By SEAN GRIFFIN

They had marched together last
November in 1938 down the
Ower-strewn streets of Barcelona

Sid Passionaria,
heroes’ farewell, these ‘‘men trom
‘Out of every borderland.”’

low, nearly forty years later,
€ memories of that final parade
ame flooding back as they
Narched past the Spanish war
emorial in the centre of Berlin
While 40,000 people thronged the
“Square to pay tribute to them.
For Len Norris, Gerry Delaney
d John Johnson, as for the many
thers honored that day, the month
f October was a time of
emories. Forty years before, an
listoric movement had been
"ganized in which all had taken
heir part; forty years before, they
ad come - together in the In-
ernational Brigades to defend the
esieged Spanish Republic.

he 40th anniversary of the
mation of the International
igades was celebrated in two

around the world gathered first in
Florence, Italy on October 9 and 10,
and again in Berlin, capital of the
German Democratic Republic, on
the last three days of the month.
“In Florence, heart of the ‘‘Red
lt’ of Italy where Communist

ci ndidates swept to victory in the
Civic administrations of the region,

Sponsored by the Association of
talian Volunteers for Spain.

_ Among the speakers was Luigi
ngo, chairman of the Com-
-Munist Party of Italy and one of the
“Many members of the Italian
Garibaldi Battalion who slipped

to

Local 900,

OR IVLPVP EP VED

bid them a,

ties this year as veterans from all:

International Brigades mark 40th anniversary — ae
Reunion in-Florence and Berlin

back inside the borders of
Mussolini's Italy. to form the
famous partisan companies which,
together with the Allied: forces,
liberated Italy from fascism.

In one of the written messages
there was a sadder, if optimistic,
note. Dolores Ibarruri, now 80,
wrote to tell the assembled
veterans that illness prevented her
from attending the historic
gathering. But in paying tribute to
the International Brigades, she
spoke confidently of the day when
the Spanish people would free
themselves from fascism.

In Berlin, three days of activities
culminated in the mass rally in the
memorial square where the widow
of Hans Beimler, the celebrated
commissar of the Thaelmann
Battalion who was killed in the first
battle to defend Madrid, laid a
wreath to the International
Brigades.

But although both reunions had
their formal programs, they were
intended as a time for the In-
ternational Brigaders, many of
whom had not seen one another
since they left Spain, to come
together again.

“It was a tremendously
emotional experience, seeing
veterans we had not seen since
1938,” both Len Norris and John
Johnson assert.. “There was a
tension you could feel every time a
Bulgarian shook the hand of a Finn
or a Canadian greeted a Por-
tuguese.

“You think of so many things —
how you have survived when so
many have been killed during the
war or have passed away sin-
COg. aie
From veterans’ associations
around the world, brigaders came
to the Mackenzie-Papineau Bat-

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Best Wishes for
a successful 1977

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Labor Movement

CANADIAN UNION
OF PUBLIC EMPLOYEES
Kamloops —

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-Season’s Greetings

RCP OSTA GRRE SANTA OME IS TA ea

talion veterans to ask after old .
comrades, to renew friendships

and to reaffirm the bond of

solidarity. “There were veterans .
from Sweden, from Finland and
other countries who remembered
the names of Canadians from forty
years before andcame to ask after
them,” Norris recalls. :

For Gerry Delaney, the reunions
presented a rare opportunity to.
look up former prisoners who had
been with him inside the stone
walls of Franco’s prisons in the
months following the end of the
war. The search took him halfway
around the world — to Genoa,
Dunkirk and Berlin.

In Genoa and Dunkirk, however,
there was bitter disappointment.
In the Italian city, he walked the
narrow streets of the neighborhood
for hours without finding anyone.
who remembered the man. And in
Dunkirk, a time-consuming check
of telephone directories, police
stations and civic lists finally
ended in a bureaucratic dead-end.

‘When I got to city hall to check

was told by a big, imposing man at
the desk that it was against the law
to give me the name. I had to
abandon the search.”

But in Berlin, his quest was
fulfilled as he met Karl Kormes,
although the former German
prisoner’s responsibilities as an
official of the GDR ministry of
foreign affairs precluded anything
more than a brief introduction.

Yet the meeting had another
significance: in the GDR, the
Spanish veteran and former
prisoner of Franco had been
decorated by his government for
his action and given a responsible
government position; in this
country, Gerry Delaney and his
fellow veterans have not even been
afforded a government pensionm
And Spain still suffers ‘under
fascism while the International
Brigaders in Canada, the USS.,
Britain and elsewhere in the

TOP: Mac-Pap veteran John Johnson (left) meets British vet John Peet
(centre) and Lincoln Battalion member James Yates in Berlin.
CENTRE: In Florence, | to r, James Cameron, former Mac-Pap now
living in Britain, Gerry Delaney, Dinah Cameron, Ethel Norris, Len
Norris, Irma Johnson. BOTTOM: The memorial to the International

branded as “‘premature anti- : r .
Brigades in Berlin.

fascists.”

But if they were premature, they
remain anti-fascists. And for the
International Brigades, the
struggle — as yet incomplete —
against fascism is at the heart of
everything they do. It unites all of
them in the reunions that they hold.

“There is a deep feeling of in-
ternational solidarity in the
reunion of the Brigade veterans,”
Len Norris says simply. “Suddenly
there are no national boundaries
again and we relive the days when
it didn‘t matter whether you were
Canadian, French, Yugoslav or
Finnish.

“We were united in a common
bond in defence of the Spanish
Republic and against fascism.
That bond still unites us.”

_ Marineworkers and Boilermakers
Industrial Union - Local 1

1219 Nanaimo St. Vancouver

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“gs & -Season’s Greetings
: and Sars
Best Wishes for 1977

UNITED FISHERMEN and ALLIED WORKERS |

Vancouver Fisherman-Local |

PACIFIC TRIBUNE—DECEMBER 17, 1976—Page 3

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