Historia de Barcelona

Etiqueta: barcelona

  • PSUC y la Generalidad intentan de hacer olvidar las Jornadas de Mayo

    [Diario Lois Cusick] In the wake of the May tragedy, «the P.S.U.C. and the Generalitat mounted one … event after another … We had a week devoted to the Battle of the Egg (La lluita de l’ou). This was a four-year plan to make Barcelona self-sufficient in eggs by having a chicken on every balcony. Then, the first week of June, we had Book Week. The carnival revolutionists filled the Ramblas with colorful bookstalls selling old parchment manuscripts from the burnt-out churches and new bright paperbacks of communist-approved authors. No more Kropotkin or Bakunin. This was the week we learned the Russians had arrested Bob Smillie of the P.O.U.M.’s [English] I.L.P. column while he was in Valencia.»

  • La Batalla del Huevo causa problemas de convivencia

    [E]n esta Barcelona en que hoy vivimos, en la Barcelona de «la batalla del huevo», en que cada galería, cada balcón, cada terrado, se ha convertido en gallinero incipiente, los gallos cantan cuando les da la gana, cada uno a hora distinta o todos a coro a todas las horas, desde que anochece hasta que sale el sol…

    ¡En fin!… Es molesto… pero soportable. En la retaguardia de una guerra tan atroz como la nuestra, no se puede hablar de molestias, sino es burla, burlando, más para señalarlas, que para quejarse de ellas… Ahora: esa multiplicidad de corrales improvisados, esa aglomeración de gallinas, y pollos, y conejos en espacios reducidos, en núcleos ciudadanos de gran densidad, sin las indispensables condiciones de espacio y aireación, ¿no nos traerán, ahora que entra, de lleno, el verano, consecuencias más graves, más irreparables que la molestia del canto de los gallos al amanecer? Ya se advierte en Barcelona una invasión de moscas digna de los valles andorranos y se perciben emanaciones poco gratas… «Evitemos que la batalla del huevo se convierta en la guerra del tifus» nos dice un lector. Y su advertencia nos parece atinadísima.

    Pues la campaña de la «batalla del huevo» tuvo, sin duda, otra intención que la de convertir en corrales todos los balcones y todas las galerías. Y a esa intención—estricta—debe limitarse el ciudadano celoso, a un mismo tiempo de su alimentación… y de su higiene.

  • Companys deniega permiso a los anarquistas para conmemorar el aniversario del inicio de la Guerra Civil

    Catalonian anarchists supporting the Leftist Government of Premier Dr. Juan Negrin asked leave to stage anti-Fascist rallies and parades on the first birthday of Spain’s civil war last week, but were sternly repressed. Catalonia’s President Luis Companys cared to risk no street riots among his Communist, Anarchist, Socialist and Republican supporters, and anyhow Leftist Spain was grimly straining every resource in its first large offensive of the war.

  • 52 muertos en bombardeos aéreos

    52 muertos en bombardeos aéreos, de los cuales 48 identificados y 4 no.

