Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War

by Vaill, Amanda

  The assault, by Nationalist troops joined by Italian Black Shirts, had begun on February 3; on February 5, rebel warships had started to bombard the city from the sea. Those who could flee began to do so, streaming eastward toward Almería, 130 miles away; by the time Málaga fell on February 8, and between two and four thousand people were rounded up and shot by the conquerors, the ribbon of coast road between the mountains and the sea had become packed with refugees—“seventy miles of people desperate with hunger and exhaustion,” as a British volunteer ambulance driver described it. A handful of them, mostly the city’s Republican high command, had automobiles; most were on foot, some leading mules or donkeys laden with their pitiful possessions. Many were children. All suffered from exposure to the sun by day and the cold by night; but worse was to come: Nationalist tanks followed them from Málaga and ran them down, Nationalist planes strafed them from the air, and Nationalist ships fired on them from the sea. Their only defense came from the now mostly decimated Escuadrilla España, André Malraux’s tatterdemalion air squadron; the effort brought most of his remaining planes down in flames, and marked the end of the squadron as an independent unit.

  As soon as the two photographers heard what had happened they scrambled to get to Almería to document it, but by the time they arrived the Nationalist tanks and airplanes had finished their work. There would be no dramatic pictures here. Capa and Gerda were directed to a modest brick building with a sign over the door—“Refugio Lenin”; inside was a large bare room with tattered grimy mattresses and bedrolls pushed up against the walls. There the men, women, and children of Málaga sat, their faces showing the devastation of those who have seen the unimaginable: the father clasping a baby with a bandaged head, the toddler with her fat little legs swathed in bloody gauze, the family clustered like a modern pietà against the whitewashed plaster. Outside, isolated refugees were still trickling into the city, and on the outskirts some had found makeshift shelter in a roadside cavern.

  The Nationalists had withdrawn westward to Málaga after their pursuit of the refugees, but there was still scattered fighting along the unstable front to the north of the coast: units of Loyalist militia, along with soldiers from the Polish Chapaiev Battalion, were pushing back against the rebels in the vicinity of Motril and Calahonda, and Capa and Gerda joined them. They found Calahonda a whitewashed shell, seemingly empty except for the corpse of a soldier curled up as if in sleep next to a bullet-pocked wall, and a live sentry sitting surreally at the entrance to the lifeless village, peering through binoculars at nothing; in the plaza, however, a heroic-looking young woman was preparing to ride her white horse up into the hills with provisions for the milicianos, and they followed her. It was wild country, strewn with boulders and prickly pears, and punctuated by massive limestone crags that dwarfed the soldiers they photographed; but although it made for striking pictures, the landscape wasn’t enough to keep them if they couldn’t find a story. So they made plans to return to Madrid, where there was disturbing news about a Nationalist drive to cut the road that lay between the city and Valencia.

  Before they left, however, Capa had a surprise for Gerda. On a flying trip to Paris he’d bought himself a new camera, a 35mm Contax, so he could give her his speedy compact Leica—the camera she had coveted for so long—in place of her boxy Rollei. And there was something else. He’d had a new stamp made for the back of their prints. Up to that point their photographs had run with the credits “PHOTO CAPA” or “PHOTO TARO”—but now, even before they were sent out to magazines and newspapers for submission, their pictures could be stamped “REPORTAGE CAPA & TARO.”

  February 1937: Madrid

  Ilsa had returned to Madrid from Paris at the end of January, after browbeating the military governor at Alicante into giving her an official car for the journey, and telling the guards at all the filling stations along the road that she was the daughter of the Soviet ambassador so they’d sell her fuel. In Paris, she’d extracted a promise from Leopold Kulcsar that he would give her a divorce as soon as the war was over, and for now she and Barea would have to be content with that. At least Barea could stop drugging himself with brandy every night to get to sleep.

  Having Ilsa back was almost the only comfort he could find in this bleak midwinter, however. The news of Málaga’s fall came just as the Nationalists began a new offensive in the Jarama Valley, southeast of Madrid, just west of the main road to Valencia; the journalists in the pressroom were taking bets on how soon Madrid would surrender once the rebels cut its lifeline to Valencia. Food and fuel, already scarce, were becoming almost unobtainable; the metro stations and the Telefonica’s cellars were crowded with a permanent population of the newly homeless. Although the air raids had slackened, the shelling kept up; all day and night the horizon to the east, south, and west was lit by artillery flares.

