In the spring of 1942, General Francisco Aguilar González, Mexican ambassador to the collaborationist regime in Vichy, left France to return to Mexico with his wife. The couple boarded a passenger ship for New York in Lisbon with twenty large boxes of luggage. In New York, they boarded a train with all their belongings and finally arrived in Mexico. One of the 20 boxes contained three cardboard boxes that had been handed to González in Vichy by a film negative developer. He asked him to save them.
Before Germany invaded France, the famous war photographer Robert Capa entrusted the undeveloped negatives to his film developer, not knowing where the fate of war would take him. In cardboard boxes, an archive of 4500 negatives taken during the Spanish Civil War by three unusual photographers; Robert Capa, Gerda Taro and David Seymour (Chaim), was packed. Although these negatives of Capa’s were thought to be lost, people have always said that they exist, but nobody knows where. But it wasn’t until 1979 that Cap’s brother Cornell, founder of the International Centre of Photography (ICP), began to search for negatives, including through advertisements.
Mexican General González died in 1971 and the box of negatives, which had been safely stored in the attic all this time, became the property of his daughter. Before her death in 1995, she left it to her nephew, a filmmaker by profession. It was only he who looked at what was in the box and called an art historian to help. Together, they assessed that the negatives were of inestimable documentary value. After much deliberation, the 126 rolls of negatives finally ended up in the hands of Cornell Cape in 2007, who then selected the best ones and exhibited them in New York.
Robert Capa, together with Gerda Tara and David Seymour, was the founder of modern war photography as we know it today. His words are well known: “If the photograph isn’t good enough, you weren’t close enough.” Until then, all war photographs had been taken before or after the battle. Nobody was stupid enough to jump out of the gun tunnels and expose themselves to danger during battle.
Capa was the first to do so. His photographs went around the world, were published in every newspaper and some are still classics of photographic art. Individual photographs show Republicans during battles and Republican priests at prayer, other refugees retreating with all their possessions, other Communist generals, volunteers of the international brigades, portraits of Federico Garcia Lorca and La Pasionaria, Republican soldiers guarding the art treasures of the Duke of Alba. All together, they show a Spanish state struggling to survive.
The most famous is Capo’s iconic photograph, the umpteenth Fallen Soldier, which shows the Republican at the moment he is struck by a bullet and thrown off balance, falling backwards with his rifle in his outstretched right hand.
“Viva la muerte!”
On 18 July 1936, a small man in a grey suit with a Spanish diplomatic passport issued in the name of Antonio de Sargoniz boarded a small private plane at Gando airport in the Canary Islands. He was flying to Morocco, Spain. During the flight, he took off his grey suit and changed into his general’s uniform. The passenger’s name was Francisco Franco Bahamonte and he was the youngest Spanish general. He landed in Tetuan, where rebel troops had already seized the airport. Immediately after landing, he issued a proclamation in which he assured that his mission was to ensure order and authority in the country, while at the same time declaring a state of siege throughout Spain. “I will liberate Spain from the Marxists at any cost”, he told an English journalist. Thus began the Spanish Civil War.
A week before his flight to Tetuan, on 12 July 1936, a medium-sized young man with a tuft of black hair got off the train at Verdun station. A camera hung over his leather jacket. He spoke in fluent French, but with a Central European accent. He was born in Budapest 23 years ago. His name was Endre Erno Friedmann. But that name was not on the press card either. For several months, his name had been Robert Capa.
Luckily, his camera didn’t end up in a pawn shop, which happened regularly with his stuff when he ran out of money. On this trip, he was to cover a commemoration for a small Parisian newspaper near Verdun, where 300,000 French soldiers died in 1916 in one of the biggest battles of the First World War. Click, click, click, the camera worked as the veterans laid flowers at the memorial to the fallen and Capa knew he was making some good photographs.
But what was the Hungarian doing in Paris? Capa was practically a refugee twice. He was beaten by the police in Budapest for taking part in an anti-fascist demonstration, and before graduating from high school he made the mistake of being seen talking to a well-known communist. He found himself in Berlin, where Hitler had already begun to enforce his anti-Semitic measures and, like many refugees, Capa soon found himself in Paris. When he earned some money here, he paid for drinks for everyone he knew. He had a small group of friends, “copains” as he called them, including a Polish refugee called David Szymin, whom everyone called Chim, who worked for the weekly Regards.
One day, Gerda Pohorylle, a green-eyed girl with a short boyish hairstyle, found herself in this circle of friends. They didn’t have much in common. Like him, she was a Polish Jew and the daughter of a not-so-poor merchant from Stuttgart. She, too, had already had dealings with the Nazi police, distributing anti-Nazi leaflets around Stuttgart. They soon became lovers and lived in a dingy studio apartment. He took photographs, she wrote stories, and it seemed that, at least temporarily, nothing could change their modest but pleasant life.