  • Langston Hughes: un bombardeo aéreo

    HUGHES BOMBED IN SPAIN
    Tells of Terror of Fascist Raid
    Women, Children Huddled in Fear as Bombs Explode
    By LANGSTON HUGHES
    MADRID, Spain–I came down from Paris by train. We reached Barcelona at night. The day before there had been a terrific air raid in the city, killing almost a hundred persons in their houses and wounding a great many more. We read about it in the papers at the border: AIR RAID OVER BARCELONA.
    «Last night!» I thought, «Well, tonight I’ll be there.»
    […]
    It was almost midnight when we got to Barcelona. There were no lights in the town, and we came out of the station into pitch darkness. A bus took us to the hotel. It was a large hotel several stories hight which, before the Civil War, had been a fashionable stopping place for tourists.
    We had rooms on an upper floor. The desk clerk said that in case of air-raids we might come down into the lobby, but that a few floors more or less wouldn’t make much difference. The raids were announced by siren, but guests would be warned by telephone as well. That night there was no bombing, so we slept in peace.
    [The next day.]
    At midnight, the public radios began to blare forth the war-news, and people gathered in large groups on corners to hear it. Then the cafe closed and we went to the hotel. I had just barely gotten to my room and had begun to undress when the low extended wail of the siren began, letting us know that the fascist planes were coming. (They come from Mallorca across the sea at terrific speed, drop their bombs, and circle away into the night again.)
    Quickly, I put on my shirt, passed Guillén’s room, and together we started downstairs. Suddenly all the lights went out in the hotel, but we heard people rushing down the halls and stairways in the dark. A few had flashlights with them to find the way. Some were visibly frightened. In the lobby two candles were burning, casting weird, giantlike shadows on the walls.
    In an ever increasing wail the siren sounded louder and louder, droning its deathly warning. Suddenly it stopped. By then the lobby was full of people, men, women, and children, speaking in Spanish, English, and French. In the distance we heard a series of quick explosives.
    «Bombs?» I asked.
    «No, anti-aircraft gun,» a man explained.
    Everyone was very quiet. Then we heard the guns go off again.
    «Come here,» the man called, leading the way. Several of us went out on the balcony where, in the dark, we could see searchlights playing across the sky. Little round puffs of smoke from the anti-aircraft shells floated against the stars. In the street a few women hurried along to public bomb-proof cellars.
    Then for a long while nothing happened. After about an hour, the lights suddenly came on in the hotel again as a signal that the danger had passed.

  • Citando a Ignacio de Loyola, el gobierno español se muda a Barcelona

    … for the first time in modern history, a Spanish Government moved to Barcelona, the second move of the Leftist Government since the war started. Plenty of government bureaus remained in overcrowded Valencia. Signaling the move, Minister of the Interior Julian Zugazagoita made a radio speech containing two statements, neither of which would have been possible year ago when the Leftist Government first moved to Valencia:

    «The Government planned to go to Barcelona as early as last November but decided temporarily on Valencia. . . . Barcelona now in its turn has the significance of showing the clear fidelity of the Government toward Catalonia.

    «The Government is not obliged to appeal for obedience, but has the right to impose it. … We have come to agree with the sage formula of that exceptional captain of Christ, Saint Ignatius de Loyola, who imposed on his disciples silent obedience ‘until death.’ The task must be accomplished. We must win by our own strength alone.»

    Last November an admission that the Madrid Government dared not move to the then anarchist-ridden Catalan Barcelona, or words of praise for the founder of the powerful, much-feared Jesuit order, would have been tantamount to treason.

  • Pérdidas en Teruel, misa secreta en Barcelona

    Feia més dun any que la guerra durava. Cada dia que passava les privacions eren més grans, i la fe de molts trontollava. Havíem ja vist caure i desaparèixer a tants dels nostres millors!

    Per acabar-ho d’adobar, els diaris i les ràdios d’aquells dies anaven plens de la batalla de Terol, que es desenrotllava sota uns elements completament desfavorables. El fred i les nevades més terribles s’havien ensenyorit d’aquells paratges erms, i la lluita era ferotge, apocalíptica… Els diaris parlaven de conquestes i d’avanços que a voltes resultaven imaginaris. El Mansueto, l’estació del ferrocarril, el seminari, fins es parlava ja de la plaça «del Torico», aquella plaça irregular, porticada, amb tant regust de poble, on encara unes setmanas abans d’esclatar la revolta, m’hi havia passejat per sota les seves voltes tant plenes d’encisos, enmig de la jovenalla riallera i sorollosa que sempre han estat els aragonesos.

    No ens ho crèiem… Terol resistiria, Terol no es podia perdre… I amb aquesta esperança vàrem passar aquell Nadal, trist també, perquè encara no vèiem la fi de la nostra tragèdia.

    Un consol inefable vareig tenir enmig de tanta tribulació. En la tarda d’aquell Nadal, gràcies a un de tants sacerdots a qui no s’agraïrà mai la serena valentia en complir la seva santa missió en aquells dies de dol i de misèria, vareig pogué rebre la sagrada Comunió.

