in the vineyards with their machine-guns. I saw Merriman and Edgar Codey falling. I screamed to them and they did not respond. I saw their bodies, motionless, near the vineyards furrows, a few meters away’.

Was Joe killed near Merriman, or somewhere else in the area?
Was he killed on April 2, or already on the previous day, as appears in the Moscow casualties List?
And what happened to his body, as well as the other hundreds of bodies which remained there in the budding vineyards and the blooming hills? Were they buried in joint graves, like other tens of thousands of dead in this bloody war, with no markers, with no tombstone?

We may never know. The details brought here are the only ones we have. No precise details have been available up to this point.

The Other Side

The volunteering of the brigades did not help the Republicans; their defeat was decisive. The Lincoln Brigade was beaten badly, with most of its soldiers wounded or killed.
Considering the huge, brutal involvement of the Nazis and Fascists, and the non-interventionism of the West, the defeat may have seemed inevitable.
Probably, if we could ask Joe about the ultimate defeat, he would refer to it like other Lincoln veterans do: Despite the defeat, the heroic struggle, for many reasons, was worthy.
Not many will disagree.
However, while dealing with the materials for this site, a few questions arose which seemed less clear; questions about ruptures in the Republican side, which perhaps contributed to its defeat not less then the external factors.
If Joe was alive, I would like to ask him how he felt about them
They lay in two areas:
One is the relation between political ideologies and actual reality, and the other is psychological - it is about the connection between what one says to himself about himself, and what really motivates him.
This site portion will introduce several events to which and people to whom Joe was exposed during the last year of his life. I will try to show their complexity, and will raise some questions they might have presented to Joe.

The Anti-religious Sentiment

Fierce Anti-Catholic actions done by the Republican side: ridiculing, oppressing, physical aggression, and outright killings of Catholics. (See here Republicans shooting a Christian statue).

Slaughtering Non-fighters

Many testimonies prove: even though acts of abuse and slaughter were more common on the Fascist side, it was also common on the Republican side as well. Tens of thousands were murdered, sometimes by people of the same village and family.
Doesn’t this show that, aside of ‘ideologies’, an immanent murderousness hides in normal humans, a murderousness which the Lords of War, from all sides, use and encourage?

Lorca

Lorca was murdered at the beginning of the war, in August 1936.
It was well known that the Fascists murdered him, but it was ultimately found that most likely those fascists were relatives, who had seen his plays (mainly ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’), his progressiveness, and his homosexuality as attacking their religious-conservative values. In the night after the murder, a relative of Lorca, Juan Luis Trescastro Medina, announced at a bar: I shoot him two bullets for being a homo.

But there was also violence in Lorca himself, both in his plays and in his life.

It can be seen, for example, in the sexual, emotional, cultural, artistic, and spiritual connection he had with the matador Ignacio Sanchez Mejias (see pictures). For Lorca, bullfighting, killing, and other violence, was not only something external which needed to be fought against, but also something essential within himself, and probably inside Spain and even humankind itself.

Politics and Military Nominations

According to the Stalinist approach, the criteria for being a military commander should have been, first and foremost, an unconditional loyalty to the party, meaning, to Stalin, while military skills came only secondary, and this resulted in many unskilled commanders in the brigades.
The commanders of the American battalions, Robert Merriman and Oliver Law, demonstrated this ‘rule’. Robert Merriman, who many see as the model for ‘Robert Jordan, the brave guerilla fighter of Ernest Hemingway’s ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’, gained his nickname ‘Murderman’ following the heavy causalities caused by his dilettante military skills.

Internal Wars - Barcelona

In early May, while the Lincolns were manning the Jarama trenches of Madrid, there suddenly ignited a deadly battle, with hundreds dead and thousands wounded, in the Catalan city of Barcelona, and this battle wasn’t between Republicans and Fascists, but rather, between opponent factions within the Republicans, primarily Stalinists-communists from one side, and Trotskyites and Anarchists on the other side. As Russia’s support was vital to the republic, the government took a definite Stalinist side and crushed the Trotskyites, which undoubtedly severely damaged the republicans’ ability to win.

