(1)
Martha
Gellhorn, interviewed by Peter Prichard (1986)
I found out about the Spanish
war because I was in Germany when it began. The German papers always
described the Spanish Republic as "the Red swine dogs."
I didn't know anything about it except that, and that was all I needed
to know. And it was the only place that was fighting fascism.
I tried to get some (travel documents)
in Paris, which I couldn't. So I just took a train and got off near
the border of Andorra and walked across. There was a train going down
to Barcelona, so I just got on. I didn't speak Spanish, and I did
not have the faintest idea of doing anything except being there. It
was a sort of act of solidarity just to be with the right people.
I didn't write. I just wandered about. I used to write letters to
the wounded in the Palace Hotel, and I used to drive a station wagon
with blood in bottles to a battalion aid station. Then somebody suggested
I should write about the war, and I said I didn't know anything about
the war. I did not understand anything about it. I didn't see how
I could write it. I only knew about daily life. It was said, well,
it isn't everybody's daily life. That is why I started.
(2)
Martha
Gellhorn, The Undefeated (1945)
At the end of the gray unheated ward, a
little boy was talking to a man. The boy sat at the foot of an iron
cot and from this distance you could see that they were talking seriously
and amiably as befits old friends.
They had
known each other for almost six years and had been in five different
concentration camps in France. The little boy had come with his entire
family in the great exodus from Spain at the end of the civil war
in 1939, but the man was alone. He had been wounded at the end of
the war and for six years he had been unable to walk, with a wound
in his leg that was never treated and had never healed. He had a white,
suffering face and cheeks that looked as if the skin had been roughly
stitched together in deep hunger seams and he had gentle eyes and
a gentle voice.
The little
boy was fifteen years old, though his body was that of a child often.
Between his eyes, there were four lines, the marks of such misery
as children should never feel. He spoke with that wonderful whisky
voice that so many Spanish children have, and he was a tough and entire
little boy. His conversation was without drama or self-pity. It appeared
that the last concentration camp was almost the worst; he had been
separated from his mother and father. Also the hunger was greater,
although the hunger had always been there, and one did not think about
it any longer.
In the
last camp they all ate grass, until the authorities forbade them to
pull it up. They were accustomed to having the fruits of their little
communal gardens stolen by the guards, after they had done all the
work; but at the last camp
everything was stolen. And there were more punishments for the children:
more days without food, more hours of standing in the sun; more bearings.
'The man who guarded us
in our barracks was shot by the Maquis, when they came to free us,'
the boy said. 'The Maquis shot him for being bad to children.'
His mother was here with
him, and three sisters, too. An older brother was somewhere fighting
with the French Maquis.
'And your father?' I asked.
There was a pause and
then he said, in a flat quiet voice, 'Deported by the Germans.' Then
all the toughness went, and he was a child who had suffered too much.
He put his hands in front of his face, and bowed his head and wept
for his father.
(3)
Martha
Gellhorn,
The Undefeated (1945)
There
were ten concentration camps in France from 1939 on. It is alleged
that half a million Spanish men, women and children fled to France
after the Franco victory. Thousand got away to other countries; thousands
returned to Spain tempted by false promises of kindness. By the tens
of thousands, these Spaniards died of neglect in the concentration
camps. And the German Todt organizations took over seven thousand
able-bodied Spaniards to work as slaves. The remainder - no one knows
certainly how many - exist here in France. The French cannot be blamed
for their present
suffering since the French cannot yet provide adequately for themselves.
The Third
French Republic was less barbarous to the Spaniards than was the Petain
government, evidently, but it would seem that all people who run concentration
camps necessarily become brutal
monsters. And though various organizations in America and England
collected money and sent food parcels to these refugees, nothing was
ever received by the Spanish. Furthermore, they were constantly informed
by all the camp authorities that they had been abandoned by the world:
they were beggars and lucky to receive the daily soup of starvation.
The only way to get out
of these French concentration camps was to sign a labor contract:
any farmer or employer could ask for two or ten or twenty Spaniards,
who were then bound over to him and would have to work for whatever
wages he chose to pay under whatever living conditions he saw fit
to provide. If a Spaniard rebelled, he could return to the concentration
camp. A well-known Barcelona surgeon worked as a wood-cutter for four
years at twelve cents a day. He is sixty-two and there is nothing
unusual about his case.
