 OK, can you hear me all? I shall talk in Spanish, because I lived 20 years in Italy. So my Spanish accent actually is more of an Italian one. But hopefully it won't be a problem. So as I have been introduced, I am a journalist and writer. And I have lived the last 20 years of my life doing research on the Dutch volunteers in the Spanish traders, i.e. this project, which is managed by the Social History Institute in Amsterdam in the Netherlands. And it has been conducted thanks to the Dutch Friends Association of the International Brigaders. And here is Christina Ruiz. She comes from Aragon, after having spent 30 years in the Netherlands, who's helped me with the translation of my discourse. So please, Christina, if words are, if I like some words, please give me a hand. I have published two books on the Dutch volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. OK, so far so good. Right. This is a book on Fanny Schromert. You know, Dutch always uses. My name is Scholten, and she was Schronchét. Fanny's nickname was the Queen of the machine gun. Also I have published a book on Miss Schreening, who was a US guy who helped with the Lincoln's. And he was a singer, actually. He was the singer. He was a very kind man, actually. So there is this side, Spanischiders. These 700 biographies of Dutch volunteers in the Spanish Civil War. And amongst them, there were 27 women, Dutch women. Most of them being, obviously, who was mostly the case. There were nurses. Two or three, I will be talking about in detail afterwards. I was asked to talk about women in general. Here you can see this website, Spanischaders.nl. And this is where you can check and get more information on these biographies. You can do a Google translation, which is never OK. We'll know that. And as I was saying, I was asked to talk about women in general in the international brigades. And it's such a broad area. It's a complex topic. It's a little bit difficult, to be honest. In 1939, the International Brigades Archive was sent to the former Soviet Union. And during many, many years, it was totally closed and hidden from the public. However, three years ago, it was openly published. It's actually online. And as you said, it's the Ergaspi. You could vote hours, endless hours. The archive is called RJSPI. And here, he found a letter by Gallo, Luigi Longo, an Italian. He was one of the most important commanders of the International Brigade. And the letter is directed for a lady from Strasbourg. And it says, dear comrade, for serious military reasons and in view of the experience of the last few months, I have to communicate with you. I'm really sorry. We don't accept any women. If there are women in our battalion, it is decomposed for reasons you could yourself imagine. Dear comrade, I am truly sorry, but there is no place for you in the international brigades. Nor are there women accepted in the Spanish militias. They don't accept women either. It is not true. Afterwards, I will talk about Fanny, who participated in the militias right up until 1937, maybe May or July. But this letter by Longo, it's December 1936. So basically, we've said everything about the role of women in the international brigades. And also, we can feel it's important to realize how high commanders or the big guys thought about women participation. Indeed, there are few very scarce studies done on this topic on the role of women. But in many countries, in a few countries, sorry, there have been some studies carried out, such as the Netherlands, the US, in Latin America, in Austria. There is also a very nice book on Belgian women, which is titled, Give Me a Second. This is the long letter, sorry. This is my first PowerPoint presentation, so I need to get organized. This is the letter, which you can find in the archive. This is the book I was mentioning on Belgian women. In Spanish, Cristina means, yes, in Spanish, it will be published in December. In German language, two books have been published. They're quite general ones, Frauen in the Spanish English, which means women in the Spanish Civil War. These were two daughters by a German volunteer, Luxchitz, and Spaniakimferinen by the Austrian René Luxchitz. And the first one includes short biographies of a few thousand women from all over the world. The problem is that it doesn't have an index, so it's quite hard to use it, actually. And the second one by René Luxchitz is much more theoretical. And many of her conclusions actually coincide with those by Mary Nash, the US writer, who wrote about the Spanish women in the Civil War, which is titled, To Find Male Civilization. Cristina, how would you say this in Spanish? Desafiar a la civilización. And both actually writers actually stated or realized a great difference between the first months of the war from July to September 1936 and afterwards when the People's Army was created. And in the regular army, there was no place for women, as Gallos said. In the previous months, in the militias, women actually played an important role. And it was actually devoted, many attention was devoted to them. Women who took up arms were, of course, a new phenomenon. But afterwards, when their arms were taken away from them, new tasks were given. Please see this postcard here. It's quite clear, isn't it? The postcard says, women work. There were also big differences between the political groups, the anarchists, and the POUM, which were more favorable to accepting women