For someone who had just arrived, the aspect of Barcelona was something startling and overwhelming. it was the first time I had ever been in a town where the working class was in the saddle. Practically every building was draped with red flags or with the red and black flag of the Anarchist, and scrawled with the hammer and sickle and with the initials of the revolutionary parties, and almost every chuch had been gutted and its images burnt. Every shop and café had an inscription saying it had been collectivised; even the bootblacks had been collectivised and their boxes painted red and black.
Waiters and shop-walkers looked you in the face and treated you as an equal. Servile and even ceremonial forms of speech had temporarily disappeared. Nobody said 'Señor' or 'Don' or even 'Usted'; everyone called everyone else 'Comrade'and 'Thou' and said 'Salud' instead of 'Buenos días'. The revolutionary posts were everywhere, flaming from the walls in clean reds and blues that made the few remaining advertisementes look like daubs of mud. Down the Ramblas, the wide central artery of the town where crowds of people stremed constantly to and fro, the loudspeakers were bellowing revolutionary songs all day and far into the night. But it was the aspect of the crowds that was the queerest thing of all. In outward appearance it was a town in which the whealthy classes had practically ceased to exist. Practically everyone wore rough working-class clothes.
All this was queer and moving. There was much in it that I did not understand, in some ways I did not even like it, but I recognised it immediately as a state of affairs worth fighting for.
Hommage to Catalonia, George Orwell-Orwell in Spain
Coincidió que estaba leyendo Orwell in Spain cuando vi parte del reportaje conmemorativo de la liberación de Mauthausen. Una entrevista a un superviviente del campo, me emocionó mucho, al oírle decir que para él la bandera española siempre sería la republicana.
