Two Worlds: Meeting Alice for the First Time

1937, Cerbere, France. A French customs post and bureau of the Non-Intervention Committee at Cerbere, on the eastern French side of the Spanish border, during the Spanish Civil War. Image by © Hulton-Deutsch Collection/CORBIS

This week has been a momentous one as far as my research is concerned. Not only have I received over 700 pages from the Czech archives, I have come face to face with Alice and heard her voice for the first time.

Opening my emails after three days away, I was greeted by a wealth of information tumbling out of cyberspace. First, the researcher who has been trawling the Czech archives for me sent me a drop-box full of documents – 700 – in Czech. I have only just started to read them, with the help of Google translate. And then, an email or two later, in the midst of offers for Black Friday, a relative and fellow researcher, whom I have met through Ancestry, sent me photocopies from a book about the International Brigades in Spain, which include a letter from Alice and a still from an old cine film of Alice on a beach in America.

The wealth of information that is flooding in after just a few months is overwhelming and to see her face after so many years of only knowing her name, is beyond exciting. It is not a great image, a camera phone of a still on a video, but it is so much better than nothing – and she looks a little like me. There is no reason why we she should look alike, we are not related in any way. She has dark hair, as dark as mine used to be, and a parting on the left, like mine. She is in a black swimsuit and her face is turned slightly away, but I like what I can see. And in the book is a brief summary of her life; much of it I knew, but some of the dates of her arrest and release and re-arrest are new and then there is a snippet of information about her life after her release. She worked for a company called KNIHA, which, as the name suggests (if you know Czech), is a booksellers. It seems still to exist online today. I felt emotional when I saw that, it was another connection – a love of books. Silly really, but little details make her feel more like a person to me.

In the same way that the picture I have (of a jpeg file of a still of a video of a cine film) is at several removes, so too are her words. I have accessed them through Google translate of a Spanish translation of her original Czech. Nevertheless, reaching back through those layers is the closest I have come to a direct communication with her, rather than just reading about her in the third person. The letter describes her journey out of Spain, crossing the border into France at Port-Bou and comparing it to her arrival in Spain a year earlier.

Here it is. Please forgive any strange expressions and remember how many translations it has gone through, including my own tidying-up of the expression from Google translate:

We climbed to the summit. Up in a terrible wind, which whistled and hissed. From below, the sound of waves upon waves. We were seated between two Spanish friends who looked after the border here. None of us spoke. We all looked at the darkness saying goodbye to Spain. We said goodbye to the country that had become our second homeland. And our mood was not happy at all. How different it was a year ago when we arrived here with a transport of nurses from Begue to Port Bou, and with what joy we arrived, how cordially we were received! How beautiful it was then, the long trip to Guadalajara where, at the Czechoslovak hospital J.A.Comenio, (see below) we met friends and worked so well together!