Remembering the local fight against fascism

Penn South resident Moe Fishman, 91, was one of a handful of Americans who traveled to Europe to fight against Franco’s facism during the Spanish Civil War.

By Judith Stiles

When longtime Penn South resident Moe Fishman called his parents in Astoria to tell them he was going off to war back in 1937, his father buried his head in a stack of laundry and wept, and it was the first time Mrs. Fishman had seen her husband cry. Surprisingly, the young Fishman was not leaving home to fight for his own country. Instead, he packed his bags and left New York to fight against fascism and Franco during the Spanish Civil War. The faces and voices of the 3,000 Americans who joined him in Spain to fight against the long arm of Franco can be seen and heard on tape in a stunning exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York through August 12.

The exhibit, “Facing Fascism,” plus the companion book of the same name beg the question: What was it that grabbed the hearts of ordinary American citizens and compelled them to go overseas to protect someone else’s democratically elected government? The answers lie on the black-and-blood red walls of the exhibition that houses old photographs, uniforms, artifacts, letters and taped conversations with the few living veterans who are now in their 90s. An especially poignant photo shows New York City women protesting en masse with their babies in carriages, connoting that with mother’s intuition, they presciently saw the enormity of Hitler and Mussolini lurking in the background.

“We believed Hitler,” said Moe Fishman, now 91 years old, from his downtown office at the Veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, an organization founded in 1979 to teach about North America’s role in the Spanish Civil War. He added that the struggle against fascism in Spain was the bellwether for the rest of the world because Hitler went on to “eliminate all civil liberties, civil rights, and he killed people.”

Nearly 1,000 New Yorkers joined an estimated 35,000 people from 50 different countries to fight Franco between 1936 and 1939. And complementing the baby carriages, renowned artists such as Ernest Hemingway, Martha Graham, Langston Hughes and Dorothy Parker vigorously “fought” fascism too in their own way, as they danced and wrote short stories in support of the war effort. African-American nurse Salaria Kea left her job in Harlem and enlisted as a nurse on the battlefront, saying, “I am not going to sit down and let this happen.”

There are seven remaining veterans of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, and Moe Fishman remembers with clarity how struggling through the Great Depression impacted his decision to leave New York and go overseas, recalls how a neighborhood family stood on the street with all their furniture, locked out of their own apartment for not paying rent. When the marshals went away, a group of young men from the Young Communist League came along with big metal clippers, cut the padlocks and carried the furniture back inside, giving the family a reprieve for a few more months. Having joined the Young Communist League and remembering himself as a new member of the American Committee Against War and Fascism, Fishman emphatically asserts, “We hated fascism, and we did not go to Spain to create another Bolshevik state.”

The “Facing Fascism” exhibition features personal film footage of Fishman and other veterans speaking candidly about their deepest reasons for getting involved in the Spanish Civil War. Today, Fishman speaks of the current war in Iraq and how his colleagues in the group Veterans of Peace have opposed the war from the beginning. The exhibit exudes an eerie relevance to the war in Iraq, and as E.L. Doctorow writes in the foreword to the companion book, “In our time, we see the Spanish Civil War template of dogmatic religion in collusion with political extremism both domestically and abroad. Just as in Spain in the ’30s, when the church threw its spiritual weight behind the insurgents, so today are Muslim terrorists endowed by the most reactionary clerical interpreters of the Koran.” Pondering this, Fishman readily acknowledges the complexity of the current war against terrorism but is quick to point out the simplicity of the fight to preserve civil liberties. As his fellow veteran, Abe Osheroff, summed it up in the exhibition’s film footage when describing fighting fascism in the name of protecting civil liberties, “When you do nothing about it, you lose a piece of yourself.”

Sunday April 29 at 1:30 p.m., there will be a guided tour of “Facing Fascism” beginning with a celebratory reception for Moe Fishman and the six other living veterans at the Museo del Barrio, 1230 Fifth Avenue. For more information, e-mail info@alba-valb.org.