On this day 21 July 1936 this iconic photo taken by Hans Gutmann on top of the Hotel Colón in Barcelona. of 17-year-old socialist Marina Ginestà just three days after the military rebellion against the Spanish Republic had been launched.The rifle she is carrying is an M1916 Spanish Mauser, manufactured at the famous Oviedo factory in Spain for the Spanish Army.
In the photo she has a look of innocence in her eyes, perhaps, but – as the rifle slung over her back would suggest – her idealistic determination to defend the Republic against the army's treachery and simultaneously implement a Socialist revolution in Spain is equally plain.
"It is a good photo, it reflects the feelings we had at the time," said Ginesta, whose parents were Spanish trade unionists. "Socialism had arrived and the clients of the hotel" – the now defunct Colon on the Plaza de Catalunya – "had gone. There was a sense of euphoria."
"We moved into the Colon" – which became the Communist and Socialist combined youth movement headquarters in Barcelona, festooned with images of Lenin and Stalin – "and we started eating good food. It was as if the bourgeois way of life had suddenly become ours as well.
"They say I have a striking way of looking at the camera. That's possible, because we were well aware of the mystique surrounding a revolution of the proletariat and the Hollywood films of the time, too [with stars] like Greta Garbo and Gary Cooper."
However, for Ginesta and the other idealists of the time, the summer of 1936 represented the high-tide mark for Spain's revolution, as the bitterly fought Civil War ended with defeat for the Republic and exile or death for its defenders.
The photo however became one of the most well-known powerful images from that war, and represents the fight against fascism and the struggles of conflict. It was a piece of propaganda at a time of rapid social and political change,and a symbol of hope. Hope like now that continues to prevail as the rising tide of fascism continues..
Marina Ginestà was born in Toulouse, France, on January 29, 1919. Her family was working-class and believed in left-wing ideas. Both her parents, Empar Coloma Chalmeta and Bruno Ginestà Manubens, were tailors from Spain.
The hotel where the picture was taken was destroyed after the war. Today, a building for the Banco Español de Crédito stands in its place.
Marina was a member of Juventudes Socialistas Unificadas (Socialist Youth), the youth organization mainly directed by Partido Comunista de España (PCE, Communist Party of Spain). As the war broke out, she served as a reporter and a translator assisting Mikhail Koltsov, a correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Pravda.
Marina remained a militant throughout the rest of the war and was drawn to other groups at that time such as the anti-Stalinist P.O.U.M (which the famous writer George Orwell was a member of) and the Anarchist C.N.T. As outlined in George Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, the militias of a tiny left-wing party, the POUM, joined forces with the Anarchists in Barcelona to rebel against the increasingly dominant Communists, who used the same terraces where the photo of Ginesta had been taken for machine-gun posts as they fought for control of the city. Despite her initial involvement however she quickly grew disillusioned with the path that the Stalinists were taking.
Sources shed doubt on Marina’s insistence that she did not participate in the fighting. As it turns out, Marina makes an appearance in the diary of Mikhail Koltsova who was correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Pravda.
In his Diary of the Spanish Civil War, which was published in Spanish long after Stalin had had his friend liquidated, Koltsov writes that Marina never went anywhere without her heavy, antiquated rifle. He would know, because for several months Marina served as Koltsov’s interpreter, translating from Spanish to French.
In fact, she’d been present at the legendary meeting between the Pravda correspondent and Buenaventura Durruti, the Anarchist leader, in mid-August 1936. Since Durruti’s French turned out to be at least as good as Koltsov’s, Marina’s services were not needed, and the two men excused her.
“I wouldn’t have understood their conversation anyway,” Marina later said. “I was much too young. But they appeared to like each other a lot. They smiled and seemed to agree on everything. That, I have always thought, must have been one of the reasons why Koltsov was liquidated once he got back to Moscow. Come to think of it, I’m happy I didn’t end up in there, too, as did so many Spanish Communists after the defeat of the Republic.”
Before the end of the war, Ginestà was wounded and evacuated to Montpellier. Marina did not know about the photo until 2006, although the iconic image was printed and circulated everywhere, serving as cover for the book “Thirteen Red Roses” by Carlos Fonseca, and was also along with dozens of other photographs in the book “Unpublished images of the Civil War” (2002).
When Nazi Germany took over France, Marina had to leave. She went to the Dominican Republic escaping the horrors of war in Europe. There, she married Manuel Periâñez-Martin lived briefly in the Dominican Republic, where their son Manuel was born. Though, her peace was interrupted again by the rise of dictator Rafael Trujillo and they were forced to move toVenezuela .
A few years later she married Belgian diplomat Carl Werck, with whom she had a daughter, Isabelle. Werck's job took the family to several cities in the 1950s and ’60s, including London and New Orleans. Ginestà wrote two novels in the Catalonian language in the 1970s; the first, Els antipodes, chronicled the story of Spanish Civil War exiles in the Dominican Republic during World War II. Her final years were spent in Brussels and Paris.
In the mid-1980s, a trove of Guzmân's photographs of the Spanish Civil War were unearthed, the image of Ginestà and her rifle among them. The portrait captivated those who were intrigued by the tragic war and its ultimate consequences, which permitted fascist regimes to wreak havoc across Europe and Asia. Guzmân had written an identifying caption, giving the date as July 21, 1936, and the figure as Marina Jinesta. The image was used for the cover of a bestseller in Spain in 2004, Las trece rosas (“The Thirteen Roses”).
The Spanish photo agency that held the rights to Guzmân's archive set out to find “Marina Jinesta” in 2006. A researcher discovered Ginestàt two years later in Paris, aged 89, and she spoke about the Hotel Colón days in a documentary that aired on Spanish television.
And before her death on January 6, 2014, in Paris, the 94-year-old was believed to be Marina Ginestà, had been tracked down and confronted with this version of her younger self, in 2006, she confessed that she still remembered the dead bodies she had seen, including a mother with two children in her arms, the best part of seventy years before.
The memory of her comrades, her fellow resistance fighters, most of whom perished, still lingers in the air.