  • Nieva

    Grandes olas de frío entre finales de este año y febrero de 1938, memorables en la zona turolense en medio de la Batalla del Ebro. En Barcelona nevó el día 31 de diciembre, acumuló 5 centimetros.

  • Aurora boreal vista desde Tibidabo, confusión en el frente de Aragón

    The 1938 aurora borealis

    The «aurora borealis» is a luminescent meteor, a phenomenon that frequently happens in areas close to the North Pole and which can also be seen in rather exceptional circumstances in regions of Central Europe. So the aurora borealis that could quite clearly be seen from the Pyrenees, and even from the top of the Tibidabo hill in Barcelona, on the 25th of January 1938, was an absolutely unusual occurrence. It was in fact a unique experience. There are no known accounts of any other event of that kind at such meridional latitudes.

    Furthermore, the phenomenon took place in the midst of war, thus causing terrible confusion and shock among the soldiers who were fighting on the Aragonese front. (…)

  • Cuatro días de nevada

    Empezó el 15 de febrero, con tormenta y una acumulación de 13 centímetros. Siguió al día siguiente aunque más ligeramente y los dos días siguientes también nevó pero poco.

  • Edwin Rolfe: los bombardeos de principios de marzo

    [March 10, 1938, carta a su mujer, Mary]

    Less than a week ago there were nine air bombardments over the city in a period of 25 or 26 hours. They come at night these days, when it’s hard to sight them. In the evening mostly – and the first thing you hear is the muffled sound of an explosion, maybe two or three – the first bombs. Then the much sharper crack of anti-air guns is heard, and the worst sound of all, the warning signal begins to screech. If you go downstairs to the entrance of the house, which most of us do, you see the flares in the sky, and the momentary splotches of light; and the sky is criss-crossed with light beams trying to locate the bombers. And then the central power control shuts off all the light in the city, and we’re in complete darkness… [Aerial] bombardment is a little more terrifying [than the artillery barrages he had experienced in Madrid]… You never know where they are and in which direction they’re going. And even the tougher-minded remember what a building looks like after a 400-pound bomb has struck. You have to be calm about it; and you remember that there are 1,600,000 people in this refugee-swollen city, and that it will take more bombs than the fascists have to even make a dent in a city as large as this and on a population as big. But young women and old women can’t take it calmly; they cry in a soft, low, terribly-scared sort of whimper. Sometimes the kids cry too, but not so often; they generally play around with each other as if there’s nothing going on, and if their mothers let them, they go out to watch the searchlights in the sky.

  • Edwin Rolfe: los bombardeos del 16 de marzo

    A week later [Edwin] Rolfe writes (without mailing) a long letter to Leo about another series of raids. Given the risk of being in a collapsing building, the people where Rolfe is living dig a makeshift trench in the yard, some seven feet deep at points. It would be of no use in a direct hit, but it gives some sense of security. When the air raid sirens sound, they go downstairs and lie in the trench looking up at the sky:

    The moon was full again, and enabled us to see the planes, thousands of feet high, on one of the raids. Another time they descended so low that we could hear their motors. They hit a church, about a block and a half away from us, and we went over and saw them remove a dead body and two women, one with her foot amputated, the other with her thigh ending in a stump of blood at the knee… This morning’s paper says 400 dead and 600 wounded, and that’s only a preliminary count… The sound of an explosion close by, or the sight of a man lying on the street covered with a blanket, blood slowly oozing away from him, or the whistle of a bomb descending, is horrible.

  • Llegan 10 aviones de Stalin

    Thrifty Joseph Stalin belatedly bet another blue chip on the Spanish Loyalists last week in the form of ten splendid Soviet warplanes. Tons of other Soviet war paraphernalia have reached the Leftists in the past month via France. Amid wild cheering in recently bombed Barcelona, Soviet war birds in mass formation darkened the sky and last week the Leftist Cabinet reorganized itself for a last-minute effort to crawl between the jaws of defeat and wrench out the tonsils of victory.

