mass residential areas there were not many cellars. The shelters, which were dug in haste by desperate people in the close yards and side streets, often became their graves.
Homeless people left the city to go on the mountain. The light bombers came down to a few hundred meters above the unprotected mountain. In this area the explosive effect of the new bombs was even more terrible than in the city. The fragments blew up flat over the ground. Those, who threw themselves on the ground, remained dead in their blood. Before returning to their base, the bombers dropped the remainder of their bombs over the sanatoriums and kindergarten, which were situated on the mountain.
Two theatres and 11 cinemas were changed into ruins. In the state opera a French troop performes. Bernadette Delpret of the Paris Opera sings Manon. The detonations over-roar the tender music: The hall is obscured. The singers remain on stage. The orchestra plays the «Marseillaise«. The hall and the singers together sing the French liberty hymne. The Spanish national hymn follows. During one hour, while the bombs hit all around, the three thousand persons in the dark sing popular songs and combat songs. Then the performance continues.
Between the bombings during three days leaflets fall down.
«We will bomb you every three hours, until
you surrender. Surrender, or we destroy
You all!
Generalissimo Franco.»
Franco does not speak any more of the fact that there are «innocents». He wants «to destroy them all». But they do not surrender. They know: to give up means treason, means self-destruction.
But this inhuman, murdering bombing changed the city deeply. Not only because of the destroyed houses. The face of the city is changed, it became more calm and more decided to fight. In the broad Ramblas, wonderful promenades, banners are pulled from tree to tree, urging the men to enrol as volunteer. And in masses the volunteers enrol, in order to go to the front to combat this murderer fascism so that it does not continue to kill their wifes and children.
In the rubble of a house a worker cooperates in the search of the corpses of his entire family. The rubble buried his mother, his wife and his children. He works with an angry, decided face and when he has found the last dead,
