Fanny, Queen of the Machine Gun. Fanny Schoonheyt in Barcelona, May 1. Spain, Ministry of Culture, Centro Documental de la Memoria Hist. There were other Dutch women in Spain during the Civil War, to be sure, but they generally worked as nurses. With Richard Boone, George Hamilton, Luana Patten, Arthur O'Connell. The trials and tribulations of bitter veteran Captain Maddocks and. Check out the official video for Machine Gun Kelly's 'Alpha Omega', which is featured on his new album 'General Admission'. PKM general-purpose machine gun with modern black polymer furniture and a 100-round ammunition box. Specifications (1961 – 1978) Type: Light Machine Gun Caliber: 7.62 Buy online from over 1 million business goods & industrial supplies on Tolexo.com, from categories like power tools, safety equipment, office supplies etc. The Man Who Designed the World’s Fastest Gun. Kontis, PE The visit by Springfield Arsenal representatives to the General Electric firing range was. Fanny was already in Barcelona at the outbreak of the war and participated in those July days of 1. In a letter to a friend in Rotterdam she later described how she and her comrades entered the military barracks from the roofs and how they confiscated the arms found there: “I wore a rather conspicuous yellow shirt and it is a miracle they didn’t shoot me. But perhaps be they were so surprised to see me they forgot to react.” Surprised to see a girl, is the supposition, although in those days a lot of young Spanish women came into action. Fanny immediately joined the antifascist milicias and as early as July/August . Almost all Barcelona newspapers—from the CNT’s La Noche to the widely read Vanguardia—published long interviews with her, calling her “la reina de la ametralladora,” the queen of the machine gun. Still, her comandante at the front assured she was “a very feminine woman,” while the interviewer of La Noche described her as tall, blonde (“a real blonde, not peroxide”) with eyes “as blue as a Nordic lake.” Fanny herself was rather averse to what she called “this adoration” and later, when several Dutch newspapers translated the Spanish interviews, she complained in letters to her friend about “all this nonsense” being written about her. Fanny came to Spain at the end of 1. In Rotterdam she had had a job as secretary of the prominent Dutch newspaper Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant. She was an ambitious young woman, trying hard to be invited to join the editorial staff—an almost impossible aspiration in this still exclusively male world. Still, her job provided her with an entry into the cultural and intellectual circles of Rotterdam, where she met writers, painters and filmmakers such as Joris Ivens (who in 1. The Spanish Earth, although at that point Joris and Fanny did not meet). Earlier in 1. 93. Fanny had traveled to the Soviet Union. As so many young people and intellectuals in the . She published a series of articles about her visit to Leningrad, where she was invited as art critic. Fanny was a rather talented pianist, but she likely wasn’t too interested in theoretical questions. In these articles she struggles in a naive way with the question what “revolutionary art” should be, and although she does not come to any definite conclusion, she is keen enough to predict the brilliant future of one of the composers she discusses: Shostakovich. At the end of . Lichtveld (who, as it happened, also composed the score to one of Joris Ivens’s films) lives in Barcelona, where he is working about the colony of German/Jewish refugees who have fled the Nazi regime. In the broad Spanish political spectrum Lichtveld’s sympathies are on the anarchist side and he is a fervent anti- Catholic. His daughter, in her eighties now, vividly remembers her childhood in those turbulent days, the strikes and demonstrations in Barcelona—and especially the day she and her sister, on their way home from school, saw a chapel that was set on fire. As soon as they got home, the girls burned their doll’s house in a spontaneous act of anticlerical solidarity. Fanny Schoonheyt at the front, Aug- Sept 1. Copyright EFE/Juan Guzm. But she never realized her dream of becoming a foreign correspondent for a Dutch paper. The letters to her friend in Rotterdam indicate that she was not doing well and had kidney trouble. She writes a lot about daily life in Barcelona, inviting her friend to join her on a trip to Ibiza (which she described as the cheapest place on earth), but she never once mentions Spain’s political turmoil. Nor does she give any sign of political commitment herself. In fact, this is one of the many mysteries surrounding Fanny’s life: When, where, and how did she become politically engaged? Less than a year later, after the outbreak of the Civil War, writing to the same friend in Rotterdam, she is a convinced antifascist and a member of the PSUC (the United Socialist Party of Catalonia), the Catalan branch of the Communist Party. What happened in the interim? I long thought that Fanny became politicized during the few weeks she worked as a press agent for the Olimpiada Popular, the alternative Olympic Games to be held in Barcelona in July, and on whose organizing committee sat a good number of German and Italian political refugees. When Franco’s coup interrupted the Games, several of them joined the milicias and formed the kernel of what later became the International Brigades. Actors on THE MAN FROM U.N.C.L.E., the 1960's cult television show.Vintage Coin Operated Fortune Tellers, Arcade Games, Digger/Cranes, Gun Games and other Penny Arcade games, pre-1977. 