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

by Vaill, Amanda

  To which Castro confidently responded: “Stalin never tricks anyone, at least not Communists.”

  * * *

  In the year since he had been recalled from Spain, Mikhail Koltsov had publicly thrown himself into an embrace of every official position of the Communist Party in an effort to keep the noose he feared was waiting for him away from his neck. He’d even denounced Nikolai Bukharin, Ilya Ehrenburg’s friend and Stalin’s former staunch ally against Trotsky, who’d been tried for treason the previous spring; and he’d toed the Party line by insisting that Andrés Nin and the POUM had been in league with Franco. But he knew he was protesting too much. “I think I’m going out of my mind,” he told his brother, the cartoonist Boris Efimov. “Surely, as a member of the editorial board of Pravda, a well-known journalist, a parliamentary deputy, I should be able to explain to others the meaning of what is going on, the reason for so many denunciations and arrests. But … I know nothing, understand nothing.”

  Certainly he didn’t know why he hadn’t been included in the just-concluded meetings between Stalin, Voroshilov, and Molotov and his own old friend from Spain, Ignacio Hidalgo de Cisneros, as he told Hidalgo himself when they had dinner on December 9. He wondered what fate held in store for an antifascist like himself in a Russia where communication channels were being opened to Nazi Germany. And he was worried that only the day before, Nikolai Yezhov, whom he’d regarded as a protector, had been replaced as people’s commissar and NKVD overlord by Lavrenti Beria.

  On the other hand, he was riding an extraordinary crest of success and popularity: in the summer he’d been elected to the Supreme Soviet, and the serialization of his Spanish diary in Novyi Mir had been the talk of Moscow. Stalin himself had called him into his box at the Bolshoi to congratulate him on his achievement, and there was no talk of whether or not Koltsov might be contemplating suicide, as had been suggested in their meeting in December of ’36. In fact, the general secretary had made an extraordinary and complimentary request: he had just completed a history of the Bolshevik Party, he said, and he would be honored if Comrade Koltsov would consent to introduce it with a lecture at the Writers’ Union in December.

  The date fixed for the lecture was December 12; and two days before that Koltsov was given another honor that filled his cup almost to overflowing: he was made a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. Late on the afternoon of the twelfth, in the spacious mansion in Bolshaya Nikitskaya that Tolstoy had used as the model for the Rostovs’ house in War and Peace, he presented Stalin’s party history to an enthusiastic audience of Writers Union members and their guests. At the end of the evening he went to his office at Pravda to take care of a few odds and ends; that’s where he was when the black van, which Muscovites called a voronka—a crow—pulled up at the curb and the NKVD agents came for him. At the Lubyanka, where he was tortured and interrogated over a period of fourteen months, they took his glasses away. Without glasses everything looks black to me, he’d said to Gustav Regler in Madrid: If they ever shoot me I’ll have to ask them not to take my glasses off first.

  He didn’t get the chance. On February 1, 1940, after a twenty-minute trial, he was convicted of espionage and treason—just one more of the Russian advisors to Spain, among them the generals Vladimir Gorev and Emilio Kléber and Ambassador Marcel Rosenberg, who needed to be liquidated now that Stalin had changed his mind about what game he was playing.

  January 1939: New York

  Claiming business in New York, where he had to discuss revisions to The Fifth Column with its producer, the Theatre Guild, Hemingway escaped from Christmas in Key West as soon as he decently could. Or sooner—he and Pauline could not keep from quarreling. Nor could he keep rancor out of his relations with Benjamin F. Glaser, the screenwriter the Theatre Guild had hired to adapt the not-yet-ready-for-Broadway Fifth Column for stage production. Glaser’s contract forbade him from making any adverse criticisms of the Spanish government or the Communist Party, and required him to get the author’s approval for any changes; but even so Hemingway complained to his mother-in-law that “the Jews” had so cheapened what he’d originally written that “it should be called the 4.95 Column marked down from 5.” He insisted on writing new material himself to replace what Glaser had done, and although Glaser and the Theatre Guild accepted his revisions, Hemingway was by now so disgusted with the whole process that he was telling everyone he should have written the damned thing as a novel.

