by Desconhecido
In fact, Hemingway is privy to many of the chilling details of Stalin’s “justice.” His friend Gustav Regler feeds him information about the dark side of the Soviets. The author even interviews an executioner, who admits that there are mistakes. Innocent people are sometimes killed.
Hemingway is a kind of humming paradox. While in Spain, on the front, he only values courage and loyalty to the cause. He can brook no doubt. On the surface he seems to listen to Joris Ivens, who is a die-hard communist and believes this fight is Soviet good versus fascist evil. Internally, though, Hemingway is registering all the misgivings, the betrayals that are taking place around him.
And this contradiction is exposed when Hemingway learns a terrible secret from his friend, the writer Josephine Herbst: the innocent Robles, a mild-mannered university professor, has been executed. It is Hemingway who delivers the tragic news to Dos Passos, who has by now figured out the fate of his friend. Dos Passos is devastated, soon hardened toward Hemingway and bitter about the whole cause of the Left, which is about to explode.
In this dramatic, painterly image, Chim depicts a 1938 revolutionary tribunal in Barcelona.
BARCELONA
On May 3, in Barcelona, George Orwell is strolling along La Rambla, the main walkway of the city, when he hears several rifle shots. “I turned round and saw some youths, with rifles in their hands and the red-and-black handkerchiefs of the anarchists round their throats, edging up a side street. . . . They were evidently exchanging shots with someone in a tall octagonal tower.”
So begins the standoff between the Communist Party and its former allies on the left. Ever since the war began, tension has been rising between the Communist Party and the other antifascists. The anarchists, socialists, and their allies see the civil war as a chance to remake society and create a real revolution for the worker. “The war and the revolution are inseparable,” Orwell believes. This is what Taro and Capa first photographed when they came to Spain, showing the transformed city of Barcelona and the farms in Aragon. But the Communist Party wants nothing of the kind. It will not stand for the rise of rival groups or the spread of utopian experiments. Even as communists and noncommunists fight Franco, they edge toward open war with each other.
The simmering conflict comes to a head in Barcelona. The anti-Soviet groups control a key building in the city: the Telefónica, or telephone exchange. In these early days of landlines, all phone calls are connected through a central spot run by live operators. Whoever holds the exchange can listen in on, connect, or disconnect all the phone calls in that area. The communists set out to capture the Telefónica by sending in an assault group.
The attack is a direct threat to any who are not loyal Communist Party members. Orwell holes up with other members of the anti-Soviet POUM on the roof of the Poliorama, a live theater and movie house that boasts two domes. From there, they can peer down at their former allies turned enemies, who are holed up in the Café Moka and have drawn down the metal grates and made a barricade of chairs and tables.
The standoff lasts for days. Night after night, Orwell is on watch at the top of the Poliorama—rifle across his knees, hungry, exhausted, disgusted by the clash between two parties on the left. “I used to sit on the roof marveling at the folly of it all,” he writes. “From the little windows in the observatory you could see for miles around—vista after vista of tall slender buildings, glass domes, and fantastic curly roofs with brilliant green and copper tiles; over to eastward the glittering pale blue sea—the first glimpse of the sea that I had had since coming to Spain. And the whole huge town of a million people was locked in a sort of violent inertia, a nightmare of noise without movement.”
But even nightmares end, and the Communist Party, backed by the Soviets, takes the telephone exchange. Soon after, the Communist Party begins an active campaign to discredit the POUM as betrayers of the larger loyalist cause, claiming that they were secretly allied with the fascists. Francisco Largo Caballero, who heads the government in Valencia, is forced to resign, to be replaced by Juan Negrín, who is more clearly under the sway of the communists.
The nasty infighting drains international enthusiasm for fighting fascism in Spain and will splinter the loyalist Left.
This composite image of the sheared buildings and rubble in Madrid could just as well be seen as a symbol of the fractures in the coalition running the Republic.