  • El futuro líder de los conservadores británicos habla en Radio Barcelona

    I did not quite know what I was going to find, as this was our first experience of actual warfare … I imagined we might come to a wrecked city and find a terror-stricken people, haggard and worn … with rioting and looting and feelings running high … What we did find surprised us all … Everything is perfectly normal, life is going on almost as usual … people thronging the streets, sitting in cafes, laughing and talking with far from long faces … the liberty of the individual has impressed me greatly … There are no secret courts here. During the raids the same calmness and normal behaviour continues … people go quietly to a shelter, there is no sign of panic. But they realise what it all means, as people who have never seen them never can realise … the destruction of defenceless men, women, and children, bombed in unprotected villages, is most ghastly … I have seen the planes 200 feet above my head, heard the bombs, and the village I had passed through five minutes before was in ruins … Yet still the morale of the people is untouched.

  • Cómo Gran Bretaña puede aprender de los bombardeos de Barcelona

    To drive home how enormously more horrible the next World War will be than its predecessor, Professor Haldane cited cold figures: «Between January 1917 and November 1918, German aeroplanes dropped 71 tons of bombs on England. These killed 837 people. . . . On March 16-19, 1938, 41 tons of bombs were dropped on Barcelona by German and Italian aeroplanes. They killed about 1,300 people.»

    Thus, had the bombing of Barcelona continued at this maximum intensity for even one full week, both the total weight of bombs dropped and the total casualties in this city would have considerably exceeded what all England suffered in its worst 95 weeks of actual war. Measured thus coldly, the «horrors of bombing» have increased in 20 years nearly 10,000%.

    […]

    «The first air raids may not be on Central London at all but on the traffic jams around it,» warns Professor Haldane. «In Spain, at any rate, the German airmen seem to prefer to attack concentrated traffic, whether on wheel or on foot, rather than to bomb buildings, when they have the choice. … In Barcelona one dives for the nearest shelter, leaving one’s car in the street with the ignition key in place, so that it may be used by officials if necessary. … I would far rather be in Central London during a big air raid than in a traffic jam on the Barnet Bye-Pass or the Great West Road.»

  • Ultimo desfile de las Brigadas Internacionales en Barcelona

    Herbert Matthews, sobre la última parada de los hombres demacrados, enfermos y desharrapados de las Brigadas Internacionales en Barcelona el 28 de octubre de 1938:

    They were not clad in spic-and-span uniforms; their garb was nondescript; they had no arms, and they could not seem to keep in step or in line. But every one who saw them–and above all those who fought with them–knew that these were true soldiers.

  • Última parada de las Brigadas Internacionales en Barcelona

    Hoping to stir the League of Nations to order out the German and Italian troops in Franco’s army, Negrín sent home the International Brigades. On November 15, the foreign volunteers who were still alive paraded through Barcelona, while Negrín gave them thanks and La Pasionaria saluted them: «You can go proudly! You are history! You are legend!» Mussolini in response withdrew some Italian soldiers but left the majority in Spain. Hitler heeded Franco’s pleas for more arms on condition that Germany get critical Spanish mining rights.

  • Misa de Gallo en Calatayud a la espera del asalto final a Barcelona

    Quan les campanes de les diferents esglésies de Calatayud cridaven a missa de mitja nit en el Nadal de 1938, vareig sentir un goig que era impossible d’esplicar, i que no podien entendre els que sempre havien celebrat aquella diada.

    Davant del nostre quartel general, instal·lat en el casino principal de Calatayud, hi havia l’església de Sant Pere. Allí vàrem anar a oir la Missa del Gall la majoria dels que formàvem el «Cuartel General del Ejército de Levante» que comanava el tan recordat General Orgaz.

    Abans s’ens havia repartit un lot de llaminadures que la benemèrita organització de Fronts i Hospitals enviaba a tots els combatents d’Espanya en la nit de Nadal. Vull copiar aquí la seva composició, que l’he guardat en un vell carnet de notes d’aquells dies: Una capsa de codonyat, un troç de torró de massapà, un pot de mermelada, un paquet de cigarretes, un puro, caramels i admetlles, mitja lliure de xacolata, paper d’escriure i una ampolla de conyac per cada quatre soldats, amb la que poguérem curullar el reglamentari «janillo» per dues vegades.