  Even Martha’s arrival from St. Louis, where she’d spent Christmas with her mother, failed to cheer him sufficiently; although he proudly (and recklessly) took her with him, silver fox and all, to a showing of The Spanish Earth with his teenage son Jack, on holiday from his boarding school. Afterward they went to the Stork Club, where Jack gaped at the glamorous young woman and thrilled to the four-letter words that peppered her vocabulary, without ever figuring out how his “old” father knew such a creature.

  But Hemingway’s inchoate anger about what had gone wrong in Spain, or gone wrong with Spain; his longing for Martha and guilt about Pauline; his hatred of critics who had insufficiently valued his work, and armchair pantywaists like Edmund Wilson or John Dos Passos who took issue with his politics—all these things churned in him. And on another evening at the Stork Club he was sitting drinking with the magazine writer Quentin Reynolds when a complete stranger who was himself much the worse for drink made a show of recognizing him: Look, there’s Hemingway, the big writer. The stranger came over to the table, thrust out his hand, and started rubbing Hemingway’s face. “Tough, eh?” he muttered. Seeing Hemingway’s look, Reynolds warned his friend, “Give him a poke, but don’t hit him too hard.” Hemingway was in no mood to listen. Standing up, he raised his fists and clipped the stranger on the chin. The man went down like a felled tree.

  January 1939: Paris

  The winter rains had descended on Paris: every day the same gray clouds mantling the gray buildings, the mushrooming black umbrellas along the boulevards, the steady drumming of raindrops against the windows, the hiss of tires on wet pavement. At least, thought Barea, their borrowed flat had central heating, and he and Ilsa had enough translation work to keep them from starving. And when they could spare time from that he was able, at last, to finish a draft of his new book, the story of his own life, and that of his family and his city—the city that was still holding fast against Franco even as Catalonia crumbled before the Nationalist armies. The memoir ended on the afternoon he’d quit his job at the bank in Madrid, the same day the Great War broke out; and now it seemed as if another great war was about to begin. Looking at the pile of paper that was the finished manuscript, Barea felt suddenly deflated. He’d struggled to find the right voice for his story, the voice of Lavapiés and hard Castile, but it didn’t sound like any book he had ever come across. Who would want to publish it? Who would want to read it?

  Certainly the literary world of Paris didn’t seem ready to welcome him: the few bookish gatherings a friend had taken him to had depressed him by their cliquishness and preciosity. And when he got no answer from the publisher he sent it to he was sure the book, like so much else in his life, was another dead end.

  Then, miraculously, the Spanish reader from the publishing house paid him a visit, an older man, with old-fashioned taste, who told him that although he’d been puzzled, even offended by Barea’s writing—so brutal—he’d recommended that the house publish it, because it had enormous power. Even though the publisher never followed up on its reader’s advice, Barea was perversely encouraged by the man’s visit: he felt as if the voice he’d worked so hard to find had spoken to someone. Miraculously, he had become what he had always dreamed of being: he was a writer at last.

  But he and Ilsa couldn’t enjoy the encouragement for long. Generosity was their downfall: they allowed a poor young émigré couple, Poles, to stay with them for one night when the couple’s pipes had frozen and they were without heat or water. Suddenly the building manager had reported them to the police—they
weren’t permitted to have guests overnight, particularly guests who were foreigners. They’d have to get permission from the Préfecture for that.

  And when they went to extend their own residence permits at the Préfecture there was more trouble: Were they refugees? No, they said. Well, said the official behind the grille, the Spanish government, which had issued their passports, was about to fall—they’d be refugees then, right enough. Grudgingly, he gave them new papers, for now. But they realized something they’d been trying to ignore ever since Munich: Paris was no safe haven for them. They would have to try and get away again—across the Channel, if they could, to England.

