On this day, 21 July 1936, one of the most iconic photos of the Spanish civil war was taken on the rooftop terrace of what is now the Iberostar/Apple store buildings in Barcelona.
Taken by German photographer Hans Gutmann, the photo depicts 17-year-old socialist Marina Ginestà. Although she is captured holding a rifle, it is doubtful that Ginestà actually fought on the front lines during the war. Instead, as she was partially brought up in France and spoke fluent French, Catalan and Spanish, she worked as a journalist during the war and more notably as a translator and interpreter for the Soviet correspondent from the Pravda newspaper, Mijaíl Koltsov.
Gutmann had come to Barcelona to cover the anti-fascist Popular Olympiad games and, at the onset of the war, decided to stay to cover the conflict. He then castilized his name to Juan Guzmán. A communist himself, he had easy access to what was formerly the Hotel Colón, a building taken over by the PSUC (the Catalan Socialist Unification Party) where he took many of his renowned photos.
When the photo was taken of young Ginestà, she had never held a rifle in her hands - Guzmán offered it to her to pose with, and the same rifle appears in another photo in the same hotel of the writer Ludwig Renn.
Ginestà survived the war and fled to France as a refugee. She later escaped the Second World War by fleeing to the Dominican Republic. With the rise of the dictatorship under Trujillo, Ginestà moved to Venezuela, where she settled for many years working as a journalist and a novelist. In 2014, she passed away in Paris, France, aged 94.
Learn more about the Spanish civil war in our podcast episodes 39-40: https://workingclasshistory.com/podcast/e39-the-spanish-civil-war-an-introduction/
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