Into the looking glass...

History.  My history.  The world's history.

I was never one who had a whole lot of interest in history, or war, for that matter.  Last night, however, I spent a few hours back in the early 1930's....   living through the images that I was scanning for my father, of his father in the Spanish Civil War.  I never met my grandfather.  He was born one-hundred years ago, March 15, 1911.  Veikko Olavi Lindfors died when my father was a teenager. They called him Ole {yes, like the Finnish Sven & Ole jokes told in Minnesota} back then.  The images of the war are amazing.  Yet it was not our war.  These men of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, of which my grandfather was a part of, fought together with other countries in the Spanish Civil War.  This was also known as the first "media war" and was covered by foreign correspondents, to include Ernest Hemingway.

Taken from Wiki:

Many non-Spanish people, often affiliated with radical, communist or socialist parties or groups, joined the International Brigades, believing that the Spanish Republic was the front line of the war against fascism. The troops of the International Brigades represented the largest foreign contingent of those fighting for the Republicans. Roughly 40,000 foreign nationals fought with the Brigades, although at any given time there were no more than 18,000; they came from a claimed 53 nations.^[121] Most of them were communists or trade unionists, and while organised by communists guided or controlled by Moscow, they were almost all individual volunteers.

The American volunteers fought in units such as the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and Canadians in the Mackenzie-Papineau Battalion.^[122]

Comrades (Veikko, lower right)

Sepia-toned images that seem to STOP a moment in time and say look at me!  With a look, a smile, a building crumbling in the background, children who were left behind and not sent to an orphanage or a brigade of volunteers marching the street.  All of the images calling us to remember a moment in time.

Veikko Olavi Lindfors

The world...  falling apart and coming together.

Another war, not the first, nor the last.

But history.  Ours.  Mine.

Olavi = Oliver

Oliver was born
the day
his grandmother
Elsie died,
Veikko's wife.