  January 1939: Barcelona

  By New Year’s Day, 1939, Barcelona—already battered by bombs and desperate for food—was choked by the presence of tens of thousands of refugees from all over Spain, all of them fleeing the quick death of bombardments or the slower death of reprisals in what seemed ever likelier to be a Nationalist victory. The rebels had files on two million Loyalists, they boasted, and every one of them was a marked man. “There will be no mediation,” Generalísimo Francisco Franco told the vice president of the American United Press syndicate, “because criminals and their victims cannot live together.”

  On January 3, the insurgent general Juan Yagüe’s troops crossed the Ebro, and over the next few days the Nationalists continued to advance into Catalonia, while Republican attempts to counterattack in the south, near Peñarroya, and in the west, in Extremadura, were stalled or beaten back. The only thing holding the war effort together was the population’s terror over what would happen to them if they didn’t hang on.

  Although he still hadn’t recovered from the dysentery and depression that had plagued him since China and had driven him back to Paris in December, Capa came back to Barcelona just as the Republic’s fortunes seemed to be hitting their lowest ebb. He had assignments from Match and Picture Post as well as Life, and safe-conducts and passes from the Spanish ministries of state and defense; but he never made it into action. The closest he came was a trip with André Malraux to photograph some of Líster’s soldiers at the front on a rare day of calm; but his pictures have the look of nineteenth-century history painting, not twentieth-century war photography. Líster and his men, capes flung dashingly over their shoulders, are grouped closely together (sometimes with the black-leather-clad Malraux, looking like a solemn owl, in attendance) in front of a sweeping landscape with a low horizon line and a bright sky. In some they are peering at a newspaper—a copy of España Republicana with General Miaja on the front page—in others looking at what might be mail, or fighting orders, or maps. The images were elegant, sharp, striking, and would make good illustrations of the Republic’s strength and resilience for articles that echoed the view of Barea’s (and Connie de la Mora’s) old boss, Álvarez de Vayo, who was telling Jimmy Sheean, in Paris, “Things are not so bad as the papers say. Barcelona will resist. Remember Madrid.”

  A more accurate portrait of what was going on in Barcelona could be seen in the pictures Capa took a few days later at a mobilization center, where the latest, last-resort wave of conscripts, citizens of both sexes between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five, was being processed. Capa’s camera sought out the anxious, lined faces, the patched, worn clothes, the lingering kisses left on children’s heads, the despairing laughter of a wife whose husband tries on his newly issued helmet for her—how do I look?—before saying goodbye, probably forever. Even in photographs of little boys exultantly clambering over the wreckage of a Heinkel bomber displayed on the Ramblas, his lens found the tight, anxious faces of their parents on the edges of the crowd, wondering if the next Heinkel would be the one that got them—or in the case of a man on crutches, with one leg missing, if this was the plane that had got him.

  By the morning of January 14, the Nationalist army was coiled outside Tarragona, sixty miles southwest of Barcelona on the coast; refugees were pouring north on the coast road, and Capa went down to chronicle their flight. It was a bright warm day, the sort that tricks you into thinking spring might be coming sooner than you thought—perfect bombing weather, Martha Gellhorn would have called it if she’d been there. The refugees walked along the roads, carrying their possessions in valises, if they had them, or bundles, if they hadn’t, or carts, if they’d been able to find one; some wore rough working people’s clothes, headscarves, caps, overalls or bunchy skirts, others had good winter coats and silk scarves around their necks. “I have seen hundreds of thousands flee thus, in two countries, Spain and China,” Capa would write. “And I am afraid to think that hundreds of thousands of others who are yet living in undisturbed peace in other countries will one day meet with the same fate.”

  As he was taking his pictures, a flight of Savoia-Marchettis wheeled in from the sea with the sun glinting off their silver wings and began strafing the ground with machine-gun fire. As they passed over the road they opened fire on the line of people straggling along it, including two couples helping their mule team by pushing a covered wagon up a slight incline. Seconds later the wagon had been shot to pieces, its pathetic contents strewn on the road; one of the women and both of the men who had been pushing it lay in the mud; the two mules were dead in their harness; and the remaining woman knelt on the ground, keening, reaching out for the family dog, who lay between the wheels of the cart. But he was dead, too.

