Dear Adam,
Have a smooth and enjoyable flight to the magic country of Spain! For our family, it is a very special place, what historians call a site of memory, even if we (me, your mother, my two sisters) did not experience directly the bloodily tragic Civil War. But our close relatives, your grandfather and grandmother, did. At 24, your grandfather lost his right arm in the battle on the river Ebro, the most ferocious during that ferocious war.
Your grandmother was only 21 when she left Romania to go to Spain to work as a nurse in the International Brigades hospital in Madrid, then in Catalonia.
Galea Burca, Sanda (Sara) Sauvard, Hermina Tismaneanu
Try to imagine their feelings, hopes, illusions, the sense of fraternity that linked people of many nations. Spain was betrayed, it is true. But those who fought there against Fascism deserve our respect. Not the Stalinist commissars or the NKVD agents, of course, but the romantics who went there to die in order to prevent the triumph of Fascism.
Try to imagine the battles in which one of your favorite writers, George Orwell, was involved. Read “Hotel Florida” to learn about another writer you admire, Ernest Hemingway, and his times as a reporter in Madrid and Barcelona…
Poze facute de marele fotojurnalist Robert Capa in timpul Razboiului Civil din Spania
As you know, I and Marius are working on a book about “Two Sisters in Dark Times”. We will be in Spain trying to reconstruct my mother’s itinerary (but this time from Spain to France). I have never been to Barcelona, but I have dreamed a lot about that city. I know you did too…
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