    Després d’uns mesos de no tenir casa, ni família, ni posseir el més necessari, el gest d’aquelles noies i dames de la reraguardia, preocupant-se dels anònims soldats del front, era una cosa que arribava al fons de l’ànima.

    Aquell Nadal era ademés ple d’esperances. En la nit del dia abans–aquell 23 de desembre que havia de marcar una de les més lluminoses fites de la nostra guerra,–s’havia iniciat una ofensiva i precisament en la direcció que nosaltres, catalans, tant desitjàvem. L’avanç que s’iniciava per davant de Balaguer, no havia de parar fins arrivar a Port-Bou!…

    Feia dies que en els nostres meis, sentíem parlar de la operació «Turrón». (Aquest era el nom militar amb què després sabérem es volia designar l’ofensiva de Catalunya.) Però no crèiem que el «Turrón» amb tot i tan desitjar-lo, arrivés a tenir l’extensió i l’importància que tingué.

    Quant uns mesos després en que la pau ja era un fet a tot Espanya, pujava les rústegues escaletes que condueixen al santuari de la Vergé de la Penya, patrona de Calatayud, per a despedir-me i remerciar-la, encara recordava el tel d’emoció que cobria els meus ulls en la Missa del Gall d’aquell Nadal inoblidable, en el que pressentia palpablement, que dintre uns dies o setmanes, podríem tornar a les nostres llars, i allí refer les nostres vides capgirades per les malvestats passades en aquells tres anys.

  • Antonio Machado deja Barcelona para la frontera

    Ante el avance de los nacionalistas, en marzo [de 1938] se traslada a Barcelona. Machado se instala provisionalmente en el hotel Majestic y, a los pocos días, se aloja en la torre Castañer (en el paseo de San Gervasio). Prosigue sus colaboraciones en Hora de España … y comienza su serie de artículos en La Vanguardia con el título «Desde la mirador de la guerra»…

    El día 22 de enero [de 1939] marcha con su familia y junto a otros intelectuales en dirección a la frontera de Francia, adonde llegan tras duras penalidades el día 27. La frontera es un éxodo. Antonio Machado, enfermo, tiene 64 años; su madre Ana Ruiz que le acompaña, 88. El paso de la frontera es a pie y bajo la lluvia que cae en este fatídico día, junto a una multitud de gente… El día 29 de enero, Machado, su madre y su inseparable hermano José llegan a Collioure, instalándose en el hotel Bougnol-Quintana (Machado declina diversos ofrecimientos de asilo, entre ellos el de trasladarse a la URSS). En febrero, Machado cae enfermo, agravándose el día 18. El día 22 de este mes, muere…; tres días después moría también su madre. Ambos fueron enterrados en el cementerio del pueblecito de Collioure.

  • André Malraux, los nacionales, y los persas de Esquilo

    «Els perses!», va exclamar en francès André Malraux des de Montjuïc en veure els focs de les avançades de Franco, poc abans de l’ocupació. Malraux es trobava a Barcelona des de juliol del 1938, on rodava als estudis Orfea algunes escenes de Sierra de Teruel, basada en la seva obra L’espoir, i va haver d’interrompre la filmació el 24 de gener a causa de l’arribada imminent de les tropes franquistes, i marxar a França, a Joinville, on hi havia uns estudis cinematogràfics, a acabar la pel·licula. L’exclamació, recollida per Max Aub en el seu llibre sobre la pel·licula, en què també va participar, és explicada d’aquesta manera per l’escriptor: «[Malraux] recordaba la representación famosa de la tragedia de Esquilo en la que, según la leyenda, el actor que encarnaba Jerjes cayó atravesado por una flecha enemiga al denunciar la llegada de sus adversarios».

    Però no tots els barcelonins veien arribar els perses ni veien propera la destrucció de l’Acropolis. Els barcelonins que es van quedar van rebre els ocupants amb sentiments molt diversos, segons les seves simpaties polítiques.