In the mid 1930s, Williamsburg’s Jewish community was not only focused on the economic hardships that they were suffering during the Great Depression. They were also keenly aware of the rising fascist tide sweeping across Europe. They saw that Fascists scapegoated Jews for the economic crisis engulfing the world. In January 1933 Adolph Hitler came to power in Germany and quickly began to take the first steps in persecuting Gemany’s Jews.
Williamsburg’s Jews loudly protested Hitler’s actions. On March 29, 1933 there was a meeting of 1,800 Williamsburg Jews who demanded that Congress pass legislation for immediate entry of German Jews into the U.S. There was also a solidarity parade in which more than 1,000 people marched through the neighborhood, including many Jewish veterans of World War I.
Far earlier than most Americans, Williamsburg’s Jews saw that a titanic conflict between Fascism and its opponents was brewing and many supported the Soviet Union and Communism as an enemy of fascism and they felt that they had to choose a side in the approaching conflict. The rise and fascism and the desperation caused by the Great Depression pushed many Williamsburgers to join the Communist Party.
The first large-scale armed conflict that erupted between Fascists and anti-Fascists erupted in July 1936 in Spain when Fascist Spanish generals started an armed rebellion against the leftist government of the Spanish Republic. The Spanish generals quickly received military aid from Fascist Italy and Germany, while the Spanish Republic received the military assistance of the Soviet Union. The Spanish Civil War became a proxy war between world fascism and Communism.
The Soviet Union aided the Republic and International Brigades were recruited and organized by the Communist International (the Comintern), which quickly responded to the foreigners arriving in Spain to fight for the Republic. For Stalin, who was concerned at the extent of German and Italian help for the rebels and its potential to weaken France strategically, the International Brigades offered a means to support the Spanish Republican Army short of direct armed intervention by Soviet forces, thus not alienating Britain and France who had pledged neutrality in the conflict.
The Communist Party began to recruit the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, the American wing of the International Brigades The Communist Party paid for volunteers to sail to France and then they were smuggled in groups over the Pyrenees. Of the approximately 3,000 volunteers from the United States who formed the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, some estimates suggest that one-third were Jewish and half were New Yorkers. At least two-dozen volunteers were from Willliamsburg.
Many were children of European immigrants, who had arrived in the U.S. during the early years of the century. They had received an “Americanized” education in school, but still felt family ties to Europe. Most volunteers came from large cities, where immigrants had settled. In addition, two-thirds of the volunteers were Communists. But many Jews were not Communists and went to Spain to fight back against Nazis and fascists. “I am as good [an] antifascist as any Communist,” wrote one volunteer to his commissar. “I have reason to be. I am a Jew and that is the reason I came to Spain. I know what it means to my people if fascism should win. “
The Lincoln Battalion was organized in January 1937 as part of the XVth International Brigade. After less than two months of training the Lincolns went into action. Not all the Williamsburgers who served were males. Bertha Kipness, and thirty-five year old Russian born female and a member of the Communist Party served as a nurse.
The Lincolns suffered heavy losses during the Battle of Jarama. On February 27, 1937 the unit lost two-thirds of its strength including their commander, Robert Hale Merriman (who was badly wounded), in a futile assault on Nationalist positions. Again and again, high-level commanders ordered Lincolns into attacks that officers in the field warned would be suicidal. The Lincolns’ sacrifices rarely won the Republic any tactical advantage, and foreign volunteers in Spain were “killed at nearly three times the rate of other Republican soldiers.
A number of Willaimsburgers were casualties in the battle of Jarama. Benjamin Martin Martell from Hewes Street was a Communist Party member February 27, 1937, who was killed in action. Not all of the Wiliamsburgers fighting in the battle were Jews. There were Poles and Ukrainians too. Walter Zaionz from McKibbin Street. was a radio operator who was captured at Jarama and killed by the Fascists in 1937 when he was only twenty-one years old. Frank Grodski from Wythe Avenue was also captured.