PARIS
As enjoyable as it is to hobnob with Hemingway and other luminaries, Capa and Taro know that the real story is in the Basque region, where Franco is starting to turn his attention. Chim has been in the area, photographing an important story: the Basque Catholic Church support of the Republic. In the rest of the country, Franco is closely allied with the Catholic Church. Indeed, many Catholics throughout the world see the conflict in Spain as being between the traditional faithful and atheist radicals. A proud people with a language of their own, the Basques also possess some of the richest mineral resources in the country. The Basques are fiercely independent, resistant to outside rule, and Chim, through his photographs, is eager to show that the Basques and their churches are not behind Franco’s cause. He remains in the area for a long time, traveling among small towns and larger cities.
Since Capa needs papers to travel to Bilbao, the heart of the Basque area, and both he and Taro must pitch the assignments they want to cover, they return to Paris in late April, just before May Day. Paris means a clean bed in the new studio and warm croissants—no longer stolen from a café basket. It means, Regler writes, “long French loaves, mounds of butter, sausages and hams, creamy rounds of Brie, the piles of eggs that were no longer in danger of being shattered by a bomb.”
Most of all Paris brings a sense of arrival—for both of them. Throughout April, almost daily, Taro’s photos have appeared in the pages of Ce Soir—sometimes without a name, or alongside Capa’s, but often listed as just hers. Her photos of the New People’s Army are on the cover of Regards with the bold headline SPAIN FORGES A VICTORY. She too is carving out a reputation; she too is becoming famous.
Yet Spain and the threat of fascism are never far from their minds. Taro’s family, back in Germany, has been forced to move into a ghetto, where their house is marked Juden (Jewish).
On the morning of April 27, terrible news comes from Spain: the Basque region that Chim so painstakingly covered was attacked—in the most gruesome and deadly fashion.
The day before, in the late afternoon, a German plane dropped six heavy bombs on the small town of Guernica, in the north of Spain. Guernica is considered a sacred city, known for an oak tree that symbolizes freedom for the Basque people. Just as people began to emerge to help the wounded, a squadron of planes appeared and let loose heavier bombs. Residents ran, only to be cut down by machine-gun fire. Like black crows descending from the sky, dive-bombing German attack planes—Junkers—rained down explosives that set off raging fires. Guernica is virtually incinerated to rubble and ash. Over sixteen hundred people are killed while others flee to get out of the way of the advancing rebel troops. The world has never before seen a town ravaged like this from the air.
A few days later the May Day marches in Paris attract over one million people who throng the Place de la République, many carrying banners protesting the carnage in Guernica. Capa and Taro are there, too, he once again crouching, shooting the crowds. The couple pauses at a flower seller, where Taro picks out a bouquet of lilies of the valley and fastens one white flower to her lapel before moving on. In the photo Capa takes of Taro, her spirit seems cheerful and light, far away from the deprivations she’s witnessed these past weeks.
This Belgian socialist magazine that had shown the hopeful alliance of the Popular Front also depicts the devastation brought about by the Nazi Condor Legion’s assault on the holy city of Guernica. The purpose of the attack was to spread terror in order to punish the Basques and break their will.
The moment is fleeting. Within days, each will leave for Spain on separate assignments. War is
calling once more.
He is off to Bilbao, she to Valencia.
Residents of Bilbao scan the sky, sensing bombers about to attack. This and the next five images were taken by Capa in May 1937.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
COURAGE
MAY 1937
THE PLANE’S ENGINES ARE HUMMING, its propellers ready to spin. On the Bilbao airport tarmac, as if this were a scene in a spy movie, a dark-haired photographer in a rumpled coat hands a pouch to the pilot, whispering urgently. Journalist Jay Allen watches. Only later does he realize that the photographer is Robert Capa. Already Capa and Taro are legendary to him—their “very simple, moving photographs” in magazines show “the true face of Spain.”