Gerda, like Capa, took on an artistic name and was now Gerda Taro. Meanwhile, Capa made a business breakthrough by having his photographs published in the new weekly magazine Vu, which had almost half a million readers. When news of the events in Spain came in, Vu decided to send some journalists and photojournalists to Spain, and Capa and Gerda saw this as their big opportunity – to report from a global scene where events are highly unpredictable.
On 5 August, they flew from Toulouse to Barcelona together with other journalists and photojournalists. The plane flew over the snow-covered Pyrenees and made an emergency landing in a meadow. Both were unharmed, they hurried to Barcelona, where chaos was already waiting for them. Although the mutinous barracks crew had already surrendered, the banks remained closed, as did the factories, unless the workers took them over, and the cosmetics factory had already started producing ammunition. Churches were also closed and some were burned.
Armed workers marched down the Rambla, and the seized cars bore the plates of various militias and parties; the UGT, the anarchists of the CNT-FAI, the Catalan socialists of the PSUC, the Marxist Workers’ Party of the POUM and others. Women walked around in worker’s pajamas and trousers, ties and hats had disappeared as a dangerous sign of the bourgeoisie, and workers now sat in elite restaurants with guns pressed against their tables.
Gerda was excited because it was something new for her. No more high heels and tight skirts like in Paris. Capa was sorry that they had missed the initial confrontations that the newspapers had written about. Meanwhile, Spanish photojournalists were taking handheld pictures and publishing shocking photos. A woman dressed in black bending over a corpse, a group of workers firing from behind the body of a slain horse, a man leading a rebel soldier with his arms raised at gunpoint.
The opportunity to take a similar photo in Barcelona passed, as the drama was already taking place elsewhere. The Nationalists, as the rebels called themselves, had already occupied a third of north-western Spain and a small strip of territory in the south of the country. The worst fighting was north-west of Madrid at Guadarrama, and Capa and Gerda packed their bags and headed there. It was a long journey in a chauffeur-driven car with an armed escort, as they were stopped in every village and their papers were checked.
It was harvest time and in the fields the peasants were reaping the crops of the landlords, not for them, but for themselves. The landlords fled or were killed.
Spain was deeply divided at the time. The painful division was demonstrated by an event that took place on 12 October 1936, which is considered a day of fostering contacts between the Spanish-speaking peoples. A ceremony was held in the lobby of the University of Salamanca on that day. In attendance were the Bishop of Salamanca, General Franco’s wife, the civilian governor of the city and the nationalist General Millán Astray, a war invalid without one arm and one eye. The ceremony was presided over by the Rector and world-famous Basque philosopher Miguel de Unamuno.
General Astray started shouting Viva la muerte! (Long live death) and spouting well-known slogans to incite his supporters, and he called the Basques and Catalans the cancer of Spain. A group of phalangists saluted Franco’s painting with outstretched arms. All eyes were on Unamuno, who said: ‘I cannot be silent. Sometimes silence is the same as lying. I have something to say to General Astray. Let us leave aside the personal insult. I am Basque and the bishop here is Catalan, whether he likes it or not.”
The hall was numb, because in nationalist Spain no one had ever dared to speak like that. Unamuno continued, “A little earlier I heard a necrophiliac shouting ‘long live death’. I have to say that I am repelled by this totally alien cry. The General is a cripple. That is to be said without offensive emphasis. He is a war invalid. So was Cervantes. Unfortunately, we have far too many cripples in Spain. But soon there will be more, God help us.
The cripple, lacking the greatness of Cervantes, seeks some dubious relief in crippling everyone around him. You will win, because you are brutal enough, but you cannot convince us. If you want to convince us, you must prove yourself. But to do that you would need two things you do not have: reason and justice.”
This was Unamuno’s last speech. He was sacked and, bitter, died at the end of the year. Nothing illustrated the tragedy of Spain at that time more than his speech.
Madrid is not yours, it’s ours
The government in Madrid initially refused to distribute arms to the leftist parties in the city. Finally, it changed its mind, and those who had a trade union card had the right to arms. The same order was given to the civilian governors of the loyalist provinces. The government-loyal postal administration even tried to find out which posts were still in government hands. So the government found out its defeats by telephone.
“Hello Zaragoza? Station Workers’ Committee?” “Shut up,” was the reply. “And soon you will be too. Long live Spain!” From somewhere the Madrid post office was called: “Hello Madrid? Who are you?” “The Rail Transport Union,” was the reply, as the union guards were already guarding the post office. “Miranda here. The station and the city are already ours”, the rebels replied. “But Madrid is not yours, it’s ours,” the trade unionist shouted into the phone.
Madrid was bathed in summer heat, the leaves on the trees seemed petrified in the windless air and the dust on the streets mixed with the smell of roasting coffee. Even the soldiers who stood guard outside the government buildings retreated into the shade. The Nationalists were approaching Madrid from Guadarrama and Extremadura and were receiving reinforcements because the Germans had put ships and planes at their disposal to transport colonial troops from Africa across the Strait of Gibraltar to Andalusia. Meanwhile, England and France, with their Popular Front government, declared neutrality and non-interference in Spanish affairs. The streets of Madrid were blockaded by cobblestone blockades, and a bomb hit a building where mothers were gathering to get a daily ration of milk for their children. There was rubble and pools of blood everywhere.