Williamsburg’s Anti-Stalinist Bertram Wolfe visited Spain. In 1937, the American Communist opposition decided to send someone to Spain to get a close-up of the Spanish Civil War and to get a message to the president of the General Workers Union Largo, Caballero. They chose Bert Wolfe. When he received his passport stamped in it were the words- not valid for Spain. He got credentials from Mexico as a journalist and decided to sneak into Spain. He sailed for France in February 1937. He traveled to the south of France and then found a guide who led him over the Pyrenees. When he arrived in Madrid Franco and the Fascists were beginning their siege of the city. When he reached his hotel the sound of cannon fire and small arms kept him up. He went to the hotel Florida to see a journalist and bumped into Ernest Hemmingway who invited him up to his room for a drink of scotch though it was still only ten A.M. Hemmingway said, I always drank scotch whenever I find a good fellow to drink it with.: He had a drawer filled with all kinds of good scotch and Hemmingway poured Wolfe a drink. Hemmingway told Wolfe that he and the writer John Dos Passos were heading to the south of Spain to make a documentary on the Spanish Civil War. Wolfe and Hemmingway clashed when the famous novelist told him of his admiration for the Soviet Union and Wolfe explained to him how the Soviets planned to weaken all non-Communist fascist opposition to the Fascists in order to create a Soviet style Communist state. He was close enough to the front to visit Republican soldiers in their trenches and had to be warned to bend down lest he get shot by a sniper.
At the start of the 1930s documentary films did not yet exist in America. America;s left had just become painfully aware of the human tragedy that was unfolding during Spain’s Civil War. Herbert Kline, one of the many American intellectuals who wanted to document Fascist atrocities, arrived in Spain during the Civil War. Kline started working for a Loyalist radio station in Madrid, when he was approached by Geza Karpathi, a Hungarian photographer, who asked if he was interested in making a film about the conflict, though neither man even knew how to load a camera at the time. Amazingly, these two untrained filmmakers would be part of the birth of American documentary film making.
The two amateur filmmakers met Dr. Norman Bethune, a Canadian physician who gave up his practice to join the loyalists in Madrid and help create a much-needed blood bank. They realized that Bethune would serve as an excellent focal point for a film. Kline virtually lived with Bethune’s medical unit, capturing extremely raw footage of Bethune’s work bringing blood by ambulance to field hospitals that saved soldiers’ lives, but the men behind the camera were amateurs whose primitive and shaky shots were a far cry from a movie.
Crafting the rough footage and still shots into a film presented a daunting challenge on a number of levels, the first of which was its very short length, but luckily Kline had a friend from Williamsburg named Leo Hurwitz.
A first generation American, Hurwitz was a passionate anti-Fascist who grew up in poverty with a passion for social justice. Hurwitz was bright enough to win a scholarship competition to enter Harvard. Although Hurwitz excelled at Harvard and graduated summa cum laude, he was not granted an international merit-based fellowship for which he had applied. His tutor, among others, claimed his rejection was based in Anti-Semitism, because of Hurwitz’ Jewish background. Hurwitz left academia and soon became interested in filmmaking. Along with other progressive filmmakers, Hurwitz formed Nykino, a producers’ cooperative that sought to combine artistic cinematography with a meaningful social and political message.
In 1936, Hurwitz transformed Nykino into Frontier Films, the first nonprofit documentary production company in the United States. Hurwitz and Paul Strand, his partner at Frontier Films, drew materials from newsreels as well as other sources to add to Klein and Karpathi’s raw footage, including work of Russian cameraman and film director, Roman Karmen. With the additional material, they “scenarized” the footage and created a narrative structure Klein and Karpathi’s material lacked.
There was also a second, much larger problem: the shakiness of the original footage, which presented a large hurdle. Hurwitz, however, considered this problem an artistic challenge – and his solution would have far-reaching implications for the development of documentary film. What Hurwtiz and Strand accomplished in solving the problem amounted to nothing less than a huge leap ahead for American filmmaking. Hurwitz explained his solution in a 1990 interview:
“It was an extraordinary problem. How do you handle material that is shaky and prevent it from feeling shaky on the screen? This involved very delicate cutting, using a shake to translate into another shot. This was the first sound film anyway in which I was able to focus the film, to be able to shape it in a way I felt was necessary. That was the real beginning, and it was a very stimulating and marvelous experience; very intense.”