(4)
Martha
Gellhorn, The Undefeated (1945)
The
generally accepted figure is 300,000 executions in the six years
since Franco won power.
The total present American casualties, killed and
wounded in all theaters of war, are about 475,000. It is obvious that
the only way to defeat these people is to shoot them. As early as
1941, Spanish Republicans
were running away from their French employers
and disappearing into the Maquis. From 1943 onward, there
was the closest liaison between the French Maquis and the Spanish
bands throughout France.
That the work of the Spanish
Maquis was valuable can be seen from some
briefly noted figures. During the German occupation of France, the
Spanish Maquis engineered more than four hundred railway sabotages,
destroyed fifty-eight locomotives, dynamited thirty-five railway
bridges, cut one hundred and fifty telephone lines, attacked twenty
factories, destroying some factories totally, and sabotaged fifteen
coal mines. They took several thousand German prisoners and -
most miraculous considering their arms - they captured three tanks.
In the south-west part
of France where no Allied armies have ever fought, they liberated
more than seventeen towns. The French Forces of the Interior, who
have scarcely enough to help themselves, try to help their wounded
Spanish comrades in arms. But now that the guerrilla fighting is over,
the Spaniards are again men without a country or families or homes
or work, though everyone appreciates very much what they did.
After the desperate years
of their own war, after six years of repression inside Spain and six
years of horror in exile, these people remain intact in spirit. They
are armed with a transcendent faith; they have never won, and yet
they have never accepted defeat. Theirs is the great faith that makes
miracles and changes history. You can sit in a basement restaurant
in Toulouse and listen to men who have uncomplainingly lost every
safety and comfort in life, talking of their republic; and you can
believe quite simply that, since they are what they are, there will
be a republic across the mountains and that they will live to return
to it.
(5)
Martha
Gellhorn, Is There a New Germany?, Atlantic
Monthly (1964)
The adults of Germany, who
knew Nazism and in their millions cheered and adored Hitler until
he started losing, have performed a nation-wide act of amnesia; no
one individually had a thing to do with the Hitlerian regime and its
horrors. The young realize this cannot be true, yet one by one, each
explains how guiltless his father was; somebody else's father must
have been doing the dirty work. Santayana observed that if a man forgets
his past he is condemned to relive it. Germans trained in obedience
and dedicated to moral whitewashing are not a new people, nor are
they reliable partners for anyone else.
(6)
Martha
Gellhorn worked on a hospital ship during the D-day
landings. She later wrote about the experience for Collier's
Weekly
(June, 1944)
Belowstairs all the partitions had
been torn out and for three decks the inside of the ship was a vast
ward with double tiers of bunks. The routing inside the ship ran marvelously,
though four doctors, six nurses and about fourteen medical orderlies
were very few people to care for four hundred wounded men. From two
o'clock one afternoon until the ship docked in England again the next
evening at seven, none of the medical personnel stopped work. And
besides plasma and blood transfusions, re-dressing of wounds, examinations,
administering of sedatives or opiates or oxygen and all the rest,
operations were performed all night long. Only one soldier died on
that ship and he had come aboard as a hopeless case.
It will be hard to tell you of the
wounded, there were so many of them. There was no time to talk; there
was too much else to do. They had to be fed, as most of them had not
eaten for two days; shoes and clothing had to be cut off; they wanted
water; the nurses and orderlies, working like demons, had to be found
and called quickly to a bunk where a man suddenly and desperately
needed attention; plasma bottles must be watched; cigarettes had to
be lighted and held for those who could not use their hands; it seemed
to take hours to pour hot coffee, via the spout of a teapot, into
a mouth that just showed through bandages.
But the wounded talked among themselves
and as time went on we got to know them, but their faces and their
wounds, not their names. They were a magnificent enduring bunch of
men. Men smiled who were in such pain that all they really can have
wanted to do was turn their heads away and cry, and men made jokes
when they needed their strength just to survive. And all of them looked
after each other, saying, "Give that boy a drink of water,"
or "Miss, see that Ranger over there, he's in bad shape, could
you go to him?" All through the ship men were asking after other
men by name, anxiously, wondering if they were on board and how they
were doing.