  And as if Barea didn’t have his hands full trying to handle the newspapermen while all this was going on, he and Ilsa would now have to deal with two filmmakers—armed with safe-conducts from the Socialists, the Anarchists, and the Communists—who’d arrived from Valencia to make a documentary about the war for an American group of Loyalist sympathizers. Joris Ivens and his cameraman and compatriot John Ferno, along with 450 pounds of baggage that included three movie cameras, had checked into the Hotel Florida on January 22.

  In addition to his equipment, Ivens had with him a short scenario that he and Archibald MacLeish had concocted for the project now called The Spanish Earth—a title MacLeish, with his poet’s instinct for the telling metaphor, had come up with. As sketched in its pages, the film would tell the story of a fictional village whose citizens—landowners, military officers, priests, doctors, shopkeepers, laborers, and peasants—witness the flight of King Alfonso XIII in 1931 and must grapple in their different ways with the tensions and possibilities of the Republic, then with the struggle to preserve it: “a great struggle which has shape and purpose.” It had sounded fine and noble in New York, and maybe it had still sounded all right on board the S.S. Normandie, when Ivens and Lillian Hellman, who was supposed to be working on the film script with him, conferred about it as they sailed across the Atlantic. But Hellman, who was still smarting from the failure of her latest play, a labor-union drama entitled Days to Come, caught pneumonia in Paris and decided not to go on to Spain. And as soon as Ivens got to Madrid he could see the treatment they’d outlined wasn’t going to work. There was no way he was going to be able to stage dramatic reenactments of recent history when current events were playing themselves out, under fire, everywhere, and—as he put it—“the direction is in the hands of life and death.”

  In Madrid he and Ferno set up an office in the building on Calle de Velázquez where the International Brigades and “Commandante Carlos’s” Fifth Regiment were headquartered, and Ivens sought out Carlos and Mikhail Koltsov, whom he had known during his time in Moscow with Mezhrabpom, to ask for help in revising his shooting script. Both his new advisors thought he should focus on the ordinary lives of common people, with Carlos also lobbying for glimpses of parliamentary democracy at work in the new Spanish society. But with the government relocated to Valencia, the closest they could come to democracy at work was a rally announcing the final abolition of the various party militias and their absorption into the new Popular Army. The participants included Enrique Líster, the twenty-nine-year-old Soviet-trained commander of the army’s 11th Division, the Spanish Communist Party’s general secretary, José Díaz; and Dolores Ibárruri, the legislator and ideologue known as “La Pasionaria”—none of them exactly common people, but Ivens would identify them as a Galician stonemason who’d risen from the ranks to become an officer, a typesetter turned parliamentary delegate, and “the wife of a poor miner from Asturias.”

  For the next few days they filmed the extraordinary things that were part of everyday life in Madrid: men carrying the doors of ruined houses to use as reinforcements for the trenches, soldiers getting a shave inside a truck painted with the whimsical lege
nd “Brigada Mixta Jefe ‘Líster’—Peluqueria” (Chief “Líster” Mixed Brigade—Barbershop), coffins being carried through crowds of shoppers, people running in terror as the shells rained down, the limp forms of those who didn’t make it safely across the street. Then came the word that insurgent troops had started an all-out drive toward the main road from Madrid to Valencia, which lay to the east of the Manzanares and Jarama rivers. If Ivens and Ferno wanted footage of real combat, that was where they would get it; but they were prevented from setting out immediately by several days of steady drenching rain that would make filming impossible. And when the deluge let up on the morning of February 11, the Nationalists were claiming to have taken the bridge at Arganda, near the junction of the Jarama and the Manzanares, and to control the road to Valencia.

  But The New York Times’s correspondent, Herbert Matthews, thought the Nationalists were bluffing; and to find out, he commandeered a car and set off south between the sodden, olive-clad hills, with Ivens and Ferno in his wake. They discovered that the government’s troops had managed to check the insurgents’ advance, but the insurgents had redirected their efforts farther south and west, to Pindoque, where a railway bridge—guarded by French International Brigaders—spanned the Jarama. There, the night before, a Nationalist contingent of Moroccan troops had crept over the fields and knifed the French sentries, enabling two Nationalist brigades to cross the river and launch an attack on another International Brigades unit, the Italian volunteers of the Garibaldi Battalion, who were dug in at Pajares, just north of Pindoque. As Matthews, Ivens, and Ferno drove over the Arganda bridge they heard the sound of mortars and machine guns; Matthews, who wanted to learn whether the Valencia road was still open, proceeded down the highway into Arganda itself, to the southeast, but Ivens and Ferno went due south, toward Pajares, right into the line of fire.