Strand and Hurwitz also created a new documentary style “the structure of need,” which brought a powerful emotional center to the film, showing a series of needs, an obstacle to those needs being met, and then a resolution. “Heart of Spain” used a brilliantly simple, but emotionally powerful, dialectal structure. Hurwitz explained:
“The film opens with bombed buildings, Madrid in ruins—‘Blood has been spilled here.’ The war is treated in its effect on people, the spilling of blood. Then a sequence of normal living in the midst of war—people walking around, carts going by. This creates a need for life to go in spite of the torn city. Then there is an explosion and the first scenes of the fascist attack on Madrid—people running through the smoke-filled streets, children dug out of bomb craters. Again you return to a scene of a ‘normal’ city during war—recruits being trained, children playing at defense. Positive and negative needs are created in the audience….Such feelings derive from the actual experience of life in a city during war. In this way, as when you have a plot, which actuates needs and empathy, one moves through the film identifying with the needs of the Spanish people to renew life in their fight against the fascists. When the actual blood transfusion sequence begins, a thematic basis for the film has already been constructed, which weaves together the specifics of medical aid with the social struggle. From this point on, the detailed events—what happens to the blood from donor to wounded soldier—carry with them the larger metaphor…And when you have defined that, then the relation of people in the blood episode becomes much more meaningful, because the nature of working together, of comradeship, becomes symbolized by the blood transfusion service.”
The film was wildly successful. Heart of Spain was Frontier’s first completed project, made with the goal of encouraging Americans to donate blood to Spanish Loyalists. The film ran for nearly two months in New York following its successful Hollywood premiere. It later toured North America as part of a road show promoting the Republican cause with two specially-decorated military ambulances that transported the film, a projection crew, and a nurse from town to town. About two million viewers saw the film in the 1930s and the film helped strengthen the Republican cause in America considerably.
The battalion remained in the lines and was slowly rebuilt while maintaining its front-line trenches. The unit was pulled out of the lines for a brief rest before the offensive at Brunete. The Battle of Brunete started on July 6th and ended–July 25th 1937. The battle, fought fifteen miles west of Madrid, was a Republican attempt to alleviate the pressure on the capital exerted by the Fascists Although initially successful, the Republicans were forced to retreat from Brunete and suffered devastating casualties from the battle.
A number of Williamsburgers were victims in the fighting. Joe and Sam Stone who were members of the Young Communist League that met on Tompkins Avenue were killed in the futile attempt to lift the siege of Madrid. John Piekarski from 345 Wythe Avenue was captured during the retreat from Belchite. Ivan Nahanchuk, a Ukrainian painter from South Third Street was wounded in action. Stanley Etela a thirty- year-old Finnish American from Metropolitan Avenue was also wounded in action in the battle.
The Battle of the Ebro was the bloodiest battle of the Civil War. Tens of thousands of men were butchered between July and November 1938. The defeat spelled disaster for the Republic as it effectively finished the state’s chances of resistance to Franco’s armies. In 1937 the Republic embarked on an offensive in Aragon with the goal of taking the regional capital Zaragoza, which also served as the Nationalists’ communications hub for the entire Aragon front. The Republican goals were to take pressure off the Northern sector by forcing Franco to redeploy troops to the area and to take the vital city of Zaragoza. In the disastrous offensive lasting only two weeks, they failed not only to take Zaragoza, but even to draw Franco’s attention from the hard-pressed north.
The debacle involved many locals. Sylvester Zajac 34years old from McKibbin Street drowned during a retreat while trying to swim the Ebro. Morris Krangel, who was twenty-six years old from 406 South 4th Street was killed on October 13, 1937 at Fuentes de Ebro. Leo Gordon, who served in the offensive with his brother Joe, fought at Fuentes de Ebro and the battle of Teruel, where he was wounded in the face by shrapnel fragments. In March 1938, he was leading a mission to enable the Republican retreat by blocking the fascist advance when he was killed in action.
Leo Hecht a twenty-four year old from Rodney Street deserted and was held in a Spanish military prison. Upon his return he was prosecuted for a passport violation because during the war American citizens were forbidden from visiting Spain.
Near the end of the war The Republican government ordered all the international soldiers home, hoping in vain that Hitler and Mussolini would pull their forces out of Spain. The Americans who fought in Spain quietly returned home. They did not want to advertise their time in Spain for fear of prosecution. Spain fell to Franco who instituted years of fascist dictatorship. Few today know of the bravery and sacrifice of the Lincoln Brigade.
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