Valencia
is a province located in eastern Spain.
The city of
Valencia had a population of 320,000 in 1931. This made it the third
largest city in Spain.
On the outbreak of the
Spanish Civil War members of the National
Confederation of Trabajo (CNT), the Federación
Anarquista Ibérica (FAI), the Worker's
Party (POUM), the Union General de Trabajadores
(UGT), the Socialist Party and the Communist
Party (PCE) made sure that the city remained loyal to the Popular
Front government.
Diego
Martinez Barrio, leader of the Republican
Union Party, established an administration that governed five
provinces from the city of Valencia. However, the UGT remained the
most dominant organization in the city.
In November 1936 the Popular
Front government decided to leave Madrid
and move to Valencia. The new Republican capital now became a major
target of General Francisco
Franco and his
Nationalist
Army.
In July 1938 the Nationalists
began their campaign to capture Valencia. The resistance put up by
the International Brigades at Ebro
temporarily saved Valencia from capture. On 12th March, 1939, Juan
Negrin and
his government left the city and it eventually fell on 30th March.
(1)
Ilya
Ehrenburg, letter
sent to Marcel Rosenberg (17th September,
1936)
In Valencia our party
is working well, and the influence of the UGT is growing. But the
CNT has free rein there. The governor takes their side completely.
This is what happened when I was there: sixty anarchists with two
machine-guns turned up from the front, as their commander had been
killed. In Valencia they burned the archives and then wanted to break
into the prison to free the criminals. The censor (this is under Lopez,
the leader of the CNT) prohibited our newspaper from reporting about
any of this outrage, and in the CNT paper
there was a note that the "free masses destroyed the law archives
as part of the accursed
past."
(2)
Arthur
Koestler, Dialogue
With Death (1942)
The train
to Valencia was crowded out. Every compartment contained four times
as many Militiamen, sitting, lying down
or standing, as it was meant to hold. A kindly railway official installed
us in a first class carriage and locked the door from the outside
so that we should not be disturbed. 'Scarcely had the train started
when four Anarchist Militiamen in the corridor began to hammer at
the glass door of our compartment. We tried to open it, but could
not; we were trapped in our cage. The guard who had the key had completely
vanished. We were unable to make ourselves understood through the
locked door owing to the noise of the train, and the Militiamen thought
that it was out of sheer ill-will that we were not
opening it. Forrest and I could not help grinning, which further enraged
the Militiamen, and the situation became more dramatic from minute
to minute. Half the coach collected outside the glass door to gaze
at the two obviously Fascist agents. At length the guard came and
unlocked the door and explained the situation, and then ensued a perfect
orgy of fraternising and eating, and a dreadful hullabaloo of pushing
and shouting and singing.
By dawn the train was
six hours behind time. It was going so slowly that the Militiamen
jumped from the footboards,
picked handfuls of oranges from the trees that grew on the edge of
the embankment and clambered back again into the
carriage amidst general applause. This form of amusement continued
until about midday.
Valencia too disported
itself in the brilliant January sunshine with one weeping and one
smiling eye. There was a shortage of paper; some of the newspapers
were cut down to four pages, three full of the Civil War, the fourth
of football
championships, bullfights, theatre and film notices. Two days before
our arrival a decree had been issued ordering the famous Valencia
cabarets to close at nine o'clock in the evening "in view of
the gravity of the situation". Of course they all continued
to keep open until one o'clock in the morning, with one
exception, and that one adhered strictly to the letter of the
law. The owner was later unmasked as a rebel supporter and
his cabaret was closed down.
(3)
Dorothy
Parker, broadcast,
Madrid Radio (October
1937)
In Valencia, last Sunday
morning, a pretty, bright Sunday morning, five German bombers came
over and bombed the quarter down by the port. It is a poor quarter,
the place where the men who work on the docks live, and it is, like
all poor quarters, congested. After the planes had dropped their bombs,
there wasn't much left of the places where so many families had been
living. There was an old, old, man who went up to everyone he saw
and asked, please had they seen his wife, please would they tell him
where his wife was. There were two little girls who saw their father
killed in front of them, and were trying to get past the guards, back
to the still crumbling, crashing houses to find their mother. There
was a great pile of rubble, and on the top of it a broken doll and
a dead kitten. It was a good job to get those. They were ruthless
enemies to fascism.