Capa and Gerda came to the city at the end of August, filmed some city scenes, but they wanted to see the real fighting in Guadarrama, where the Republicans suffered heavy losses because the recruits didn’t want to dig defensive trenches because they thought it was cowardly. But journalists and cameramen were not allowed in that area. So they set off for Toledo, hoping to film the capture of Alcázar, which would have been an important symbolic victory for the Republic.
But they learnt that it would be days or weeks before dynamite bombers would arrive from Asturias to dig tunnels under the fortress and blow it up. At Córdoba, the chances were better. The city had been occupied by the Nationalists at the start of the rebellion, and the Republicans were now preparing to take it. Here they could have taken the photographs they had come to Spain to take. They were in a hurry, money was running out and Gerda wanted to be back in Paris by mid-September.
They crossed the yellow-brown La Mancha plain, reached the village of Almadén and photographed the famous mercury mine, which belonged to the Rothschild family and is now run by the Workers’ Committee. Finally, they arrived near C ó rdobe. On 5 September, however, Nationalist bombers began bombing the Republican positions, later joined by artillery and machine guns, and chaos ensued. Men, women and children from the nearby villages made a panicked flight, on foot, on mules and in wagons. They were followed by volunteer Republican troops of militiamen, who had no military experience and who saw that they could not fight the planes with rifles. Capa could only film the flight of frightened people this way.
Before leaving Córdoba, they stopped at a group of Republican soldiers and Capa took a photo of the officer during his speech to the soldiers. Some of the soldiers looked at the officer with an elated face, others were bored, others furrowed their brows. But these were not the photographs for which Capa had come to Spain.
They continued their journey across the Guadalquivir river and came across the camp of a small CNT anarchist militia near the village of Espejo. It was still early when they arrived there and the sun cast long shadows on the dry earth. The journey was not without danger, as there were Nationalist ambushes nearby. The militiamen were happy to pose for two foreign photographers and were keen to give them a mock fight. They ran up and down the sloping hill, kneeling and pointing their rifles into the empty air, brandishing their rifles in a heroic pose. Capa and Gerda squatted in a ditch while the militiamen ran down and jumped over the ditch they were squatting in, and then took up a fighting position on the other side.
The photographers raised their rolleiflex and baton and pulled the trigger while the militiamen fired into the empty air. The light of the sun, still low in the sky, illuminated the soldiers like a spotlight, capturing every detail, from the clods of earth to the markings on the militiamen’s caps.
Finally – because it had to be in the end – Capa or Gerda asked some militiamen to pretend they had been hit by an enemy bullet. A militiaman with a moustache and a tanned complexion, dressed in a jacket, slid down the hill, fell on the ground and pretended to have been hit by a bullet, while the other two were already lying on the ground. Capa didn’t know if this was what he was looking for, because he wanted a real scene, not a fake one.
Then another militiaman came down the hill. He wore a white shirt, leather straps and a cartridge belt across his torso, a rifle in his right hand, and spaghetti straps on his feet, which skidded on the dry ground. And then … Was that an echo, the sharp crack of a rifle? Suddenly, his legs went weak, his arms went limp, his right hand holding the rifle almost fell open and his body slid to the ground. Just as the militiaman began to fall, Capa pulled the trigger and what resulted was one of the most famous war photographs in the world. A fallen soldier.
What actually happened on the hill? Capa never wanted to talk about it. A year later, in an interview with a New York newspaper, a friend of his gave a very graphic description of the event. He said that a militiaman, who was hiding in a trench from enemy fire, tried to join his squad, jumped out of the trench and was hit by enemy fire. An interesting story, but marred by a small detail, namely how a lone militiaman could be hit by a machine gun from an enemy ambush hundreds of metres away.
Ten years later, Capa told a new version to the Telegram newspaper.According to his account, there were 20 militiamen in the trench with the unfortunate man, hiding from enemy fire from a nearby hill. One by one, they jumped out of the tunnel and Capa pulled the trigger, holding the camera high above his head so that he could not see exactly what he was photographing.
In the 1940s, Capa privately told a friend that the militiaman had probably been hit by a sniper hidden on one of the nearby hills. During this account, Capa appeared to his friend to be deeply affected and compassionate, as he had never seen a death before, and especially not one that he himself had caused.
Shortly afterwards, the photographers left Espejo and handed the rolls of film to the pilot, who brought them back to Paris in stages and gave them to the developer. A few days later, Vu magazine published six of Capa’s photographs from the front in Córdoba, giving most space to the death of a militiaman. The text under the photographs was epic:
“With a brisk step, their chests to the wind and their rifles in their hands, they ran down the slope …. suddenly …. a bullet whistles … a fratricidal bullet. And the native lump drinks their blood.”
