A well-kept secret

Monthly Review, Sept, 2004 by Annette T. Rubinstein

Judith Newman, director and producer, Into the Fire: American Women in the Spanish Civil War (New York: Exemplary Films, 2002), 58 minutes.

In 1936 I was part of a small delegation to Washington attempting unsuccessfully to persuade our congressmen to lift the embargo on loyalist Spain. We remained actively involved in support of the Spanish Republic and its veteran defenders for many years after the fall of Madrid, eagerly following whatever news we could find. Yet until yesterday I knew nothing of the 60 young American women who volunteered at the outbreak of war and served until they were forced to leave two years later.

Yesterday I saw a one-hour documentary, Into the Fire, produced and directed by investigative journalist Judith Newman and shown on public television last year. It tells us enough of this story to make us want much, much more.

Newman has found and interviewed 16 of these nurses and combined current interviews with film clips of the war to create a riveting short story. She features reports by four of the women, still as passionately engaged today as they were over half a century ago--a laboratory technician, Celia Greenspan, who says she had never before done more nursing than applying a Band-Aid, and three experienced nurses--Ruth Davidow, Salaria Kea, and Esther Silverstein.

In 1936, Kea had answered a Red Cross call for volunteers to work in flood-devastated Ohio, only to be turned away because "the color of my skin would make more trouble than I'd be worth to them." Back in Harlem she read news stories of "the way Germany was treating the Jews ... it was like the Ku Klux Klan" and was infuriated by news of Hitler's bombing Spanish civilians. On March 27, 1937, she sailed on the SS Paris with a group of 12 other nurses and doctors. The other nurses had already left in slightly larger parties.

Together with a team of doctors--led by prominent surgeon Edward K. Barsky--whom they cannot praise too highly, these four women and their colleagues worked long hours, sometimes from dawn far into the following day. They stoically report the desperate shortage of the most elementary supplies--bandages and hot water--and describe head or chest operations lit by flashlight when electricity failed.

The film also introduces four better-known women, the writers Virginia Cowles, Martha Gellhorn, Josephine Herbst, and Dorothy Parker. Gellhorn, an old friend of Eleanor Roosevelt's, wrote her begging for help. We hear several of Eleanor's replies urging her to "write Spain out of your system" and remarking "strange how easily our pockets affect our feeling for democracy." Eleanor does not seem unduly concerned, but she does arrange a showing at the White House of For Whom the Bell Tolls, based on the Spanish Civil War novel by Gellhorn's then husband, Ernest Hemingway.

Interwoven with all these are contemporary shots of bombing, in Guernica, Brunette, and Madrid, and of mothers so desperate for food that they remain on queues in squares where bombs are falling. One heartbreaking picture I do not remember seeing earlier is of a pathetic, gallant fleet of flimsy First World War airplanes coming out to do battle with a squadron of state-of-the-art German fighters that outnumbered them five-to-one.

Although, as Silverstein says, "Most of us thought we would never return," and although many of the nurses were seriously wounded, there were, miraculously, no fatalities in the nursing corps. Davidow speaks of their repatriation in 1938 saying, "It was a blurry teary day for me. I felt guilty. I had left all those people at the front. I didn't know what was gonna happen to them and I felt like a traitor."

Both of these, Kea, and many others, continued speaking at mass meetings and on street corners, trying futilely for a last minute rescue. Many of them, with Dorothy Parker, worked for years after the fall of Madrid to raise funds for the Spanish Children's Relief and a "Rescue Ship" to take the veterans interned in French camps to asylum in Mexico.

For those of us who were there this documentary will be a bitter bracing reminder of a tragedy and its heroes. For the many more born later it will reveal a history our history books deliberately forget.

Annette T. Rubinstein is an editor of Science and Society, the author of American Literature: Root and Flower, and The Great Tradition in English Literature, both distributed by Monthly Review Press.

Into the Fire is being shown this fall on public television and can be obtained through the Filmakers Library, www.filmakers.com (212-808-4980).