  Back in Barcelona, things weren’t much better. If those who were fleeing were at least safe, for the moment, they were just as despairing, cloaked and huddled with their belongings on the pavement in front of refugee centers, posed as if they were figures in some grim altarpiece: young couples, old women, beautiful dark-eyed children. Capa felt his heart aching: “it is not always easy,” he wrote, “to stand aside and be able to do nothing but record the sufferings around one.”

  On January 22, with the dust from the enemy’s shells already visible behind the crest of Montjuic to the south, Prime Minister Negrín gave the order for the government to abandon Barcelona and move to Gerona, fifty-two miles north. Officials began burning documents by the drawerful—so many that minor fires broke out all over the city, their smoke mingling with that from the incessant air raids that were reducing the port area to rubble. Military convoys were pulling out, and civilians started to stream out of the city, in cars or trucks or buses if they were lucky, or on foot if they weren’t. The next night, and the one after that, Herbert Matthews slept in his Minerva to prevent anyone from stealing it; he would need it when the time came to leave, but for now he and Capa, and a handful of other reporters, were holding out.

  Late on the evening of January 25, word came that the Nationalist vanguard had crossed the Llobregat River and was on the slopes of Monte Tibidabo, on the city’s western rim. Matthews, Capa, and a British journalist, the Daily Express’s O’Dowd Gallagher, went to the Censura to send their last stories. They found it a spectral place, lit only by candlelight (the power was out) and largely deserted, since Constancia de la Mora and her senior staff had left days ago for the French border. Matthews telephoned his last dispatch from Barcelona, in which he tried to sound a positive note (“While there is life, there is hope”), but Capa’s photographs of the Censura, with its empty desks and flickering candles, told a different story.

  After midnight the journalists went back to the Majestic through the shuttered, empty streets. It had turned cold and blustery, and propaganda leaflets and discarded identity cards skittered about in the wind. At the hotel Matthews closed up his luggage and gave tips and the last of his food supplies to the tearful chambermaids; then he, Capa, Gallagher, and another British correspondent, William Forrest, got into the Minerva and set off along the coast road for the north. Traffic was heavy. In addition to cars and trucks there were bedraggled columns of soldiers and the tragic stream of refugees trudging along the margins of the pavement. Soon after sunrise they reached Caldetas, on the coast, where American nationals were waiting to be evacuated on the U.S. cruiser Omaha. Stopping for breakfas
t at the American consulate, the Minerva’s passengers learned that the editors of Life, concerned because Capa had no passport, had petitioned the U.S. government to allow him to be taken out of Spain on the Omaha as well. But Capa would have none of it. He needed to document what was happening to the refugees trying to get to the border, and he’d take his chances with Matthews and the others.

  Back to the road, then, with Matthews peering through his glasses at the traffic, finding detours and shortcuts, and Capa taking pictures as if the camera were a shield against his feelings. How else could you not weep to see the little boy, his face set in a frown of concentration, his sockless bare legs exposed beneath the hem of his best wool coat, or the mother and her children sitting beside the mule cart they had to empty because the mule couldn’t carry both them and their possessions?

  When the Minerva reached Figueras, sixteen miles from the border, late in the afternoon, the town was in chaos. The government had already decided to abandon Gerona, and now government officials as well as foreign correspondents and a flood of refugees without passports were all milling about in the village with nowhere to go and nowhere to stay. There was an improvised press room in the back of a flat the Propaganda Ministry had requisitioned, though; in it Matthews, Capa, and Forrest found a group of censorship officials and correspondents, among them Jimmy Sheean, who had just arrived from Paris, where he and Dinah had gone the day after Bola’s party in November. Sheean was in a state of growing despair. He’d been to see Prime Minister Negrín, who along with most of his government had fled to Figueras: Why hadn’t they gone back to Madrid to make a stand? Sheean wondered. Why hadn’t Negrín, and Del Vayo and the others, seen how dire the Republic’s position was before now? Had they somehow confused confidence and courage with propaganda? But there were no answers to these questions.