Security camera notice, Plaça de George Orwell (Barcelona)
"... I did not make any of the correct political reflections. I never do when things are happening ..."- Homage to Catalonia, Chapter 13
George Orwell (Eric Blair) and his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy Blair came to Loyalist-held Barcelona in December 1936, intending at first that he would work as a journalist. He quickly decided to volunteer as a soldier, while Eileen did party administrative work. By political happenstance they ended up with the P.O.U.M., a small Marxist political party considering itself neither Stalinist nor Trotskyist, that was later persecuted by the Stalinists for "Trotskyism." Orwell served first in the Sierra de Alcubierre, then nearer Zaragoza, then in several stints near Huesca. He was in Barcelona in time for the 1937 'May events,' in which open violence broke out among the Loyalist parties there. Later, again at the front outside Huesca, he was wounded in the throat. By the time he returned again to Barcelona, both he and Eileen were wanted by the police. Both Blairs were lucky to get out of the country; a report recently found in Spanish archives denounces them as 'rabid Trotskyists' to a Communist 'Tribunal for Espionage and High Treason' and mentions a 'liaison with Moscow' on the part of the accusers.