(7)
Martha
Gellhorn, wrote about the Battle of
the Bulge in her book The Face of War (1959)
A colleague and I drove up to Bastogne
on a secondary road through breath-taking scenery. The Thunderbolts
had created this scenery. You can say the words "death and destruction"
and they don't mean anything. But they are awful words when you are
looking at what they mean. There were some German staff cars along
the side of the road, they had not merely been hit by machine-gun
bullets, they had been mashed into the ground.
There were half-tracks and tanks
literally wrenched apart, and a gun position directly hit by bombs.
All around these lacerated or flattened objects of steel there was
the usual riffraff: papers, tin cans, cartridge belts, helmets, an
odd shoe, clothing. There were also, ignored and completely inhuman,
the hard-frozen corpses of
Germans. Then there was a clump of houses, burned and gutted, with
only a few walls standing, and around them the enormous bloated bodies
of cattle.
The road passed through a curtain
of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this
field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some
dark shapeless vegetable.
We had watched the Thunderbolts
working for several days. They flew in small packs and streaked in
to the attack in single file. They passed quickly through the sky
and when they dived you held your breath and waited; it seemed impossible
that the plane would be able to pull itself up to safety. They were
diving to within sixty feet of the ground. The snub-nosed Thunderbolt
is more feared by the German troops than any other plane.
You have seen Bastogne and a thousand
other Bastognes in the newsreels. These dead towns and villages spread
over Europe and one forgets the human misery and fear and despair
that the cracked and caved-in buildings represent. Bastogne was a
German job of death and destruction and it was beautifully thorough.
The 101st Airborne Division, which held Bastogne, was still there,
though the day before the wounded had been taken out as soon as the
first road was open. The survivors of the 101st Airborne Division,
after being entirely surrounded, uninterruptedly shelled and bombed,
after having fought off four times their strength in Germans, look-for
some unknown reason - cheerful and lively. A young lieutenant remarked,
"The tactical situation was always good." He was very surprised
when we shouted with laughter. The front, north of Bastogne, was just
up the road and the peril was far from past.
(8)
Martha
Gellhorn was with the United States troops that liberated Dachau
in 1945. She later wrote about it in her book The Face of War
(1959)
I have not talked about how it
was the day the American Army arrived, though the prisoners told me.
In their joy to be free, and longing to see their friends who had
come at last, many prisoners rushed to the fence and
died electrocuted. There were those who died cheering, because that
effort of happiness was more than their bodies could endure. There
were those who died because now they had food, and they ate before
they could be stopped, and it killed them. I do not know words to
describe the men who have survived this horror for years, three years,
five years, ten years, and whose minds are as clear and unafraid as
the day they entered.
I was in Dachau when the German armies surrendered unconditionally
to the Allies. We sat in that room, in that accursed cemetery prison,
and no one had anything more to say. Still, Dachau seemed to me the
most suitable place in Europe to hear the news of victory. For surely
this war was made to abolish Dachau, and all the other places like
Dachau, and everything that Dachau stood for, and to abolish it for
ever.
(9) Martha
Gellhorn, Eichman and the Private Conscience, Atlantic
Monthly (1962)
This is a sane man, and a sane man is capable of unrepentant, unlimited,
planned evil. He was the genius bureaucrat, he was the powerful frozen
mind which directed a gigantic organization; he is the perfect model
of inhumanness; but he was not alone. Eager thousands obeyed him.
Everyone could not have his special talents; many people were needed
to smash a baby's head against the pavement before the mother's eyes,
to urge a sick old man to rest and shoot him in the back of the head;
there was endless work for willing hands. How many more like these
exist everywhere?
(10)
Martha
Gellhorn was asked by Shelia MacVicar of ABC News what the worst war
she covered (1986)
I hated Vietnam the most, because I felt personally
responsible. It was my own country doing this abomination. I am talking
about what was done in South Vietnam to the people whom we, supposedly,
had come to save. I'm seeing napalmed children in the hospital, seeing
old women with a piece of white sulphur burning away inside of them,
seeing the destroyed villages, seeing people dropping of hunger and
dying in the streets. My complete horror remains with me as a source
of grief and anger and shame that surpasses all the others.
(11)
Martha
Gellhorn, interviewed by Peter Prichard (1986)
I think the proof of the power of the press is the fear of the press
by governments. The Falklands war is a perfect example. That was not
a war; it was a campaign. It was so tightly censored, and it was clear
that all that the British government had learned from Vietnam was:
Keep the press out. If any interests of any government are involved,
they fear the press.
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