and the communist socialists and republicans. Lucius, in her book, analyzes the image that was given of women. And it doesn't always coincide with reality. It's the classic image of the woman that of a dedicated person devoted, a woman who gives comfort. But it underestimates the fact that many, especially women in the international brigades, they chose to come here because of political reason, because of their anti-fascist ideas. We talk about women in Spain. There's always this idea of a nurse. But women did have some organizing roles. They worked in the health care service. And also on the front, there were translators, journalists, photographers, and so on and so forth. After the disappearance of the militias, that women fighters who were previously praised and admired, then they were started to be seen as a problem. In the so-called characteristics or features, which were the list of behavior assessment or evaluation of conduct of the volunteers, in the case of women, there were lists of personal aspects of their love life, for example, which was one of the characteristics that would never be listed for men. For example, Frieda Schiff, a German woman who lived in Moscow for six years with a black man. This detail would never be found in a man's list. And our question is, why? So sexism and racism were not yet topics of discussion or topics of debate after the general park. I would like to say more things about Dutch women. Some Dutch women, as I said, most of them were nurses. Their biographies can be found of these 27 women. All the biographies are in the Dutch website. And you can see in these biographies a big difference in their backgrounds, origins, and political reasons. Most of them were communists. That's true. But there were some socialists, social democrats, PON followers, or POUM followers, and women who had no political affiliation whatsoever. I decided to tell you about the three Dutch women who were not nurses. The first one of them is a woman named Fanny Schoenheide. The press, back then, at that time, and we're talking about the year 1936, Fanny, the Dutch woman, was really popular. She was really popular at the press, back then. She was considered, oh, by the way, this is another Dutch woman, Lini. I will tell you about here Lini Buñez, another militian member. I will tell you more about this lady later on. But let us come back to Fanny. Fanny was very popular. She was a fighter, the woman fighter. And we can see that in some interviews that were done with her. An example, for example, was the interview published in La Vanguardia, a Catalan newspaper, on the 28th of August of 1936. They were talking to the military chiefs who directed the operations on the Aragonese front. And then we find Colonel Bilalba, who says, we have a Dutch woman that we have baptized, the queen of machine guns. She's tall, blonde, beautiful, and her name is Fanny. She's not a tomboy at all. She's a little woman who's discreet, kind, and very, very feminine. She's the most admirable woman on the front. The other day, she had to load a machine gun. And she had to walk three kilometers under the very strong Aragonese sun. From the effort, she fell ill. And she was taken to hospital. But she didn't then ask, as people normally do some few days to recover for convulsions, after some restful sleep, she came back to the front. That was written then. But in December 1936, Fanny was again at the hospital. And she was interviewed again by a journalist. She was interviewed so many times. This time, the journalist also worked for La Vanguardia. But rather than an interview, the thing that was published was a declaration of love, really. Fanny Schonheit, I need to say that this journalist was the only one who was able to write her name properly. And according to this journalist, Fanny was, as follows, blonde hair in which no oxygen played any role. Naturally blonde, just blonde. And then blue eyes, blues, as in a northern lake or a southern sky. Right? And then the journalist continues with this. He was fascinated, and this is fascinating, right? He of course, and yes, how brave she was, how determined she was to come back to the front again. Fanny, a writer in Barcelona. Two years before the war, but back then she was working for a liberal newspaper in Rotterdam in the Netherlands. But then she realized that she would not be able to go beyond being a secretary. In Barcelona, she expected to be able to work as a correspondent, but she did not succeed. And in these two years in Barcelona, she started writing down letters to a friend in Rotterdam. This can be found in the Amsterdam archive. And in these two years, her political interests were clearly going towards the left. And finally, she ended up in the PSUC, the political party. I do not know how it was, but she finally ended up at that political party because she was always, after the war, very mysterious about her own life in Spain. Very quiet, very silent. She didn't say a word, even to her daughter. She never told anything about her life, not even to her daughter. She was a member of the PSUC, and that is something that I have double checked. And then she was again to the hospital again. Marina Ginestá. Marina Ginestá is a woman I interviewed about 10 years ago when she was 90 years old. But she told me that this was the case. 90 years old, but she was so wonderful. Marina, this young girl of this iconic photography you have on screen, was