Home Docs (2)
Welcome to my second blogpost showing documented sources for the fictional diary of Klara Philipsborn, Home So Far Away.
Also included in the footnotes to Thomas Pusch’s article cited in Home Docs (1) is a key passage, cited from Gestapo records. I’ll include one excerpt, showing “hot spots” in bold. And here is a copy of the original image, provided to me by the U.S.Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C:
Gestapo record of Klara/Clara Philipsborn. Image from USHMM
Schreiben Stapo Berlin (D 1 b) an Gestapa, 7.2.1940. "Die Philipsborn gehörte der Internationalen Brigade in Rotspanien an und war im Militär-Hospital von Okania als Dolmetscherin tätig... Der Einsatz von Frauen wurde in den internationalen Einheiten im Laufe des Konfliktes auf den Gesundheits- Büro- oder Stabsdienst festgeschrieben.
Translation:
Letter from Stapo Berlin (D 1 b) to Gestapa, February 7, 1940. " Philipsborn belonged to the International Brigade in “Red Spain” and worked as an interpreter in the military hospital in Okania. .. In the course of the conflict, the use of women in the international units was restricted to healthcare, office or staff service.
So Klara was actually a participant in the International Brigades, according to this document! I have unfortunately not been able to connect her to a specific battalion or brigade. Of the nearly forty thousand international antifascist volunteers to Spain, nearly seven thousand are believed to be Jewish. See this monument, erected in 1990 in the ancient Jewish cemetery at Montjuïc, Barcelona.
Monument to Jewish volunteers to the Spanish Civil War, Montjuïc, Barcelona. Image courtesy of By NoGhost - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=119796352
“Red Spain” refers of course to the people of Spain who were loyal to the democratically elected Second Republic and probably to members of the Communist Party of Spain (PCE). From “Home Docs 1” you can see that Klara is described as belonging to the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Later we will see what happens when she applies for membership (a new requirement as of January, 1938) to the Spanish Party.
Hottest spots here: Klara’s work in health care and translation, and the military hospital in “Okania.” I assumed that I was looking at the German version of “Ocaña” and learned that it was a town in the province of Toledo and that the site used as a military hospital during the Civil War had been a reformatory-style prison. Further searches turned up a book by María Josefa Canellada titled Penal de Ocaña, which I promptly ordered. The slim volume, number 1653 in the Austral Collection of Espasa-Calpe turned out to be a novel of testimony from the point of view of a humanities student who volunteers in a Madrid hospital at the outbreak of the Civil War. She is transferred to the prison in Ocaña as Madrid suffers heavy bombardment and joins with others in transforming the prison into a field hospital and attending the war wounded there. I was reading the book in bed and musing on the philosophical approach to war and to the deeply emotional experiences of patients and caregivers when I arrived at page 134, which begins, “Se llamaba Clarita.” I had come across none other than a vignette of my Klarita, complete with her nationality, her appearance, up to her kinky hair, her odd personality, her teaching a little German class, and finally, her obsession with “Comandante Carlos.” I did not sleep much that night, pondering the odds of finding a distant relative in the pages of a novel and determined to develop all the “hot spots” on this single page to a complete story. During the research I was able to contact the granddaughter of María Josefa Canellada, Ana Zamora, a theater director who had recently produced a staged version based on Penal de Ocaña, of the same title. And here is an image of the cover of the book that inspired Klara’s fictional diary.