It makes you sick to think
of it. That these people who pulled themselves up from centuries of
oppression and exploitation cannot go on to a decent living, to peace
and progress and civilization, without the murder of their children
and the blocking of their way because two men - two men - want more
power. It is incredible, it is fantastic, it is absolutely beyond
all belief except that it is true.
(4)
Edward
Knoblaugh,
Correspondent in Spain (1937)
By day Valencia was even more gay than by night.
Streets were filled with uniformed men and pretty girls. Automobiles
loaded with pleasure-bound militiamen roared through narrow thoroughfares.
Street hawkers shouted their wares. Blind musicians, most of whom
I recognized as having come from Madrid, now played their accordions,
hurdy-gurdies and violins along Valencia's streets.
Stores were jammed. One
had to wait for a seat in a cafe. Restaurants were doing a flourishing
business. The population of the Levante capital, ordinarily around
400,000, had been swelled to nearly 1,000,000 by the influx of refugees,
many of whom were able-bodied Madrid men who had succeeded in escaping
the besieged city under one pretext or another.
As in Madrid and Barcelona,
the Russian influence was apparent everywhere in Valencia.
Posters announcing Communist
organization meetings were plastered on buildings and fences; pictures
of Stalin, Lenin and Marx and bronze lapel-pins fashioned in the shape
of a hammer and sickle were on sale at every street corner; Marxist
literature predominated at the book stalls; the only motion pictures
were Russian propaganda films; sound trucks blared forth an unceasing
stream of Communistic propaganda in the plazas, and the Red flag vied
with the Anarchist Black-and-Red banners on public buildings. As in
Madrid and Barcelona, streets had been renamed to conform to Marxist
ideals. Directions were often difficult to find because the residents
had not yet become accustomed to the new system of nomenclature. Saints'
names, by which most streets in Spain are known, and names of former
prominent conservative political leaders, were removed. The new names
included Via Russia, Paseo de Lenin, Avenida de la Pasionaria (The
Passion Flower, Dolores Ibarruri, Asturian Communist leader), Plaza
Rojo (Red Square), Avenida Thaelman, Avenida Libertarian and other
names associated with the revolutionary theme.
Here in Valencia, as in
other parts of Loyalist Spain, the wearing of hats was supposed to
be an indication of Fascist
sympathies and everyone not having a militiaman's cap went bare-headed.
For awhile, I was told, militamen shot at anyone wearing a hat. White
shirts and any kind of necktie also were eschewed as being Fascist,
which ac-
counts for the generally shabby appearance of the civilians seen on
the streets. One had to watch his hands closely.
The closed fist was used by traffic police, where there were traffic
police; by the army as its official salute, and by automobile drivers
to indicate turns. To extend a palm in a moment
of forgetfulness was extremely dangerous. Babies
in arms were taught to clench their tiny fists.
(5)
Laurie
Lee described the
bombing of Valencia
in his autobiography, A
Moment of War (1991)
The bombers seemed now overhead, moving slowly,
heavily, ploughing deep furrows of sound. A single searchlight switched
on, then off again quickly, as though trying to cancel itself out.
Then the whole silent city woke to an almost hysterical clamour, guns
crackling and chattering in all directions, while long arcs of tracer-bullets
looped across
the sky in a brilliant skein of stars. This frantic outburst of fire
lasted only a minute or two, then petered out, its panic exhausted.
The airplanes swung casually
over the city, left now to their own intentions. Just a couple of
dozen young men, in their rocking dim-lit cabins, and the million
below them waiting their chance in the dark. A plane accelerated and
went into a dive, followed by the others in a roaring procession.
They swooped low and fast, guided perhaps by the late moon on the
water, on the rooftops and railway tracks. Then the bombs were released
- not from any great height, for the tearing shriek of their fall
was short. There followed a series of thumping explosions and blasts
of light as parcels of flame straddled the edge of the station. I
felt the ground jump at my feet and smelt the reek of burnt dust.
A bomb hit the track
near the loading sheds, and two trucks sailed sideways against a halo
of fire, while torn lines circled around them like ribbons. Further
off an old house lit from inside like a turnip lamp, then crumpled
and disappeared. A warehouse slowly expanded in the gory bloom of
a direct hit, and several other fires were rooted in the distance.
But it was over quickly - a little more of the city destroyed, more
people burnt or buried, then the bombers turned back out to sea.
Available from Amazon Books
(order below)
