We Saw Spain Die (68 page)

Kurt Landau’s 42-year-old wife, the diminutive Katia, had been closely involved in his political activities in exile. She was arrested on 17 June on the orders of the Director General of Security, the Communist Colonel Antonio Ortega, and kept in custody until 29 November. Her detention was an attempt to flush out Landau who had gone into hiding. Despite his wife’s incarceration, Kurt Landau managed to remain at liberty until 23 September 1937, when he was abducted by Soviet agents from his hiding place. Like Rein and Wolf, he was never seen again.
¹⁰

The Republican Minister of Justice, the Basque Catholic Manuel Irujo initiated a judicial investigation into the disappearance of Nin. Another Basque, Julián Zugazagoitia, the Socialist Minister of the Interior, dismissed Colonel Ortega. The Communists were outraged but backed down when faced with threats of resignation from Zugazagoitia, Irujo and the Minister of War Indalecio Prieto. In the event, the rest of the POUM executive did not share the fate of their leader. Manuel Irujo ensured that Nin would be the last Spanish Trotskyist to be murdered although he was unable to control the persecution of foreign leftists by the Soviet security services. For the repression of the POUM, the government had created a Special Court for Espionage and High Treason but Irujo ensured that it would be made up of judges of the highest impartiality and probity.

Still in custody, Katia Landau was informed of her husband’s arrest. Comrades and friends made enquiries at the Comisariado General de Órden Público and at all the official prisons. It was to no avail. Even Ortega’s successor as Director General of Security, the Basque Socialist Paulino Gómez, was unable to ascertain the whereabouts of Kurt Landau. Katia demanded a judicial enquiry and when the authorities were unable to clarify the fate of her husband, she led a hunger strike of 500 in the women’s prison in Barcelona. The Minister of Justice visited her in person on 22 November, in hospital, and persuaded her that the trials of POUMistas would be fair. She was sufficiently impressed to call off the strike.

An international commission of enquiry led by John McGovern (General Secretary of the Independent Labour Party) and the French pacifist Professor Felicien Challaye went to Catalonia in November
1937 to investigate conditions in Republican prisons and to look into the disappearance of Andreu Nin, Erwin Wolf, Marc Rhein and Kurt Landau. John McGovern saw Katia:

Our next visit was to the General Hospital, where Katia Landau was a prisoner and patient after her hunger strike. She had been in prison for over five months; it was during her imprisonment that her husband was seized by the Cheka, tortured and murdered. In spite of her ordeal we found her full of fight. She was fierce in her antagonism to the Comintern and its Cheka in Spain. She is a little woman, only four feet ten inches in height and five stone eight pounds in weight, but full of idealism and energy. Katia had two armed guards at the hospital and no one could visit her without a permit.
¹¹

As a result of Irujo’s intervention, Katia was released on 29 November. However, on 8 December, she was re-arrested by a special squad in an unmarked car and taken to NKVD headquarters in the Passeig de Sant Joan. There she was interrogated by Leopold Kulcsar who told her that she would never leave the building alive. It was during these interrogations that Katia twice saw Ilsa and concluded that she too was an NKVD agent involved in the persecution of the foreign anti-Stalinists. Although Katia’s account of what happened to her was exact, her interpretation of what she saw can be seen to be erroneous when contrasted with Arturo Barea’s explanation of Ilsa’s presence in Barcelona.

When Arturo and Ilsa left Madrid in October 1937, they had gone to Alicante. There, in late November, they were alarmed to be asked to accompany two policemen to Valencia. They assumed that they were being arrested, although in fact they were the object of a search initiated by Leopold Kulcsar who was working with the security services, which had recently moved with the government from Valencia to Barcelona. Convinced that Ilsa had fallen in with a bad lot, he wanted both to check on her welfare and to try to win her back. He was working at the Spanish Embassy in Prague as press attaché to the Ambassador Luis Jiménez Asúa. According to Boris Volodarsky, he was already an
NKVD agent. He had been brought to Barcelona to assist in the interrogation of foreign anti-Stalinist Communists arrested in the wake of the May Days. Although Arturo feared that it was a trick to imprison or maybe execute them, it was in fact Leopold’s desire to see if he could get his wife back. Once there, Ilsa convinced him that their marriage was over and that she wanted to be with Arturo. Leopold saw that that she was happier with Arturo than she had ever been with him. With some dignity, he accepted the situation and offered to help them get papers to permit them to leave Spain. This involved lengthy dealings with the Servicio de Información Militar. Finally, their papers were ready and they went to SIM headquarters to collect them. Poldi was there.