Other magazines and newspapers have published other photos of the event. Then Life magazine published a photograph of a “fallen soldier” and called it a symbol of the Spanish Civil War. This photograph more than fulfilled the purpose of Cap’s trip to Spain.
But Capa and Gerda were already on their way elsewhere. Capa had become a well-known photojournalist with this photo, but Gerda was also taking photos, although editors still considered her a mere appendage of Robert Capa. This hurt her and hurt her very much. Her photographs appeared on the pages of newspapers such as Einheit and Unita, but they were shocking photographs of childhood suffering, not photographs from the front. If she wanted to photograph war scenes, she needed a new camera. Her rollei was too clumsy and too big for such scenes.
In February 1937, they were already in Cartagena, home port of the Spanish Navy, to film the Republican cruiser Jaime I, known as the Spanish Potemkin. At the beginning of the Civil War, the sailors rebelled against the nationalist officers and the captain and took control of the cruiser. Capa and Gerda were everywhere on the ship, camera in hand, both in the engine room and on the bridge, surrounded by smiling sailors. Click by the gun barrel, click in the galley between the pots, click, click, click and click.
There was a real party on board, where the crew hastily assembled brass players with accordion, guitar and Basque flute on a goat bellows. The sailors hugged them, patted them on the shoulders and sang: “El canon ruje, tiembla ta tierra. Pero a Madrid … NO PASARAN.” (The cannon is firing, the earth is shaking … But they will not take Madrid).
Capa and Gerda had almost forgotten there was a war until the Nationalists, together with the Italian Blackshirts, invaded Malaga. Rebel ships shelled the city from the sea, Malaga surrendered and the invaders immediately shot between 3000 and 4000 people. Masses of refugees swarmed along the coast to the north, followed by Nationalist tanks and mendes, and killed from the air by planes.
A small group of obsolete planes, led by French writer André Malraux, came to the aid of the refugees, but almost all of them ended up in flames on the ground. Capa and Gerda had nothing to photograph here, as it was all over soon.
In the morgue
Soon afterwards, Capa managed to get a new 35mm contax camera, so he was able to give his lens to Gerda, and their pictures, which were published with the caption “photo Capa” or “photo Gerda”, were now jointly titled “Reportage Capa & Taro”. The Battle of Jarama near Madrid lasted throughout February 1937, and then the front line stabilised just as Capa and Gerda arrived in Madrid. They stayed at the Hotel Florida, which, although occasionally shelled by the Nationalists, was one of the few hotels that always had enough hot water, adequate food and interesting guests.
Here was Ernest Hemingway hanging out at the bar, emptying bottles of whisky, while his late wife Martha Gellhorn stayed in her room. It was possible to meet the American writer John Don Passos and the Soviet military attaché and head of intelligence Vladimir Gorev, who was conquering the girls. The French writer André Malraux took notes here and almost all the foreign correspondents always stayed at the Florida Hotel. By chance, the Canadian Ted Allan, a volunteer and political commissar of the mobile blood transfusion unit of the International Brigades, also found himself there.
Allan was an acquaintance of Hemingway’s, the first journalist to interview General Franco after the start of the uprising and the man who was smuggled out in a car to cover the Badajoz massacre that took place at the beginning of the uprising. He was introduced to the reporters and for a long time he held Gerda’s hand in his and looked into her eyes. “Isn’t she beautiful?” he later whispered to a neighbour.
Capa has decided to embark on a commercially risky project. Instead of using a Parisian middleman to distribute his photographs to magazines and newspapers, whom he had to pay dearly, he set up his own photographic studio, Atelier Robert Capa, and hired an old acquaintance from Budapest, Imret Wiess Csiki, to develop the photographs and do other work. To organise all this, Capa came to Paris.
But how will he return to Spain, where Gerda has stayed? Unlike Gerda, who had German citizenship, Capa was a stateless person as a refugee and could only return to Spain if he was officially sent there by an editorial office. Meanwhile, in Madrid, Gerda gladly accepted an invitation to move temporarily in with the well-known poet Rafael Alberti and his wife, who headed the union of anti-fascist writers. She believed that the time had come to regain her lost independence. She loved Capa very much, but she did not know if she was in love with him.
So she was eager to join Ted Allan, who followed her doggedly, and two other writers to visit the battle line at Guadalajara, defended by international brigades. The weather improved and, under cover of fog, the Republicans surrounded and attacked the Italian troops, who were still being strafed from the air by Russian Chato aircraft. For the first time since the start of the Civil War, the Republic won a great victory and Gerda came face to face with mass murder for the first time.
Everywhere stood burnt-out trucks, overturned guns and ammunition boxes left behind by the retreating enemy troops; among them, like scattered toys in rain-filled bomb craters, were the bodies of the dead, hundreds of bodies, their faces grey under the fading sun. “It’s horrible, though, an arm here, a head there, and limbs torn off. Young Italian boys themselves.” “But,” she remarked, “I took some wonderful photographs.”