Allen and Capa are here to cover the fighting around Bilbao. Guernica was just a beginning. Franco is out to capture the valuable Basque region, which is rich in ore and minerals. Capa plans to battle back by taking photographs. He records a town turned into an inferno when its gas depot is bombed. Ahead of the attack on Bilbao, twenty-two thousand children are evacuated onto huge freighters. Capa portrays the remarkable grace of soldiers and officials as they lead young people up the gangplanks and assist well-dressed women who clutch their leather suitcases. Once again it is the impact on civilians that he so beautifully and tragically captures—women and children sitting on sandbags, shading themselves with folded-newspaper hats. They are staying near an air raid shelter so they do not have to run far when the warning sounds.
In Bilbao, Allen sees Capa in action and understands, on a deeper level, how the photographer captures those powerful images. When air raid sirens let out their four short shrieks signaling planes, Capa does not run. He stays put, clicking away. “We found ourselves together in a panic . . . and I saw him calmly get the faces until the street was empty of all save a gaurdia [policeman] with a rifle, who drove us into refuge. I saw him at the front, grave eyes, expressionless to agony.”
Ordinary life carries on during wartime: These people use newspapers for shade while waiting outside an air raid shelter.
Bombed gas tanks become an inferno.
What spurs Capa to such bravery? How is he able to plunge into the scene and keep shooting even as Junkers are about to tear across the sky? Later in life, Capa will say, “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” Usually this is taken to mean that to be a good war photographer, you must be a daredevil, a risk taker, always heading toward danger. Certainly Capa’s personality is suited to war photography: he is impulsive and restless, a man of action.
Yet there is another way to look at Capa’s courage. As his friend Regler would say, “He was truly brave because he always had to fight his own cowardice. Capa constantly joked about his fear, which was very real to him, and somehow humorous.” To Regler, Capa’s toughness in Spain was a “magnificent act.” Underneath, Capa was “really a very soft man . . . a small beautiful boy whom everybody loved.”
Capa himself would describe the “incompatibility of being a reporter and hanging on to a tender soul at the same time.”
To get close as a photographer is both to put on the armor of bravery and to leave yourself open to feel, to connect, with whomever or whatever you see. A soldier is trained to fight fear to complete his mission and to protect his buddies. A war photographer must fight fear to be a sensitive witness, to bring to the world the human story in front of the lens. The photographer’s challenge is to find that balance between the “magnificent act” of bravery and the “softness” within—the tender part of the self that feels urgently for the people being photographed. Getting close is not just about the action shot—it is about connecting emotionally, finding the heart of a devastating and violent scene. That is the calling of the committed photographer.
Bilbao residents run as the air raid sirens go off.
Once Capa is done shooting in Bilbao, he quickly heads back to Paris. While there, he ends his contract with Ce Soir. The restless photographer who needs to find his own stories is chafing as a Ce Soir employee. He wants to be a free agent. He and his editors make an agreement that Ce Soir will have the first look at his work.
Then Capa walks into the Paris offices of Henry Luce’s Time Inc., which produces The March of Time documentary newsreel series. For years Capa has been fantasizing about making movies. During his penniless days he would often write his family about becoming a filmmaker. “I want to make movies more than anything else,” he announced back then. Now he has the reputation to ask for what he wants. Capa manages to charm the Time-Life editor into loaning him an Eyemo movie camera—even though he’s inexperienced with one. Better yet, he is told to produce film footage for the documentaries.
A soldier pauses near Mount Sollube.
Then he’s on the first plane he can get back to Spain.
For Capa, life is very clear: There is war. There are pictures. And there is Taro.
BODIES. DEAD BODIES. This is what Taro sees in Valencia. She cannot stop photographing the fallen: terrible phantoms from a nightmare. Cold, pale corpses blotched with dried wounds are laid out on marble slabs, on stretchers, and on the checkered tile floor.
