Anna-Mária Basch

In late October 1936, an enthusiastic Spanish crowd welcomed more than 500 volunteers from several countries into the port of Valencia. The only woman among them, white-haired in her early forties and carrying this medical bag, was Anna-Mária Basch, a Hungarian nurse who became the first female International Brigadier in the Spanish Civil War.

Born in 1893 in Felsőszentiván (now Hungary), she joined the workers’ movement at an early age. In 1915, while working in a hospital close to the Italian front, she met her future husband, Endre Basch (1890-1944). He had joined the Austro-Hungarian Army after his expulsion from the University of Engineering, where he frequented a left-leaning student branch of the Hungarian Freethinking Association led by Karl Polanyi. The couple married the following year, and their son János (1916-1980) was born during the war.

After the crushing of the Hungarian Soviet Republic in 1919, these committed leftists both took part in organising the Communist Party in Subotica (Serbia), with Anna-Mária mobilising the women. In 1930, she and Endre were forced to go into exile in Belgium. She worked as a hospital nurse in Brussels until 1936 when the police discovered that she had hidden recently arrived comrades from Hungary and Yugoslavia. The family left for Paris, where they organised the first international volunteers to help the republican cause in Spain.

At the International Brigades headquarters in Albacete, Anna-Mária was placed in charge of the nurses in a major hospital. Her husband joined the artillery, and her son worked as a radio operator. In the next three years, Anna-Mária became a highly professional theatre nurse, the right-hand of the New Zealand field surgeon Douglas Jolly. The intimacy of their surviving letters and photographs suggests that they shared a loving relationship.

Anna-Mária and her family were among the last volunteers to leave Spain. After helping to transport the injured through the Pyrenees, she and her son arrived in France in 1939. Anna-Mária joined the Belgian partisan movement, hiding resistance fighters in the German hospital where she worked. Her communist cell was dismantled in 1943, and she was sent to Ravensbrück concentration camp. Having changed her Jewish surname from Berger to Révész when she was twelve, her origins weren’t discovered. Her foreign language skills later enabled her to work in an office in Neubrandenburg, where she took an active part in saving children’s lives.

As the British troops advanced, she escaped with a group of women. She was reunited with her son and daughter-in-law but never knew for certain the fate of her husband, who was probably murdered in the crematorium of Majdanek.

In the late 1940s, the Hungarian Workers’ Party invited her to return, but by then, mistrust, animosity and paranoia reigned in the Party, and many ‘Spanish comrades’ were accused of being foreign spies of the West, jailed and executed.

Of the almost one thousand Hungarian volunteers, nearly half lost their lives in Spain. With no option to return to Hungary, many of the survivors joined resistance movements in Europe and died during World War II. As secretary of the Hungarian Partizans’ Association, Anna-Mária supported the remaining Hungarian volunteers. She was also a board member of the International Ravensbrück Committee for more than two decades.

By the time Anna-Mária Basch died in Budapest in 1979, her name had long been forgotten.

ÉCs