After only a month, Capa managed to get a paid job at Le Soir newspaper, pick up a Spanish visa and travel to Madrid. To celebrate their reunion, a friend invited them to dinner and Ernest Hemingway joined them.
Hemingway liked the impatient young photographer who wanted to get to the front line by any means necessary. Interestingly, he didn’t like Gerda. “You cunt,” he later said to Ted Allan, who was quite upset about it. Towards morning, grenades started hitting the Florida Hotel. Most of the doors were knocked off their hinges, shards of window glass flew around, and frightened guests began to gather in the reception. Hemingway was already dressed, the American writer Dos Passos was still in his pyjamas, and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, in a blue silk robe, was offering grapefruit juice to the women. Capa came from somewhere – he was not in the hotel when the attack happened – and started taking pictures of the hotel staff sweeping up the shards.
A few weeks later, Capa went to the northern front in Bilbao. The city was already surrounded, so he had to take a small plane via Biarritz in France, and he had to return via France to Paris.
Gerda found herself in seaside Valencia, caught up in a war she wanted to see. In mid-May 1937, Nationalist planes appeared and bombarded the city. They destroyed several buildings and killed almost 100 people. Gerda Taro, not content with photographing the destroyed buildings, slipped past the guards blocking the entrance to the morgue for desperate relatives and entered the cold, tiled hall. Here, on the floor or on hastily made tables, lay bloody and broken corpses, laid side by side. A man in a business suit with a bloodied head, an old woman dressed in black, a little girl with no legs.
She and Capo came to Spain looking for – what? Romance? Excitement? Pathos? Danger? That’s what she finally found in these cold places. She walked up and down between the rows of corpses, taking care not to step in the pools of blood or on the bloody blankets, not to touch the bloody limbs. She looked into the face of death; calm, unaffected, almost loving, and documented what she saw.
“If the photos aren’t good enough, it means you’re not close enough,” Capa always told her. On this day, Gerda was very close indeed. She gave the film packs to a Danish journalist on his way to Paris and asked him to take them to Capa, who would print them on ExtraDur Kodak photographic paper. When he returned to Spain, he was asked to bring coffee and chocolate and photographic reflectors. She was obviously preparing herself for even greater horrors than she had witnessed in Valencia.
During Capa’s brief stopover in Paris, when he had to return to Spain from besieged Bilbao via Paris, he also managed to make an important career leap forward. Tired of working only for Ce Soir, he struck a deal with the American giant Times Incorporation, which launched Life magazine with a circulation of millions. Of course, the Times was the right place for a photographer who wanted to make a career out of it.
In July 1937, the International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture continued its work in Madrid. Days before, rumours of a new offensive along the Manzanares against the Falangists had already spread, and trucks full of soldiers were already moving north and west, carrying military material. Journalists were not allowed to write about this, as the censorship was extremely strict and all permits to go to the front were revoked.
Then, on 6 July, the Republicans attacked a bulge of territory occupied by the Nationalists, which protruded dangerously towards Madrid. The offensive met with indignant resistance from the enemy, but the Republicans, with the help of their loyal air force, managed to get close to the village of Brunete, which was the key to the success of the offensive. That afternoon, the writers gathered at the Congress were again listening to one of the propaganda speeches when a trio of Republican soldiers in full battle gear with helmets on their heads burst into the hall.
“The town of Brunete is now in our hands!” they shouted, showing the writers the confiscated and bayoneted Phalangist battle flag. A mad enthusiasm broke out in the hall, the writers hugged each other and shouted, and someone started singing the Internationale. Gerda stopped taking pictures of the enthusiastic crowd, because the confiscated flag was like a signal to her. She must go to the front by all means, she must take pictures while there is still something going on and before anyone else remembers. She rushed out of the hall ahead of the others to secure a pass and transport to the front, but in vain. No journalists were allowed near the front.
That didn’t stop Gerda. She took a taxi and ordered the driver to drive to the front. The soldiers she met on the way waved cheerfully at her, because she was already well known among them and they called her “pequena rubia” (little blonde). Two other journalists followed her in another car. She arrived in Brunete and photographed a Republican holding a local signboard with the word Brunete on it and a soldier drawing a hammer and sickle and the words Viva Russia in red paint on a wall on which two crossed arrows were painted as a nationalist symbol.
In the afternoon, she was on her way back to Madrid, passing the dead and wounded lying by the roadside. She did not go to the congress for the next two days, because she was a war photographer. Let others deal with the Congress and the writers. For her, the reality was on the rolling hills around Madrid, where the Republicans were trying to hold on to the territory they had taken.
