Every year, hikers trek the “Chemin de la Liberte” in the Pyrenees, to commemorate the 800 or so Allied airmen and Jewish refugees who risked their lives on a 60km (40 miles) route escaping Nazi-occupied Europe during World War II.
“The good escaper,” says a 1944 British military document called Tips for Escapers and Evaders, “is the man who keeps himself fit, cheerful and comfortable.”[...]
Reflect on what it was like, for example, to be shot down over Belgium when you are only 19 years old. Your parachute works – something of a surprise in itself, since you have had only the most rudimentary training – and when you land you find yourself behind enemy lines, with most of Nazi-occupied Europe between you and freedom.
You have to ask someone for help, even though you know they are risking their lives if they give it to you. And if you are lucky and they do not turn you in, there is still the long journey south to negotiate, past German checkpoints and patrols with, at the end of it all, the climb over these massive mountains.
Or think of the Jewish families who attempted the Pyrenees just one step ahead of arrest and deportation to the death camps.
I was told the story of a woman who carried her two-year-old daughter across in November snow. When the child cried in the cold their guide said she should be suffocated because the noise might alert the German patrols.
And what of the French helpers? One local supporter of the Chemin remembered his mother hiding escaping Allied airmen in her mountain bed and breakfast, where she was providing lodgings for German troops at the same time. (more…)
It’s a long while since I did a Monday music post. This one follows on from my earlier series on Catalan music, but also kicks off a new (non-musical) series I’m going to start soon about the Catalan lands that are now part of France. Barre died earlier this year. He is very little known in the English-speaking world and consequently has no English wikipedia page. Below is my loose translation of the French page.
Jordi Barre (born Georges Bar on 7 April 1920 in Argeles-sur-Mer and died on 16 February 2011 in Ponteilla) was a Catalan-speaking singer-songwriter. Taking to the stage very young, he sang in the village dances of the plain of Roussillon and then turned sailor, typographer, foreman. In the mid-1960s he met the poet Albert Esteve, who encouraged him to devote himself exclusively to the song.
In 1974 he moved to Barcelona where he met the great figures of Nova Cançó, moving close to the autonomous musical community of the end of the Franco era. Still standing away from political movements, Jordi Barre advocated through song for a recognition of culture and especially of the Catalan language and quickly became an institution for the people of Northern Catalonia.
His voice was gravelly and profound, its deep timbre through “which run cool water streams, the rocky hills, the blue of the sea and the madness of the north wind” (Jean-Michel Collet); his impressive concerts are great moments of emotion and intensity on a par with a Paco Ibanez or a Silvio Rodriguez.
So it was that in the spring of 1939 I came to Prades. I could not have imagined at the time that I would spend the next seventeen years of my life in this little town in the Pyrenees. And in spite of the sorrow in me, I found respite in my surroundings. With its winding cobbled strees and whitewashed houses with red tiled roofs – and the acacia trees that were then in bloom – Prades might have been one of the Catalan villages I had known since childhood. The countryside seemed no less familiar to me. The lovely patterns of orchards an vineyards, the wild and craggy mountains with ancient Roman fortresses and monasteries clinging to their sides – these too were a replica of parts of my homeland. Indeed, centuries before, this very region had been part of the nation of Catalonia – from Joys and Sorrows by Pablo Casals, via On An Overgrown Path
Granados: Spanish Dance (played by Pablo Casals, c.1916-20)
For Granados, a Catalan composer of the late 19th century, see here.
Max Bruch: Kol Nidrei (played by Pablo Casals, 1923)
Pablo Casals: El Cant dels Ocell
This version of his classic Catalan melody was recorded in Puerto Rico in 1956.
Pablo Casals: El Cant dels Ocell
This version is from 1958′s Windjammer.
Victoria de los Ángeles: El Cant dels Ocell
A singer from Barcelona, who died in 2005.
NATO meets in Chicago at a time when its foundations are being profoundly undermined by the ongoing economic crisis. While the heads of state and defense ministers in attendance may hope that discussions of economic matters are left to the near-concurrent G8 meeting (six G8 members are signatories to the NATO agreement), there is no [...]
In his book C.L.R. James: the Artist as Revolutionary, Paul Buhle refers in several places to a manuscript of an abortive attempt at an autobiography by James. Buhle describes the project, undertaken in the last period of James’s life with the assistance of Anna Grimshaw, as one that simply did not jell the way one [...]
Russell Rockwell, co-editor of the new book The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978, has made the text of his recent talk on the book available on the blog Marxist-Humanist Dialectics. Rockwell delivered the talk on May 5 at the Alternative Press Center in Chicago.
Business as Usual: the Economic Crisis and the Failure of Capitalism Reaktion Books (London), 2011 Paul Mattick’s Business as Usual is an attempt to come to grips with the global economic crisis that began in 2007 in Marxist terms, an entry into a growing category books which includes David Harvey’s The Enigma of Capital. Mattick [...]
Stalin by Boris Souvarine, translated by C.L.R. James Alliance Book Corporation, 1939 No biography in the conventional sense can be written about Stalin, due to the far-reaching falsification of the historic record of the “life” the man lived. Although Boris Souvarine’s Stalin is frequently referred to as a biography, it can be more accurat […]
Russell Rockwell, co-editor (with Kevin Anderson) of The Dunayevskaya-Marcuse-Fromm Correspondence, 1954-1978: Dialogues on Hegel, Marx, and Critical Theory (Lexington Books) will discuss the relationship of these three thinkers at the Alternative Press Center, 2040 N. Milwaukee Ave, 2nd Floor, Chicago, Illinois (near the CTA’s Blue Line Western Ave st […]
Margaret Ellingham, an American expatriate who lived for decades in northern Italy, participated in and wrote about many of the profound social struggles that took place in that country from the 1960s through the 1980s. Ellingham contributed her penetrating commentary on Italian events to the pages of News & Letters from 1964 through 1991, the [...]
Raya Dunayevskaya’s “The World Crisis and the Theoretical Void“, a 1960 article that first appeared in Prometeo, a journal edited by the Italian independent revolutionary Onorato Damen, has just been made available by the Marxists Internet Archive. Dunayevskaya travelled to Europe in late 1959 to attend an international conference in Milan […]
To mark André Breton’s birthday—February 19, 1896—Criticism &c. presents here an excerpt from an essay by Julien Gracq, author of The Castle of Argol and Balcony in the Forest, which was written on the 100th anniversary of Breton’s birth and was printed in Le Monde. This English translation appeared in the journal L’Esprit Createur. • • […]
Among the chapters of Indignant Heart recently made available by Libcom, Chapter 16 (“The Trotskyist Party”) is extremely important for its depiction of the strong current of racism that pervaded the Marxist parties, an under-acknowledged aspect of the history of the U.S. left. It’s not possible to discern any difference between the attitud […]
