Hotel Florida: Truth, Love, and Death in the Spanish Civil War by Amanda Vaill Read Free Book Online Page B

she’d shared smuggled cigarettes with the other women inmates, taught them American popular songs, and showed them how to communicate with each other during lockdown by tapping on the walls of their cells—all the while telling her captors she was just a silly girl who didn’t know anything about politics. When an outraged letter from the Polish consul at last secured her release (technically, she was a Polish citizen) she fled to Paris, but the city was hardly more hospitable to her than it had been to the young Hungarian photographer. Even though she found friends from Germany such as Ruth Cerf and Willi Chardack, she couldn’t get a residency permit, so she had to work off the books as a secretary for starvation wages. The room she shared with Ruth was so cold, and they had so little money for food, that on winter weekends they’d stay in bed all day to keep warm and conserve energy before venturing out to their favorite haunt, the café La Capoulade on the corner of the Boulevard Saint-Michel and the rue Soufflot, where they could huddle next to one of the huge charcoal braziers to talk politics and philosophy.
    Maybe because Gerta preferred the company of the Sorbonne students, political theorists, and exiled SAP members at the Capoulade, while André liked the more freewheeling artistic atmosphere at the Dôme, they saw little of each other in the months after their first meeting, although Gerta did give him story ideas and big-sisterly advice about what clothes to wear or what to read. (Left to himself, he’d read detective stories; she was more inclined to books like John Dos Passos’s epic modernist novels Manhattan Transfer and 1919 , the story of John Reed, “the last of the great race of war correspondents who ducked under censorship and risked their skins for a story.”) By this time she was in a liaison with Willi Chardack—her old flame Georg Kuritzkes had gone to study medicine in Italy—while André was having a desultory affair with a striking red-haired German fashion photographer named Regina Langquarz, who called herself Relang and sometimes let André use her darkroom. But in the spring of 1935, while he was in Spain shooting two assignments for his old Dephot boss, he’d written Gerta a letter in which, after describing the Holy Week celebrations in Seville where “half [the people] are drunk [and] the crowd is so thick that one can get away with fondling the breasts of all the señoritas,” he confessed that “sometimes … I’m completely in love with you.”
    Gerta kept him at arm’s length until that summer; but then she invited him to accompany her and Willi Chardack—with whom she was no longer romantically involved—and another male friend to the tiny island of Ste. Marguérite in the south of France, a half-hour’s ferry ride from Cannes. For almost three months the four young people lived on tinned sardines and slept in tents under the umbrella pines near the fortress where the Man in the Iron Mask had been imprisoned; during the long sunlit days they rambled over the island’s garrigue or swam in the sea, and André taught Gerta how to use his camera. Soon the two of them had become lovers. When they returned to Paris in the fall, suntanned and inseparable, André told the Hungarian photographer André Kertesz, who had become a mentor, “Never before in my whole life have I been so happy!”
    Gerta took him in hand, as if he were a school project. “It’s impossible how you live,” she told him. Together they found a modern one-room apartment in the Seventh Arrondissement with a view of the Eiffel Tower; although its divan bed was so narrow they couldn’t both sleep on their backs at the same time, it had a tiny kitchen where they could prepare meals (“I do the washing up and break all the glasses,” he wrote to his mother), so they spent less time (and money) in cafés. They began working together, André shooting photographs and Gerta typing up accompanying