  They found the Garibaldi Battalion on the road, where soldiers were leaping out of their transport trucks and forming ranks for the assault, as their dashing commander, Randalfo Pacciardi, roared from position to position on the back of a motorcycle. Holding their cameras in front of their faces, as much as a shield against gunfire as to focus their shots, Ivens and Ferno followed the soldiers into the field. A grenade exploded five yards from them and they threw themselves on the ground, then got up and ran forward as a shell slammed into the earth, raising a geyser of clods and broken rock. At one point Pacciardi fell, his face struck by a bullet or a fragment of flying debris. From the bit of cover behind which he was crouching, Ivens tossed him a handkerchief to use as a makeshift bandage; and the bespectacled, professorial-looking Pietro Nenni, who had cofounded the Garibaldi Battalion with Pacciardi and was its political commissar, knelt beside him and tenderly dressed the wound. Then the two of them got to their feet and Pacciardi strode forward, calling out “Avanti!” as he beckoned his troops forward. Eventually the Garibaldis secured their stretch of the road, and it seemed safe enough for Ivens and Ferno to drive on to the village of Morata de Tajuña, where they witnessed something even more harrowing than the battle they had just been in—though to the citizens of Madrid, or the refugees of Almería, it was horribly familiar.

  Morata was a farming village that had become a mustering point and operational headquarters for some of the various International Brigades coming to the Jarama front from their main base at Albacete. When Ivens and Ferno got there, however, the streets were nearly empty of soldiers: the rebels had managed to capture another Jarama bridge, due west of Morata at San Martin de la Vega, and any remaining Brigaders had been rushed to the battle lines. The fighting was elsewhere; so the first hum of aircraft might not have warned Morata’s villagers that they themselves were about to become collateral damage.

  Then the bombs came, a steady rain of ordnance that pounded the village “to smithereens,” as one of the soldiers left behind put it. Buildings crumbled, and those who’d been unable to get to shelter were slaughtered. At length the shuddering roar of explosives stopped, and all was still. “You should hear the silence of five hundred people after the crash of bombs,” Ivens remembered later. Cautiously, he and Ferno ventured out into the ruined streets—“not realizing we were being brutal but feeling we had to get those pictures”—and filmed the dazed women, “their hands over their bellies in the agony of shock,” the crumpled dead, the children already playing in the rubble. They didn’t shoot any film of the Brigades headquarters that might have been the bombers’ real target, though; or if they did, they didn’t identify it as such. Simplicity is what works.

  Down the east-west road, toward Pingarrón, the International Brigades were being shot to pieces trying to hold the line against the advancing rebels, and it was by no means certain they’d be able to do so. Ivens and Ferno packed up their gear and drove back to Madrid while they still could.

  * * *

  As the filmmakers were driving back to Madrid, Gustav Regler—the political commissar of the Twelfth International Brigade who had been Capa’s guide to the Casa de Campo front—was at the Palace Hotel, opposite the Prado, looking for Mikhail Koltsov. The Nationalists’ offensive along the Jarama, in particular the slaughter of the French troops who were a part of his brigade, had shaken Regler badly and he wanted to be rescued from his visions. Koltsov will distract me, he kept telling himself. And up to a point, Koltsov did. “I know all about it,” the Russian said to Regler reassuringly; even though the attack had been a surprise, Regler was already second-guessing himself, blaming himself for something he couldn’t have foreseen. But he shouldn’t. Koltsov paused, took off his glasses to polish them, and put them back on. “Without glasses everything looks black to me,” he remarked. “If they ever shoot me I’ll have to ask them not to take my glasses off first.” He laughed, a short sharp bark, and stood up. “I’m going to take you to a party.”

  They went to one of the private rooms in the hotel where a farewell fete was being given for an engineer about to go home to Moscow. The engineer, Gorkin, showed off the presents he was taking to his wife and children, toasts were drunk, and the head of the Russian delegation, whom Regler called Maximovich, gave a moving speech, wiping away tears at the end of it. Regler’s spirits lifted—what important work they were doing, and what a bond of comradeship it created! The next day he spoke of this to Koltsov, and was brought up short when Koltsov said, “Gorkin will be arrested when he reaches Odessa.”