this woman with the machine gun. And she said, back then, that was the only woman of my life. She said that I had a rifle in my hand, that I have a machine gun in my hand. Marina was 16, and she met Fanny, who was 23 years old. Marina looked up at here with admiration. She admired here as a modern, independent woman, a woman who, oh my god, she smoked cigarettes on the street. And that was exceptional then. In spring 1936, Fanny, like many young people in Barcelona, was in charge of the preparations of the People's Olympiad in Barcelona. As you all know, these Olympic Games of Barcelona, these People's Olympic Games, were being prepared back then. And that was that moment in which Fanny was trying to start and decide to join the militia and fight with her friends with whom she was preparing these People's Olympiad. Fanny immediately joined the ranks of the militias. And in a letter to her friend, she starts telling her friend about these first days in Barcelona. She participated in the assault. And she went out to the front of Tardienta. And that's where she made the name of, well, that's where she was called the Queen of the Machine Guns. Because she was really, really brave at that time. At the beginning of 1937, after the disappearance of the militias and the creation of the popular army, Fanny then joined a pre-military training camp, a camp that was pretty close to Barcelona. And according to several documents that I have checked, she was a director of the camp, manager of the camp, and even a lieutenant. However, I have asked several Spanish historians about the possibility that she was a lieutenant. And they all deny it. They say that this is not possible. A foreign woman in the People's Army, no. They say no. I actually have no explanation for that. Because she is described as holding these ranks in the army in several documents. And I will need to skip some parts of my presentation. So my apologies. If you want to find out more about Fanny, please look her up, because she's a really interesting woman. I'm now only going to talk about the second woman, because otherwise I will not have time for that. So the second Dutch woman that I am really interested in, her name is Adriana Schreiberer. Hold on a second. I'm going to show you about here. I don't have any photos. I only have a few documents available. She was born in 1907. And she died in 1942 during the Nazi occupation of Holland. I think Fanny had a great adventure spirit. But Adriana too, Adriana too. She was in Spain from September 1936 to August 1938, almost two years. And her passport shows that she was constantly crossing the border between France and Spain. However, I don't know exactly what she was doing when she was crossing the border so many times. Hold on a second. It's not easy to accelerate my speech. Dejan, as she was called, is a woman for whom we have the most interesting information thanks to the research and investigations of the Dutch secret service. Because she was interrogated in September 1938 by the Amsterdam police. And she told a completely fantastic but also made-up or invented story. Of course, it's just a bunch of lies. She said that she went to Spain in order to write a book on the economic situation of the country. And in order to work in the radio, Barcelona, I couldn't really find any evidence of whether they were broadcast in Dutch. I don't think this is likely. They were centrally broadcast in German, but probably not in Dutch. In the interrogation, she said that she had no political interest whatsoever and that she did. She does not belong to any party. But it turns out that the police had a file on here. And according to that file, she was a communist. She was in Moscow in the famous Lenin School. And she also lived without being married with her boyfriend. In 1933, she was fined for insulting the president of the Dutch government. We could say that Jan had all the qualities that would please the communist international officials in Barcelona. But that was not the case. There is a document by Gustav Schindel, who was a German volunteer and also a communist official, who in 1940 in Moscow collected all the so-called characteristics about German and Dutch volunteers. And Zinda writes devastating things about him. According to him, she has a frivolous behavior. She's too cheerful. She has no class awareness. And the most serious of it all is that she has some friendly relations with the PO-UM people in this paranoid climate of 1937, 1938, with the Moscow trials. Having relationships with the PO-UM, according to the logic of commentary, it was the same as being a traitor and a spy. Out of all these accusations, they could find no evidence. The Communist Party of Spain wrote a letter to the Dutch party asking that this woman was so dangerous that she had to be removed from Spain, expelled from Spain. And I need to finish. But the two women, as all Dutch volunteers, both of them lost their nationality. They were not national citizens of the Netherlands anymore. And not only that, their names, the name of these ladies, the name of these women volunteers were included in the list of the secret police of the Netherlands. With the occupation of the Netherlands, these lists of these subversive people ended up in the hands of the Gestapo. So many Dutch fighters ended up in concentration camps. So Jan was arrested and tortured in 1942. And she committed suicide in prison. She was only 35 years old.