She captures the faces of those who are waiting to see the dead. There they are, hollow-eyed, desperate, pressed against the bars of the gate outside the morgue.
Taro’s image of Capa with the Eyemo movie camera. Only a few scraps of his footage have been found.
Valencia is the temporary seat of the government, a haven where many have gone to escape the relentless standoffs and battles elsewhere in Spain. Once a city of four hundred thousand, it has swollen to more than a million. The American journalist Virginia Cowles writes that “people poured through the streets, crowded the squares, clustered in the doorways, thronged the beaches, and flowed endlessly through the markets, to the shops and cafés. Everything was noise and confusion.”
Until now, the war has not seemed quite real in Valencia; it was a faraway problem for the people trapped in Madrid. Cowles watched the young men who “seemed to have nothing better to do than stand in the sunshine picking their teeth.” Then on May 15, fascist planes flew in from the sea and hammered the port city with bombs. The sense of peace and calm was shattered.
This is Taro’s first time living through an attack on a city and photographing the gruesome, immediate effects. Being under fire is a new kind of baptism into her profession, and it toughens her.
Taro shows the concern on the faces of families waiting grimly outside the morgue in Valencia.
Threading through the stunned crowds, Taro makes her way inside the morgue and then onward to a hospital, where she photographs the wounded. After dispatching her photos, she sends a telegram to Capa, who has not yet left Paris: BRING MOVIE FLOOD LAMPS AND REFLECTOR. INDISPENSABLE. COFFEE CHOCOLATE TOO.
Another Taro image from the same sequence is used as a cover photo.
Her request for coffee and chocolate comes with a nice flourish—she says “too” in Spanish, as también, not in French. The word is a charming way to remind him of their connection to Spain, and probably the easy way they move in and out of languages, mixing German and French with bits of Spanish. Oh please, she seems to say, give me a taste of Paris here in Spain, where coffee and chocolate are so hard to find.
The telegram Taro sent to Capa from Valencia. The word stop was used in telegrams to mark breaks; it was not part of her message.
By the time Capa and Taro are reunited, the Bilbao that Capa recently left is tottering. Hoping to draw Franco’s troops away from Bilbao, the loyalists decide to launch two new offensives. One will be in Huesca, on the Aragon front, where Capa and Taro went when they first came to Spain. Fresh troops, now under the organized and disciplined People’s Army that Taro photographed earlier, have been sent up there from Catalonia. The other offensive is toward Segovia, about forty miles north of Madrid. It is being led by a Polish commander who goes by the name General Walter. Taro, who befriended Walter back in Madrid, now asks him if she and Capa can join
his unit as they head up to the mountains in the Navacerrada pass.
The general, apparently charmed by the young woman, agrees.
All of the photos and negatives in this chapter were shot by Taro in late May and early June 1937. In this image, soldiers rest in the forest.
CHAPTER TWELVE
COMRADES IN THE FOREST
LATE MAY–JUNE 1937,
SEGOVIA FRONT
THE NAVACERRADA PASS must feel like a cocoon of quiet. In the thickly forested hills, light filters through the pine trees as the soldiers break camp and prepare for the battle ahead. The men saw logs, build platforms, dig out shelters camouflaged with leaves and branches, unspool telephone wire to connect to the lookouts. Their meals are served out of iron skillets on a rough stove; they drink water from the cold, clear streams. Everyone sleeps outside, on ground strewn with pine needles, the sky glittering with stars. Though it is nearly summer, the night air is nippy and cool because they are six thousand miles above sea level.
War brings friendship and alliances; it is stilled time, where you belong solely to a unit—your fellow soldiers become family. Nothing else exists but this: your next task, your next meal, the laughs shared over a wood table. You get up for more work until the summer light dwindles over the shoulder of the mountain. Some-times you have enough time to write a letter to a loved one, then tuck it away, hoping it will somehow reach home. You wake up at dawn, dread turning like a rusty screw in your stomach. The time for fighting approaches.