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

cost money, more money than two impecunious journalists could scrounge up, so they were glad to recruit as a member a young American heiress named Muriel Gardiner, who had come to Vienna to study psychoanalysis with Sigmund Freud and would become a valuable colleague of theirs. Another member was an English economics student, Hugh Gaitskell, later head of Britain’s Labour Party; not officially in the cell, but in contact with it, were two other Englishmen, one a tall, blond, pink-faced poet, Stephen Spender, who (somewhat surprisingly, since his previous relationships had all been with men) was having an affair with Muriel Gardiner, the other a dark, extremely charming aspiring journalist, recently married to an Austrian girl who, like him, was a Communist. His name was Harold Adrian Russell Philby, but everyone called him Kim.
    The Spark was successful at first, using contacts in England to channel aid from British trade unions, and getting the word out about what had really happened in Vienna. But then the unthinkable happened. The Austrian police arrested a courier that the group used to carry money, messages, and illegal documents between Vienna and their exiled leadership in Brno, and through the courier—who was having a romance with the Kulcsars’ maid—Ilse and Poldi’s cover was blown. It would be only a matter of hours before they were picked up and imprisoned, or worse. Fleeing to a little inn in the mountains two hours south of Vienna, where Ilse had spent carefree summers as a child, they waited for terrifying days until Muriel Gardiner could bring them the false papers they needed to escape. Finally, near midnight on a stormy evening, she appeared—soaked to the skin, having traveled by bus and on foot up the icy road in the rain to deliver the precious documents; the next day, with their photographs neatly inserted into two strangers’ passports, Ilse and Poldi crossed the Czech border and made their way to Brno.
    That was in November 1934, and nearly two years of life in exile had been hard. Ilse missed her family, and Brno’s medieval alleyways and sleek new Bauhaus apartment buildings made her homesick for her beloved Baroque Vienna. She and Poldi were working together to launch a new, multinational socialist review for which she planned to write, and that was exciting; but the rootlessness and petty infighting in their circle of émigrés were wearing Ilse down. Developments in Germany, where Hitler had just occupied the Rhineland and was making noises about annexing northern Czechoslovakia, were far from reassuring; things were worse at home, where Dolfuss (having eliminated the leftist opposition) had been assassinated by Austrian Nazis and, Muriel Gardiner reported, many of their former associates were being arrested.
    But the real trouble, for Ilse, was with her husband. There was the business of the money: back in Vienna, Poldi had been the bookkeeper for the Spark, and before they left he’d apparently started skimming off some of its funds into a special account he had—for what? There was his domineering streak, his need to tell her what to do, what to think. Then there were his contacts with a shadowy network of operatives in Germany and elsewhere, in which he used the code-name “Maresch.” Most ominous of all was the new hardness he’d begun to demonstrate: speaking of a comrade he suspected might be a turncoat, he’d said, with a look that blended pleasure and cruelty, “If it is true, we shall have to put him out of the way.”
    Into the anxious fog that surrounded her, the bulletins from Spain—the army’s attempted coup, the government’s resistance, and even more the revolutionary changes that were taking place in the wake of the rebellion—came like a ray of clear light. In Spain fascism was being openly confronted, not accepted, or appeased, or explained, or ignored; people were acting on their convictions, instead of endlessly talking about them, as her and Poldi’s