Martha Gellhorn
Martha Gellhorn
Martha Ellis Gellhornwas an American novelist, travel writer, and journalist, who is now considered one of the greatest war correspondents of the 20th century. She reported on virtually every major world conflict that took place during her 60-year career. Gellhorn was also the third wife of American novelist Ernest Hemingway, from 1940 to 1945. At the age of 89, ill and almost completely blind, she died in 1998 of an apparent suicide. The Martha Gellhorn Prize for Journalism is named after...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionJournalist
Date of Birth8 November 1908
CitySt. Louis, MO
CountryUnited States of America
People may correctly remember the events of twenty years ago (a remarkable feat), but who remembers his fears, his disgusts, his tone of voice? It is like trying to bring back the weather of that time.
Joseph McCarthy, the Junior Republican Senator from Wisconsin, ruled America like devil king for four years. His purges were an American mirror image of Stalin's purges, an unnoticed similarity.
After the desperate years of their own war, after six years of repression inside Spain and six years of horror in exile, these people remain intact in spirit. They are armed with a transcendent faith; they have never won, and yet they have never accepted defeat.
Dachau has been my own lifelong point of no return. Between the moment when I walked through the gate of that prison, with its infamous motto, 'Arbeit Macht Frei,' and when I walked out at the end of a day that had no ordinary scale of hours, I was changed, and how I looked at the human condition, the world we live in, changed ... Years of war had taught me a great deal, but war was nothing like Dachau. Compared to Dachau, war was clean.
And though various organizations in America and England collected money and sent food parcels to these refugees, nothing was ever received by the Spanish.
I only knew about daily life. It was said, well, it isn't everybody's daily life. That is why I started.
The road passed through a curtain of pine forest and came out on a flat, rolling snow field. In this field the sprawled or bunched bodies of Germans lay thick, like some dark shapeless vegetable.
From two o'clock one afternoon until the ship docked in England again the next evening at seven, none of the medical personnel stopped work.
Germans trained in obedience and dedicated to moral whitewashing are not a new people, nor are they reliable partners for anyone else.
If I practised sex, out of moral conviction, that was one thing; but to enjoy it... seemed a defeat.
I used to write letters to the wounded in the Palace Hotel, and I used to drive a station wagon with blood in bottles to a battalion aid station.
Officialdom is hostile to inquiring outsiders.
What the trees can do handsomely-greening and flowering, fading and then the falling of leaves-human beings cannot do with dignity, let alone without pain.
the private conscience is the last and only protection of the civilized world.