08/05/15, by [email protected]. The criminal exploits of Public Enemy number 1, George 'Machine-Gun' Kelly, during the 1930s. I supposed Fanny’s decision to join the armed Republican resistance against the coup had been a spontaneous one, motivated by a sense of solidarity with the people she had been working with in those weeks. But a conversation with Marina Ginesta in 2. Marina, one of the last survivors of the SCW, is over ninety by now and still a beautiful woman. A photo depicting her on the roof of the Hotel Colon in Barcelona has become an icon of the SCW. During the war she worked as a translator, among others for Koltsov, the famous Pravda- reporter. Marina told me Fanny’s political activism had started much earlier: She had met Fanny at the end of ’3. No woman in Barcelona at that time would have dared to light a cigarette in public. She paid no attention to us, young ignorant Spanish women, I even had the impression she looked down on us. The older men respected her a lot and the younger men. Could Fanny have lived a double life of which her Dutch friends were unaware? Fanny Schoonheyt died in 1. I have been fascinated with her since the mid- 1. Reliable sources are few and far between. Apart from a handful of letters, Fanny left no personal papers; in fact, I suspect she purposely tried to erase all traces of her Spanish past. Even her daughter, who was born in 1. Dominican Republic, had no idea that her mother had fought in Spain. The most extensive information about this period of her life is to be found in the Dutch National Archives in The Hague. Between 6. 00 and 8. Dutchmen participated in the Spanish Civil War and for almost all there is a personal dossier, compiled by the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Justice. A special Royal Decree of summer . Probably a third of them were killed in Spain; of those who returned—stateless—to Holland, many ended up in German concentration camps. As it turns out, the Dutch National Archive contains an extensive correspondence about Fanny between the Dutch consul in Barcelona and the Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Several remarkable points jump out. This is the time the militias, where anarchist influence is strong, are being dismantled, and the new army of the Republic, the “Ej. It is also the time of increased Soviet influence in the Army. We don’t know what rank exactly Fanny held in the Republican army; Spanish military historians claim there never was a foreign woman officer at all. However, the uniform she is wearing on one of the few photos taken of her during the war is not the uniform of a simple soldier. Several sources affirm that Fanny was “directora” in the “campo de instrucci. Remarkably, during the whole war Fanny never entered the International Brigades; she always operated in the realm of the Ej. Regardless of the specifics, hers was an exceptional career for a foreign woman. How involved was Fanny in the internal political conflicts that divided the Republican camp? In his Homage to Catalonia George Orwell describes the horrible days of May . Orwell mentions the Barcelona’s central square, the Plaza de Catalunya, whose “principal landmark . Click on the image to see the whole page. In the course of my investigation I became more and more convinced that Fanny Schoonheyt had has been one of the PSUC machine- gunners at the Plaza. After publishing my biography of Fanny in the fall of 2. ALBA’s Sebastiaan Faber sent me a photo depicting Fanny, flanked by two men, standing with her back to a pile of sandbags in front of what looks like the fa. The picture, taken by the famous Catalan war photographer Agust. Interestingly, the picture forms part of the exhibit “Centelles in. In the show, Fanny is misidentified as Fanny Jabcovsky aka Fanny Edelmann, the equally legendary miliciana from Argentina who passed away this year, age 1. A cropped version of one of the other images—this time with Fanny smiling—appeared on June 1. La Vanguardia. The great antifascist fighter known as Fanny, the paper states, has been seriously wounded in a car accident near Tarragona. This is the last piece of information concerning Fanny I found in the Spanish newspapers. What she did between June 1. American journalist Isaac Don Levine. In The mind of an assassin (1. Ram. Ramon had an affair with her. His room became a meeting place for some of the most notorious communists in Barcelona as well as Soviet NKVD operatives hospitalized in the establishment.” Unfortunately Levine does not indicate where he got this information. The name Castedo is traceable to a Catalonian painter prominent in the PSUC, a friend of Fanny’s who after the defeat of the Republic disappeared to the Soviet Union. Had she adopted his name as an alias? Had Fanny entered the NKVD’s spider web? In the late spring of 1. Fanny tries to get her Dutch passport renewed at the consulate of the Netherlands in Barcelona. Her request is denied. She tells the consul she wants to go back to Holland—an obvious lie. The summer of 1. 93. Toulouse, from where she resumes her correspondence with her friend in Rotterdam. She tells here she is in Toulouse “on duty” and will go on to Paris to obtain a pilot’s license. She is reticent about the exact nature of her activities, but she does tell her friend about a man she has fallen in love with, Georges Vieux, who works at Air France in Toulouse. Georges, a highly qualified aeronautical technician, was likely involved with the informal aid Air France provided to the Spanish Republic.
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