She has commandeered congress cars, driven with journalists close to the front and sometimes even strayed into enemy territory. Now she no longer wore a skirt and heeled shoes, but a military jacket and spats, with a camera on her back and dust in her hair. She came back with photographs that no one else had. But the Republican offensive had stalled, the Republicans needed a rest, they needed to reorganise, and Gerda took advantage of this to pay a short visit to Paris and meet Capa.
Death
As soon as she stepped off the train at Gare d’ Austerlitz in Paris, she bought Ce Soir and saw her photos from Brunete and the Congress printed in it. Ce Soir and Regards also published her photographs of the victims of the Valencia bombing.
Capa also had good news. His photo of a fallen soldier was printed by Life alongside an editorial on the first anniversary of the Spanish Civil War. What a change in a single year. Then they were poor and unknown, refugees seeking sanctuary, now they are both internationally renowned photographers.
And there was no shortage of good news and ideas. In early July 1937, the Japanese Empire issued a declaration of war against China. It would be a big story, Capa was sure. And there was no photographer there yet. So he suggested to Life magazine that it send both him and Gerda there. Life paid perfectly, but what would Gerda say? He didn’t know, but he knew of her desire to draw a line between their personal relationship and her professional career.
But they were in Paris, the weather was fine, people were in the streets celebrating 14 July, the day of the fall of the Bastille, singing the Marseillaise and the Internationale and shouting for the Spanish Republic, and the song Parlez-moi d’ amour – the hit of that summer – was in the air. Who else would have thought about the future.
Gerda knew what she was going to do. She was going to China, of course. Just for ten more days, she jumps to Spain to take pictures of the Republicans finally conquering and holding the Brunettes, and a few other pictures, and then she returns. Back in Madrid, she learns that the Republicans are not doing too well in Brunete. Their troops were without food, water, ammunition, bandages, stretchers and doctors. Their Chato planes had been thinned out by squadrons of new Messerschmit planes from the German Condor Legion.
She got up very early, because that was when the best shots could be taken, and went to the front, sometimes alone, sometimes accompanied by Ted Allan, who followed her like a faithful dog. “Let’s not get too close, you know it’s dangerous,” he would tell her. She said, “What should I do? Should I film from a distance?” And so she photographed the officers at headquarters and the soldiers in the tunnels – young men too young to fight.
She photographed the dead, she photographed the wounded and she rode with them in ambulances. When an aerial bomb hit a supply truck, the truck was engulfed in flames. Black smoke filled Gerda’s image search engine. Soldiers ran in panic in all directions, one was hit and fell to the ground. Gerda stood calmly in the middle of the chaos, pulling the trigger.
It was strange when she returned to Madrid and Rafael Alberti wanted to tell her about William Faulkner’s new book in the safety of a café, while others strained their ears to hear what was happening on the front. Gerdi did not need to hear. She was there. But after ten days she knew she had to go back to Paris and on the last day she wanted to go back to the front to take one last photograph. So on the twenty-fourth of July she wanted to go back to the front one last time and say goodbye to Spain. She needed a companion, as she now had two cameras, and Ted Allan offered to accompany her. They reached the first line of battle at Brunete without any major obstacles, when an officer called out to them, “Come back at once, the Phalangists are infiltrating! In five minutes the devil will be here.”
He was right, because soon a formation of Condor Legion planes arrived and started dropping bombs. They quickly jumped into the first trench, Alann went limp and Gerda stood up, pulling the trigger with each attack. “Let’s get out of here,” Allan suggested. “You can go, but I’m staying,” she replied. The Phalangist attack seemed to last for several hours, and Republican soldiers began to abandon their defensive positions and flee under a hail of bombs, grenades and machine gun fire. In the open, however, they were an easy target for the enemy. Officers tried to stop them by threatening them with revolvers. Gerda also shouted to the fleeing soldiers to stop and hold the line of battle.
Suddenly, Gerda had had enough. She wanted to leave this hell. Their chauffeur was long gone, so they set off on foot to the next village, Villanueva. But there it was hell, with trucks and fleeing soldiers piled up in a narrow space, and troops coming to reinforce the battle line. They saw a large staff car, with three wounded men lying in the back seat, on their way to the hospital at El Escorial.
The driver agreed that they could ride with them, but they would have to stand on the step of the car. Gerda put her two cameras on the front seat, they both jumped on the step of the car and held on to the roof. Gerda was tired and happy, she had taken great photos and she was on her way back to Madrid to drink a bottle of champagne at the farewell dinner. She will then go to Paris and China.
Neither of them noticed the tank until it was too late. A convoy of Republican tanks was coming towards them at full speed. The driver of the car swerved to the left to avoid a collision, but could not avoid the first tank, which forced the car into a ditch. Allan was the first to realise, bloodied and with no feeling in his legs. Gerda was lying under the car, her lower body crushed and her stomach open. Someone managed to get them to the hospital, where Gerda received a blood transfusion and the surgeon tried to do what he could. But he couldn’t help her, he could only give her morphine injections to ease her suffering.