While they were waiting in the office being used by Leopold, he questioned two women, the first unidentified and the second Katia Landau. She claimed that he boasted that he had come to Spain specifically to assist in the Landau case: ‘My historic mission is to provide proof that out of every twenty Trotskyists, eighteen are fascists, agents of Hitler and Franco’. He spoke about Kurt Landau with burning hatred, repeating constantly ‘I have come to take a bloody revenge on Landau. If one day he falls into my hands, I will make him pay dearly’. He had come specifically to take part in the interrogations from Prague where he was press officer in the Spanish Republican embassy. Katia believed that Leopold was trying to rise within the NKVD apparatus with success in the Landau case. She was eventually released on 29 December and, having been assured that Kurt was alive and in custody, would soon be released, deported to France.
¹²

Arturo Barea’s account corroborates that of Katia Landau with regard to Ilsa’s presence during her interrogation:

Another agent brought in another female prisoner, a small woman with taut, bitter features and the wide, dark eyes of a hunted animal. She went up to Ilsa: ‘You’re Ilsa – don’t you remember me – twelve years ago in Vienna?’ They shook hands, and I felt Ilsa go rigid in her chair; but Poldi began to interrogate, the perfect prosecutor in a revolutionary tribunal, and it seemed shameless for us to stay on. I thought I heard how
he made his voice ring in his own ears. He must have dreamed that scene; perhaps he had imagined it when he was imprisoned for his share in the great Austrian strike against the last war, an imaginative, uncertain, and ambitious boy. Now he did what he conceived to be his duty, and the terrible thing was that the power over others gave him pleasure. In the yellow light his eyes were hollow like a skull’s. After we had left the building (and I thought that I never wanted to see it again) he spent a long time explaining to Ilsa why he could no longer consider that woman a Socialist. The details escaped me; I had sympathy neither for the POUM nor for their persecution. Poldi might have been right. But however careful and convincing his argument, there was a streak of madness in him.
¹³

Paul Preston, 2009

1
   Sefton Delmer,
Trail Sinister. An Autobiography
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1961), pp. 264–8. Delmer had married Isabel Nichols in 1935. After they divorced, she later married the British composer Constant Lambert and after his death married another composer, Alan Rawsthorne, in 1955.

2
   
Daily Express,
21 July 1936.

3
   
Daily Express,
22 July 1936.

4
   
Daily Express,
27 July 1936.

5
   James M. Minifie,
Expatriate
(Toronto: Macmillan of Canada, 1976), p. 57.

6
   King to Eden, 1 August 1936, FO 371/20525. On King, see the splendid account by Maria Thomas, ‘The Front Line Albion’s Perfidy. Inputs into the Making of British Policy Towards Spain: The Racism and Snobbery of Norman King’,
International Journal of Iberian Studies,
vol. 20, no. 2.

7
   King to FO, 4, 6 August 1936, FO 371/20527, FO 371/20526; King to Eden, 26 August 1936, FO 371/20536.

8
   King to Seymour, 2 September, Seymour to King, 5 September, PRO FO371/20537, W10719/62/41; King to Western Department, 10 September, PRO FO371/20538, W11209/62/41; King to Roberts, 11 September 1936, PRO FO371/20539, W11527/62/41; King to Western Department, 3 October 1936, and enclosure, Companys to King, 30 September, PRO FO371/20542, W13083/62/41.

9
   
The Times,
23, 24 July 1936.

10
  Lawrence A. Fernsworth, ‘Terrorism in Barcelona Today’,
Washington Post,
10 June 1937; Lawrence Fernsworth, ‘Revolution on the Ramblas’, in Frank C. Hanighen (ed.),
Nothing but Danger
(New York: National Travel Club, 1939), pp. 28–9, 34–5; Lawrence Fernsworth,
Spain’s Struggle for Freedom
(Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1957), pp. 192–200.

11
  Lawrence Fernsworth, ‘Revolution on the Ramblas’, in Hanighen,
Nothing but Danger,
pp. 46–7.

12
  
Daily Mail,
13, 18 July 1936.

13
  
Daily Mail,
20 July 1936.

14
  
Daily Mail,
21 July 1936.

15
  
Daily Mail,
25 July 1936.

16
  
Daily Mail,
27, 28 July 1936.

