Mildred
Rackley
was
born in New Mexico in 1906. After graduating from the University of
Texas in 1930 she travelled to Europe to study painting. She settled
for a time in Germany but when Adolf
Hitler took power she moved to the Spanish island of Mallorca.
In 1935 Rackley returned
to America where she joined the American
Communist Party.
In 1936 she was recruited by the American Medical Bureau and later
that year she travelled to Spain
as assistant
to Dr. Edward Barsky. In January 1937 Barsky and Rackley organized
the first American hospital for the volunteers fighting
in the Spanish
Civil War.
On her return
to the United States she became editor of Flight,
the magazine of the League Against War and Fascism. During the Second
World War Rackley worked in a Californian shipyard where she was
an active union organiser.
Mildred
Rackley died
in 1992.
(1)
An
account of Mildred
Rackley's
experiences appeared in Women's Voices from the Spanish Civil War,
edited by Jim Fyrth and Sally Alexander (1991)
In the English Convalescent
Hospital, we tried the most interesting experiment at collectivisation
of the patients with the personnel in the work of developing the hospital.
A patient chooses a piece of work which he thinks needs being done,
consults the administration and gets full co-operation in realizing
his work. The patients take care of the swimming pool and bath house
and fire the boiler, Kuba repairs every watch, clock and machine in
the hospital, Michel organized and catalogued the entire storeroom,
Thompson organized the food stores, Wilson and Charlie Youngblood
clean the patio and the walks daily, Ruperte Iglesias has classes
for the illiterate Spanish patients and girls, Bart organized tremendous
'sings' in all languages, Ludwig Holl organized the material and built
five kilometers of telephone line giving the hospital proper communication.
The president of the popular front granted us a piece of land and
in the spring we will have a real garden. We are raising pigs, chickens
and rabbits, and have a small flock of sheep and milk goats.
It was a pleasure to work
in the English hospitals because none of us ever allowed ourselves
to forget that we were building the hospitals for the patients and
not for the personnel, and that we would never allow any sort of personal
or professional frictions to arise to disturb the well-being of the
hospital. It is not a romantic job to have the responsibility for
feeding, clothing and evacuating hundreds of patients with varying
degrees of serious wounds, and I was able to carry on only through
the wonderful cooperation I have always had in the English hospitals.
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