Gerda was still conscious and kept asking if they had managed to save the cameras. Allan had his thigh in a cast and asked if he could see Gerda, but was told she was resting. At 7 a.m. he was told that she had died.
Capa was waiting in Paris to tell Gerda the good news; they would soon travel to China to report on events there. He bought L’Humanite and started turning the pages. Nothing new, really, just violence everywhere. Then, on the third page, he saw the news that the Phalangists had taken over Brunete and that a French journalist, Madame Tarot, had been killed in the process.
At first he thought it was a mistake, because it said below that the news of the journalist’s death was still unconfirmed. Only the writer Louis Aragon told him the truth and Capa cried like a child. His first thought was that he had to get her body, but it seemed that others wanted to get their hands on it too. In Madrid, journalists, politicians, soldiers, artists and townspeople marched past her dead body. She was then taken to Valencia, where the government had retreated, and her coffin was covered with the Republican flag.
When the train arrived at Gare d’ Austerlitz in Paris on 30 July, more than 100 people were waiting. Her brother also arrived, punched Capa in the face and blamed him for her death. Capa was too out of it to defend himself and was quickly taken home to calm down. Gerda became a symbol of the anti-fascist left and her funeral was carried out in the streets of Paris to the sound of Chopin’s funeral march.
Ten thousand people attended the funeral at Pére-Lachaise Cemetery. Afterwards, Capa locked himself in his room and tried to soothe his pain with a drink. On 1 August 1937, Gerda Taro would have been 27 years old.
In September, Ted Allan appears in Paris wearing black glasses and on crutches. Capa listened in silence as he told him what had happened. He then went to New York to arrange the publication of a book of his and Gerda’s Spanish photographs. In his dedication he wrote: “For Gerda Tara, who spent a year on the Spanish front and stayed there.” The book was published after the New Year.
Of course, in America he could not avoid the constant question about his “fallen soldier” photo. His story was always the same: “My friend and I were joking with the soldiers who were firing their rifles, and I asked one of them to pretend that he had been shot, and then he was really shot.”
He returned to Paris, where a tempting offer awaited him. The American director Joris Ivens was going to China to make a film and Capa could join him. But he wouldn’t be leaving until January the following year, so he still had time to make another leap to Spain.
Robert Capa received a word from Spain
He arrived in Barcelona and heard that the Republicans were going to attack Teruel. He knew immediately where his place was. On the way there, he met Ernest Hemingway with two other journalists. The Republicans entered Teruel with caution, as six thousand Phalangists were barricaded there with hostages. On the outskirts of the town, Capa came across what looked like a cloak in the branches of a tree, fluttering in the cold December wind. He knew exactly what it was. He took a shot, then another, approached the tree and pointed the camera at the branches.
A soldier was stuck on them. He was wearing a cap, still holding the wire of a field telephone, his eyes were numb and his face was twisted like a Goya engraving. Capo’s photograph went round the world again, joined by Hemingway’s stories of the battles for Teruel.
After his return from Teruel, he was on his way to China in January 1938.
If Capa had not had dysentery, he would have been able to attend the horse races at the club, which was the centre of social life in Hankow, the capital of China, after the enemy invaded Nanking in March. He also suffered from the climate, with 100% humidity. He had been in China since the beginning of February, and was already doing badly financially. Everyone he thought he had already agreed payment with, from Ce Soir to Lifo, was now shying away from paying him for his work.
But he was not happy with his work either. The American director thought Capa was his employee and did not allow him to shoot freely, so he got bored. In October 1938, he returned to Spain. “Where have you been?” asked André Malraux in Barcelona.
On 16 October 1938, Capa set off for Falset, a small village more than 100 kilometres from Barcelona. Here, the international brigades made their last stop before leaving Spain. The weather was sultry, although already autumnal. A brass band played, not very appropriate for this ceremony, and the brigades marched past the tribune of honour: the 300 remaining fighters of the Lincoln Battalion, out of the 4 000 that had been there at the start, 150 volunteers of the Thelmann Battalion, heroes of the Madrid defence and exiles from their homeland, followed by columns of Yugoslavs, Czechs, Austrians, English, Poles and others.
Volunteers who risked their lives for Spain have already handed in their weapons. Eight days later, the International Brigades were officially disbanded. They were to say goodbye to the population in Barcelona, but no one announced when, as the authorities feared an air attack by nationalists. Nevertheless, the 300 000 inhabitants of Barcelona quickly filled the streets, throwing flowers, crying, waving their arms and greeting those who were leaving. Capa rushed alongside the column and pulled the trigger. Of the 18,000 members of the international brigades that had been there at the beginning, only 7,000 now remained. Capa knew that the Republic was finished, its territory now limited to the part of Catalonia with Barcelona, Madrid and its immediate surroundings, and the territory stretching from Valencia almost to Malaga.
