The Bonds between the Volunteers

During the time of the Spanish Civil War, when soldiers left overseas, few knew when their next correspondence home would be. These soldiers uprooted their lives, left behind everything, for a new country, a new culture, without any promise of hearing from home.
This complete upheaval of their lives and their strong beliefs/anti-fascism sentiments is what led the soldiers to form strong bonds. It started almost immediately (it seems). When describing the climb across the Pyrenees Mountains to reach Spain, Jack Shafran talks about how the soldiers were told to look to the guy in front of them. Shafran says, however, that, “everyone was looking at the guy in front of them and the guy behind them…trying to maintain contact.”
These men didn’t know each other before the war, but on the front, in Spain, they had no one else. They relied on the friendships they made with each other to get them through the fighting, the war, the loss. These were the only relationships they had. The reliance that these soldiers had on these relationships was problematic for obvious reasons. Many soldiers saw their own die.
Abe Smorodin talks about the death of one of his friends, a soldier he had once, “been beside.” They were both of different brigades: Smorodin was in the Mac-Paps and Jack Freedman (the other soldier) was in the Abraham Lincoln Brigades. Smorodin recalls how Freedman’s death was particularly hard. He had been on his way to visit Freedman, when he learned that Freedman had died just hours earlier. Despite not being on the front, a fragmented piece of artillery had pierced his brain.
As the Director of the Tamiment Library, Michael Nash, mentioned, the veterans didn’t seem to keep in touch; it seems strange that these men wouldn’t keep in touch with the people who had been their only support systems during such a difficult time in their lives. Maybe it was returning home, old habits, and old friends. Or, maybe it was the embarrassment over the loss. Regardless, it was evident that, for the short while that they were in Spain, the volunteers became each others’ family.