Orwell and the shelters: London's Catalonia House 'celebrates' the Allied victory in Europe

LondonDozens of Union Jacks are decorating central London these days. They hang, for example, from the lampposts of The Mall, the avenue between Buckingham Palace and Trafalgar Square, the traditional epicenter of British monarchy celebrations: weddings, burials and coronations. They've been dusted off—a figure of speech, because any baggage or state visit is used to show them off—since the last major event took place just two years ago: the ride in the golden carriage of Charles III and Camila, to commemorate the enthronement of Elizabeth II's eternal crown prince.

So much decoration is now due to less mundane reasons. Next Monday, a public holiday in the United Kingdom, the city's egg yolk will experience a grand military parade to commemorate and celebrate the 80th anniversary of the VE Day In Europe, the victory of the Allies – including Stalin's Soviets – against the Nazis, which is officially dated May 8, and which was predicted since of the Normandy landings on June 6, 1944.

Neither Catalonia nor Spain are invited to this party because at that time the Franco dictatorship was imposed by blood and fire, and after the Second World War the Allies preferred to keep a rabid anti-communist in Madrid rather than overthrow him and help reestablish the defeated Republic and democracy. Result: forty years of misery and death and wounds that still float.

But Catalonia House in London, the headquarters of the Generalitat delegation in the United Kingdom, has wanted to timidly raise its hand to remember the undeniable: that the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939) was the dress rehearsal for what would later take over the continent and a good part of it. And, to this end, this Thursday it offered a dialogue between the photographer and researcher Ana Sánchez and Richard Blair.

The first, an archaeologist from the subsoil of Barcelona and other cities, has brought to light the history that remained hidden in the air raid shelters that were built throughout the country during the civil war. Furthermore, he has connected the Catalan experience with the English, which learned from what had been done, although only very occasionally putting it into practice to confront Luftwaffe air raids. Furthermore, Sánchez has endeavored to reconstruct not only the hidden history, but also the theorization of a past—that of the shelters—that is scattered throughout all kinds of archives in the United Kingdom, not in Catalonia.

The second, Richard Blair, represented theOrwell Society, as patron of the entity and son – adopted – of Eric Arthur Blair, better known as George Orwell, the author, among many other texts, of the celebrated The rebellion of the animals, 1984 and, of course, Tribute to Catalonia, a memoir perhaps more cited than read of the writer's experience between December 26, 1936, when he arrived in Barcelona, ​​​​and June 23, 1937, when he fled the pursuit of NKVD agents.

'Up & Down'; surface and subsoil

What is the link between Orwell and the shelters, between Richard Blair and Ana Sánchez? The writer's son—born in May 1944 and officially adopted on D-Day, the landing on the beaches of Normandy—claimed that his father had never written about the air-raid shelters in Barcelona. So what? Skepticism regarding the comments of more than thirty attendees, devotees of either Catalonia, Orwell, the photographer's research, or all three, pieces with which to put together a historical puzzle.

Ana Sánchez knows Orwell's work as well as the patron of the foundation that accompanied him. She has found at least two mentions, one of which, of course, in Tribute to CataloniaThe quote is very brief. It appears in chapter 13, when he writes that he "had seen the powerful defenses being built dozens of miles behind the front line" and that "new air-raid shelters were being dug all over Barcelona." This is the memory of the English essayist. The link is what the photographer attempts to establish with her research: Orwell highlights a very specific moment on the surface of Catalonia at war—the revolutionary moment that the POUM militias, which the writer would join, may represent—and the collective, popular effort of construction. They are building between Franco's coup d'état and the days following the events of May 1937. Shortly after Orwell leaves (June 23, 1937), or practically at the same time, it will be the Passive Defense Board that will centralize the works. The war continues, but circumstances have already changed. During the session at Catalonia House, there remain some biographical details that Richard Blair revealed about his father. Orwell's story lives on in the United Kingdom and fuels a very specific – and perhaps not entirely accurate – narrative about the civil war.