  “How do you know?” Regler demanded, incredulous. “Is it something political?”

  “Yes,” Koltsov replied. “Why are you so surprised? Because of the farewell party? We all knew. That’s why we gave him the party. It’s why Maximovich came.” Seeing Regler’s expression, he continued, “The French give a man rum before leading him out to the guillotine. In these days we give him champagne.”

  * * *

  The Battle of Jarama lasted most of February, in part because of infighting between Generals Pozas and Miaja—“la vedette de Madrid”—over who was really in command. Both sides suffered heavy losses, with the International Brigades hit especially hard; more than half of their combatants, and most of their officers, were killed or—like the twenty-eight-year-old commander of the Abraham Lincoln Battalion, Robert Merriman—wounded. In Madrid, Ilsa Kulcsar learned with sorrow that two of her English friends, an archaeologist from Cambridge, and a promising young poet, Christopher St. John Sprigg, who wrote under the name Christopher Caudwell, had died in battle. They had all paid, Barea said, “a terrible price” to contain the Nationalists along the banks of the Jarama, to the east of the Valencia road; but they had done it—they and the Russian Chatos, the aircraft that had harried the German Junkers out of the sky, and the Russian tanks, the light-infantry T-26s.

  By the time Capa and Gerda arrived in Madrid in the third week in February the front had subsided into stalemate, and it was too late, as seemed to happen so often, to get any dramatic shots of the fighting. But they had no time for disappointment, for they’d scored a career double coup: each of them had contract offer
s from Ce Soir, a fledgling Parisian daily—Communist-run, politically left, but independent—that would be edited by the poet Louis Aragon. And although their primary allegiance would now be to Ce Soir, they were also free to sell photographs to other periodicals. With the prospect of an ever-widening demand for their work, they were talking about leaving Maria Eisner’s Alliance Photo agency and setting up their own studio, submitting directly to photo editors and avoiding having to pay a commission on their sales.

  In Madrid they found a room in the Hotel Florida, which was still being pummeled by Nationalists’ shells at irregular intervals; the spacious front rooms, which overlooked the Plaza de Callao and faced the incoming barrage, were now much less expensive than the dark back rooms whose only view was an alleyway. But the Florida was one of the few places in Madrid that still had abundant hot water for the long soaking baths Capa liked to take after a rough day; and at least one of the resident journalists, Sefton Delmer, held festive court there in the evenings, offering his guests bottles looted from the cellars of the Palacio Real, which he’d picked up in an Anarchist bar in the Puerta del Sol.

  Despite the daily bombardments that sent pedestrians scurrying for the shelter of overhanging buildings, some things seemed disconcertingly unaffected: shop windows still displayed furs and French perfume and beautiful handmade shoes, Lionel Barrymore was appearing in David Copperfield at the Genova movie palace in the Plaza de Callao, yellow trams whizzed about the streets. Gerda and Capa headed to the Telefónica to pick up Gerda’s new Ce Soir Madrid press pass; and almost incredibly, they happened to meet Capa’s boyhood friend Geza Korvin Karpathi. He and Capa had last seen each other during their days of bohemian poverty in Paris, when they’d perfected an ingenious tactic for borrowing money from better-off acquaintances: they’d position themselves on opposite sides of the street and if the mark crossed over to avoid meeting one of them, the other would be waiting on the other side. Now Karpathi was making a documentary film about a Canadian blood transfusion unit that was working with the Loyalist army, while Capa had become a journalistic sensation; so their meeting called for a celebration—at the very least lunch, or what passed for it, in the journalists’ unofficial canteen at the Hotel Gran Via across the street. The restaurant was in the Gran Via’s basement, and the entrance was heavily guarded; you couldn’t enter without a pass, and once there, correspondents and aid workers generally ate at the long table in the middle of the room, with visiting dignitaries and soldiers at smaller tables tucked into the alcoves. The menu seemed limited to beans, potatoes, and the occasional odoriferous fish, salami, or mysterious meat dish that was usually mule, donkey, or horsemeat; but there was wine, and whiskey, and you could buy contraband American cigarettes from one of the waiters for ten or fifteen pesetas a packet.