Marty

Essentially, the International brigades were largely a tool of the Comintern to assist the republic, and thus, their ‘strong man’ was the Comintern’s representative, Andre Marty, a charismatic senior French communist, a loyal Stalin yes-man, and a ‘traitor-hunter’ (see picture, on the left).

The traitors were the ‘fifth column’ and fascist collaborators. But no less, and perhaps even more so, Marty targeted anyone else who challenged the Comintern’s dominance, mainly the Anarchists, and the most hated Stalin’s rivals, the Trotskyites (POUM). Marty’s headquarter was in Albacete, so his nickname became ‘The Butcher of Albacete’.
There are many testimonies regarding the Great Commissar’s deeds.
Here is one, which is about the disastrous Aragon retreat (debacle, actually) of March - April 1938, in which Merriman and Joe were both killed, along with hundreds of other Lincolns:

‘Almost everywhere, the Republicans started to fall apart. The various factions started to accuse each other of treachery. The Communists starved anarchist troops of needed munitions. Andre Marty, the insane overall commander of the International Brigades, travelled around, looking for traitors... Republican troops suffered arbitrary executions, with officers sometimes being shot in front of their men...’

Another description is of the famous writer Ernest Hemingway, who knew Marty very well.
Hemingway accompanied the brigades almost throughout the entire war. He arrived in Madrid in February 1937, and when the brigades fought in the Madrid suburbs Jarama and Brunet, he lived at the Florida hotel, bringing the voice of the brigades and the Republicans to the world.
He knew how to penetrate into the human soul, and he knew the brigades, so his testimony is significant. The following description is from his ‘For Whom the Bell Tolls’:

‘He [Marty] sat there, his moustache and his eyes focuses on the map...
Esta loco, the guard said. He is crazy.
No. He is a political figure of great importance, Gomez said. He is the chief commissar of the international Brigades.
Apesar de eso, esta loco, the corporal of the guard said. All the same. He’s crazy... That old one kills more than the bubonic plague... But he doesn’t kill fascists like we do... He kills rare things, Trotskyites, divagationers. Any type of rare beast’.

Hemingway

With Robert Merriman, the Lincoln commander, Hemingway maintained a close friendship. Robert Jordan, the main character of For Whom the Bell Tolls, is known to be based on Merriman. Many facts support this. To me it seems, however, that the primary model for Jordan was Milton Wolf (pictured here with Hemingway).

While only a 21-year-old machine-gunner in those days, he was already, after the Brunette battle, marked as someone who would go far, and this gained him a scheduled meeting with the ‘Maestro’, at the end of July 1937, in the Madridian cafe Chicote.
For Hemingway, this meeting was a love at first sight. He was deeply impressed by Wolf and become his determined admirer. After the war ended, he wrote the following words about him:
‘Twenty-three years old, tall as Lincoln, gaunt as Lincoln, and as brave and as good a soldier as any that commanded battalions at Gettysburg. He is alive and unhit by the same hazard that leaves one tall palm tree standing where a hurricane has passed’.

The opinion of Wolf of Hemingway after the meeting was less enthusiastic, however:
‘Ernest is quite childish in many respects’, he wrote to a friend in Brooklyn. ‘He wants very much to be a martyr... So much for writers’, he concluded, ‘I’d much rather read their works than be with them’.

To criticize Milton Wolf is not hard. Even his friends agree that he made mistakes, not in Spain, indeed, but definitely after Spain. Sometimes his political actions were hasty. His deep, militant, non-conformism; His religious support for orthodox Russian communism; His offer to the Vietnamese Ho Chi Min to help with his old Lincoln comrades (Ho Chi Min refused, luckily).
But no one can deny Wolf’s integrity and commitment to his principles.
That’s why his criticism about Hemingway’s authenticity is important.

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