She was an unnamed woman standing on a barricade in Barcelona in 1936, a red and black flag framed behind her. Her image was printed on posters and books, murals were painted of her and she became an icon of the Spanish Civil War. Her identity was unknown, as was that of the photographer. Five years ago, the first mystery was solved: the photographer was Antoni Campañà, a well-known but insignificant name in the history of local photography. She remained anonymous: an almost abstract notion – of civil war, of anarchism, of revolution – and not a flesh-and-blood person. Until now.
Because the anarchist militia had a name and a life. She was born in Almería in 1915. As a child, her parents moved to Barcelona. She was 21 years old at the time the photo was taken. In the picture she could have been pregnant. When the war ended and Franco’s nationalists were victorious, she crossed the border with her sisters during the 1939 Republican exodus and landed in Béziers, 130 kilometers (80 miles) from the Franco-Spanish border. She was a seamstress. She never set foot in her native land again, but her home has always been a little Spain: the laughter, the songs, the food. She died in 1977.
From left to right: Alain, François, Pepito and Liliana looking at pictures from the family archive. Albert Garcia
Her name was Ana Garbín Alonso and she was Pepito’s mother and Alain and François’s aunt. One afternoon in mid-June, these three very French and at the same time very Spanish retirees, speaking to EL PAÍS, unearthed memories of “Mama”, “Aunt Anita” and her sisters – the mothers of Alain and François – while eating tortillas in the garden of the house they shared by François and his wife Liliana in Sérignan near Béziers. “She was very pretty, but her mother is always the prettiest,” smiled Pepito Lumbreras Garbín, the militia officer’s son and José Lumbreras, a Spanish communist who fought in the Resistance. “She was kind and cheerful, she loved to sing and spend time with her friends and family.”
Pepito, Alain, François and Liliana vacillated between impatience and excitement. It didn’t take long for the identity of the famous militia officer to emerge. It was finally brought to light on Tuesday with the opening of the Icônes cachées exhibition in Montpellier. Les images méconnues de la guerre d’Espagne (Hidden Icons. The Unknown Images of the Spanish War).
The exhibition features a selection of Campañà’s work discovered by his grandson Toni Monné in two red boxes in 2018 – thousands of Civil War photographs that Campañà preferred to keep hidden until his death in 1989 at the age of 83.
This is a story of chance encounters and coincidences. Monné discovered the boxes when the old family home in Sant Cugat was about to be demolished, a treasure trove that would change his grandfather’s place in the history of photography: by then he was known for his pre-war artistic images and his sports photos of the period after the war and the tourist postcards he created during the years of Spanish developmentism. The photos presented an extraordinary document of the Civil War – neither the outside view of foreign photojournalists nor that of a dedicated photographer, but that of a person documenting what happened during the war from the inside: beautiful and terrible self-portrait of Barcelona. Campañà photographed refugees fleeing Franco’s oppression and nuns being murdered and burned.
The second turning point in the story came two years ago when François Gómez Garbín, Anita’s nephew, and his wife Liliane Hoffman visited Campañà’s exhibition at the MNAC in Barcelona. There they were greeted by the exhibition poster on the facade of the MNAC building. Aunt Anita!
“We got goosebumps,” remembers François. They had always known that the militiaman on the anarchist posters and in the Civil War books was Anita, but no one else knew. Coincidentally, Toni Monné was also in the museum at that moment. “She’s my aunt,” the militia officer’s nephew told the photographer’s grandson. “I couldn’t believe it,” says Monné. “It was a moment of shared emotions: the reunion between the family of the photographer and the family of the photographed.”
Pepito and Alain, Ana Garbín Alonso’s son and nephew respectively, visit the family tomb where the militia officer is buried in the Béziers cemetery.Albert Garcia
Before that there was a first alignment of the planets: at the time of the photograph, on July 25, 1936. The war has just broken out. The photographer walked down the Rambla. At the corner of Hospital Street he sees the militia officer at the barricade. She sees him and poses; He points his robotic camera at her and takes the picture. There is a brief misunderstanding: a young anarchist stops Campañà and accuses him of espionage. Then he lets him go.
The boy is unaware that Antoni Campañà’s encounter with Anita Garbín has just produced an iconic image of anarchism, which Garcia-Planas calls “the anarchist Madonna” in the Montpellier exhibition catalogue. Nor does the young anarchist realize that there is something else that connects the bourgeois photographer – his looks, his manners betray him – and the worker militia woman: they are both Catholics. Campañà comes from a Catalan nationalist and orderly family, Garbín is the daughter of anarchists and at the same time a Christian.
“Sometimes I would go to church to light a candle or to pray for one or the other,” Pepito recalls. “She sent me to catechesis; It was part of the integration, we had to be like everyone else.”
The blue box where François, Ana Garbín Alonso’s nephew, keeps photos and family memories.Albert Garcia
And they have integrated. The cousins set up their own business. François met Liliane, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, in Paris. Alain spent some time in the capital and then returned to Béziers, where Pepito has always lived. But like his cousins Alain and François, his heart was always in Spain.
“I’ve always said, ‘I’m Spanish,'” says Alain, who regained Spanish citizenship a few years ago thanks to the 2007 Historical Memory Act. “Although it’s a bit strange for anarchists, I was proud to be able to vote in Spain for the first time – no Garbín had voted in Spain since 1936, when I was with the Popular Front!”
The conversation after dinner is between memories and anecdotes and a few tears. They say that the civil war was never discussed in Anita’s house. Pepito explains: “My mother, an anarchist. My father, a communist. It was a very delicate conflict.” Anita and her husband did not return to their country. “They made a cross over Spain,” says her son, who accompanies the conversation with Spanish songs and recites the lyrics to Juanito Valderrama’s song El emigrante: “Farewell, my dear Spain / I carry you hidden in my soul.”
When Anita’s sisters – François and Alain’s mothers – visited Barcelona a few years ago, they spontaneously joined a demonstration where CNT union flags waved as if something deep was calling them. “It was impulsive without knowing why,” says Alain, his voice shaking.
They take out papers, old photos. Then Pepito takes us to the cemetery in Béziers. His mother is buried there, the anonymous militia officer, no longer anonymous: Anita Garbín Alonso, the anarchist Madonna. There are flowers on the grave. Your son crosses himself.
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