Two days after the Barcelona parade, the Nationalists launched a strong offensive along the Ebro River, and soon afterwards the river valley was theirs. For the Republic, all hope of a good end to the war was over. On 6 November, a party was held at the Majestic Hotel to celebrate the anniversary of the October Revolution, and Capa, Hemingway, Malraux and a few other journalists found themselves together. Capa provided food and drinks and looked up at the full moon sky: “It’s a night for bombers,” he remarked. Indeed, they had experienced two bombings that night and watched them from the hotel roof.
Then, a well-known singer from Asturias sang the fight song Viva la Quince Brigada. A minute’s silence followed to honour all those who died for Spain. The next morning Hemingway drove to the border and then to Perpignan, France. For him, the war was over, and Capa went to the front to Ebro, where the Republicans were preparing an attack. He joined a company of Asturians he knew from other battles.
The men around him were rising from the tunnels, falling backwards, stricken and howling in pain. The fighting lasted all day and his troops only retreated at night. His camera contained photographs that looked nothing like the ones he had taken when he first arrived in Spain. They were shallow, chaotic, hastily taken, badly framed and incorrectly lit – but they were such that they showed what war was like. He sent them to Paris and they became a sensation. Life was printed on two pages, Regards on five and Match on seven.
But the Republican offensive was a fiasco, leaving 15,000 dead. The last Republican troops retreated across the last bridge over the Ebro, blowing it up behind them. Capa returned to Paris from Barcelona at the beginning of December 1938 completely exhausted. “I think I’m going to have a nervous breakdown,” he said.
On 3 January 1939, the Nationalists crossed the River Ebro and began to approach Barcelona. Capa returned to Barcelona once more to film for Match, Picture Post and Life. “Things are not as bad as they say in the newspapers. Barcelona will endure,” his friends told him. But refugees from Tarragona, only 100 kilometres from Barcelona, were already arriving in the city with culas, suitcases, on carts or on foot, and the city itself was experiencing constant air raids. The government had already withdrawn from the city to Gerona to the north.
And then the people of Barcelona started fleeing. So Capa and two other foreign correspondents started to retreat towards the border and Capa filmed, filmed and filmed some more. The telephones were no longer working, but finally the official communiqué announced “Barcelona has fallen into enemy hands”. The next day the French police opened the border and the first of the 400,000 refugees went into exile. Later, a refugee of more than 90 years described her journey into exile:
“Planes appeared above us, dropping bombs. The road was full, full, full of people, vehicles and animals… We didn’t want to go to France, but to the countryside to stay with the peasants on the Spanish side. Then the lorries came for the women and children, but they were already full. We arrived in France on 7 February and we were 25 kilometres from the border.
It was a sunny day. The road was full of people and police and we were stopped. There was nothing for us in the Argelés camp, not even bathrooms, nothing. They were not expecting us. Then we saw a bread truck arrive and people crowded around it. There was no organisation. They threw bread at us as if we were dogs. They threw it from the truck on the ground and we picked it up.
Then the barbed wire trucks arrived, and we didn’t know what the barbed wire was for. Thousands, thousands of us stood there. Even at the beginning there were 75,000 of us. There was only sand and sea. We were on the edge of the sea. So they fenced us in with barbed wire, at least two metres high, and we were locked in.”
Meanwhile, Capa was depressed in Paris: “Everyone is in their pants and scared to death of Hitler,” he said of the atmosphere in the French capital. Then, in March, news began to filter in of the impossible conditions in the camps set up by the French government for Republican refugees near Perpignan. Journalists were banned from the vicinity of the camps. But Capa, under a different name, only managed to get permission from the police to visit some of the camps.
The refugees lived in hastily and poorly built huts without heating, many of them sleeping in caves dug in the sand. Most were in light clothes that did not protect them from the cold wind coming in from the sea. The dirty, the malnourished and the sick were mercilessly mowed down by death. Capa managed to secretly take a few photos, which were published by Picture Post and a Swedish magazine, but that was it. For Europe, the Spanish War was over and nobody cared anymore.
On 27 March 1939, Madrid surrendered to Nationalist troops without resistance, and on 1 April Franco declared the war over. The hunt for the supporters of the Republic was on. Over the following months, 50,000 people were shot and the killing continued for several years. Robert Capa went to America at the outbreak of the Second World War, returned to England and followed events in North Africa, Sicily and Italy as a war photographer.
On 6 June 1944, he landed in Normandy in the first wave of invading troops and took some of the most brutal and shocking photographs. In 1947, together with a few friends, he founded Magnum, the world’s first photographic agency. In the 1950s, Life magazine asked him to go to Indochina, where the French were fighting the Vietnamese. On 25 May 1954, he accompanied a French regiment infiltrating into the danger zone. He got out of his off-road car and went further down the road to take photographs of the infiltrating French troops. He stepped on an infantry mine, which dislocated his left leg and made a hole in his chest. He was quickly rushed to a local hospital but was dead on arrival.
“The way he lived is the way he died. Fast, dangerous and full,” said a friend. All that remains is his memory and, of course, his lost Mexican suitcase.