17
  John Langdon-Davies,
Behind the Spanish Barricades
(London: Secker & Warburg, 1936), p. 97.

18
  L. Fernsworth,
Spain’s Struggle,
p. 188.

19
  Langdon-Davies,
Barricades,
p. 97.

20
  Cedric Salter,
Try-out in Spain
(New York: Harper Brothers, 1943), pp. 33–4, 68–9.

21
  Langdon-Davies,
Barricades,
p. 121.

22
  Langdon-Davies,
Barricades,
pp. vii–viii.

23
  C. Salter,
Try-out in Spain,
pp. xix–xxi.

24
  F. C. Hanighen (ed.),
Nothing but Danger
(New York: National Travel Club, 1939), p. 7.

25
  Louis Fischer,
Men and Politics. An Autobiography
(London: Jonathan Cape, 1941), p. 438.

26
  A list of 948 men and women was compiled by José Mario Armero,
España fue noticia. Corresponsales extranjeros en la guerra civil española
(Madrid: Sedmay Ediciones, 1976), pp. 409–36. The list is defective in many ways, not least in the omission of many correspondents known to have been in Spain, but it is indicative of the numbers.

27
  Vernon Bartlett,
This is My Life
(London: Chatto & Windus, 1938), p. 301.

28
  Louis Delaprée,
Le martyre de Madrid. Témoinages inédits de Louis Delaprée
(Madrid: No publisher, 1937), p. 21.

29
  Martha Gellhorn,
The Face of War,
5th edn (London: Granta Books, 1993), p. 17.

30
  Peter Wyden,
The Passionate War. The Narrative History of The Spanish Civil War
(New York: Simon + Schuster, 1983), p. 29; Philip Knightley,
The First Casualty. The War Correspondent as Hero, Propagandist, and Myth Maker from the Crimea to Vietnam
(London: André Deutsch, 1975), pp. 192–5.

31
  Louis Fischer, in Richard Crossman (ed.),
The God That Failed. Six Studies in Communism
(London: Hamish Hamilton, 1950), p. 220.

32
  Hanighen,
Nothing but Danger,
p. 7.

33
  Edmond Taylor, ‘Assignment in Hell’, in Hanighen,
Nothing but Danger,
pp. 58–60; Webb Miller,
I Found No Peace
(London: Book Club, 1937), pp. 325–7.

34
  Minifie,
Expatriate,
pp. 53–4.

35
  ‘To Aid Spanish Fascists’,
New York Times,
1 December 1936; Laurel Leff,
Buried by The Times. The Holocaust and America’s Most Important Newspaper
(New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 179.

36
  William Braasch Watson, ‘Hemingway’s Civil War Dispatches’,
The Hemingway Review,
vol. VII, no. 2, Spring 1988, pp. 4–12, 26–9, 39, 60.

37
  George Seldes, ‘“Treason” on the Times’,
The New Republic,
7 September 1938.

38
  Herbert L. Matthews,
A World in Revolution. A Newspaperman’s Memoir
(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1971), pp. 19–20, 62; Leff,
Buried by the Times,
pp. 165–9, 180–1, 399; Guy Talese,
The Kingdom and the Power
(New York: The World Publishing Co., 1969), pp. 57–61.

39
  Matthews,
A World in Revolution,
pp. 19–21, 25–30; George Seldes,
The Catholic Crisis
(New York: Julian Messner, 1939), pp. 195–9.

40
  Matthews,
A World in Revolution,
pp. 11–12, 17–18. For descriptions of Matthews, see Delmer,
Trail Sinister,
p. 328, and Carlos Baker,
Ernest Hemingway. A Life Story
(London: Collins, 1969), p. 369.

41
  Matthews,
A World in Revolution,
pp. 30–2. Herbert L. Matthews,
The Education of a Correspondent
(New York: Harcourt Brace, 1946), pp. 130–1, 142–3.

42
  Gellhorn,
The Face of War,
p. 17.

43
  Matthews,
A World in Revolution,
p. 19.

1
   Paul Preston,
Franco: A Biography
(London: HarperCollins, 1993), pp. 171–84; H. R. Knickerbocker,
The Siege of the Alcazar: A War-Log of the Spanish Revolution
(London: Hutchinson, n.d. [1937]), pp. 172–3; Webb Miller,
I Found No Peace
(London: The Book Club, 1937), pp. 329–30, 336–8; Herbert L. Matthews,
The Yoke and the Arrows
(London: Heinemann, 1958), p. 176; Claude Bowers,
My Mission to Spain
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1954), p. 313.