It first happened in January 2018. I was at a dinner party hosted by my friend, Katrina, in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. Katrina had steered the conversation towards my plans to publish my father’s memoir which is primarily about his experience of the depression of the 1930s and the Spanish Civil War (1936-1939).

I was telling the other guests a bit about him, when a fellow Canadian asked, “What was your father’s name?”  I said, “Jim Higgins.” He replied, “I’m sure I just heard about him on the news.”  I said, “Impossible!” and promptly forgot about it.

The next day, I saw a CBC news story by Margaret Evans about the excavation of mass graves dating from the Spanish Civil War. I clicked on the link, knowing it would be about the thousands of civilians killed following the 1936 coup led by General Franco against the Spanish government.

Halfway through the piece, I was astonished to see my father’s name. It was only a brief mention, but the dinner guest had been correct!

It turns out that a guide in Corbera de’Ebre, Ramon Gironès, had told Margaret Evans the story of a young Spanish boy from the town named Manuel Alvarez whose life was saved during the Battle of the Ebro in a dramatic rescue by an anonymous Canadian soldier, how Manuel spent forty years looking for his saviour, and how he finally tracked him down in Peterborough Ontario in 1978 to thank him. His rescuer, it turned out, had been Jim Higgins.

(Almost 1700 volunteers went to Spain from Canada, and four hundred were killed, so the odds of Manuel finding my father had been close to zero. Not surprisingly, their reunion became an international human interest story. Manuel then wrote a book, The Tall Soldier,* which was published to glowing reviews in 1980 and more international news coverage.)

***

Fast forward a few months later to August, 2018. I learned of another article written by Rafael Ordôñez which had just been published on the online Spanish news site, El Independiente.

Not only did it feature Manuel and my father, but it added more to the story which even I had only recently learned.  It concerned a photo of an injured boy in a Spanish Civil War field hospital, which had been set up in a cave near La Bisbal de Falset, across the Ebro River from Corbera d’Ebre.

The photo had been taken in August, 1938 by Alec Wainman, a volunteer with the British Medical Unit during the Spanish Civil War. Wainman’s photos went missing for a few decades until his son, who uses the pen name Serge Alternes, tracked them down to London England where he found them in a basement stashed in a suitcase.

Serge compiled the long lost photos into a book, Live Souls: Citizens and Volunteers of Civil War Spain, which was published in 2015. It wasn’t until two years later, in 2017, that Serge first heard the story of Manuel Alvarez and Jim Higgins. On a hunch, Serge consulted the detailed notes Alec Wainman had made about the photo of the injured boy and realized it was none other than Manuel Alvarez.

Serge Alternes tracked down my sister, Susan Higgins, through her website (she’s a glass artist). She affirmed he had found the right contact, told him of my plans to publish our father’s memoir, and gave him my phone number.

Immediately after Serge’s call, I ran over to my neighbourhood bookstore, Book City, bought the book (it was in stock), and found the photo on page 238. It gave me goosebumps—in that boy’s face, I could clearly see the man I had met shortly after he reunited with my father in 1978.

Though Alec Wainman took many photos of children in war-torn Spain, this was the only one of an injured child. It just happened to be a child who was destined to make good on a solemn vow he made to his father: that he would find and thank his saviour in person, no matter what it took, or how long.

Their story keeps popping up, for example Juan Gavasa’s piece in Canada’s Lattin Magazine, but Manuel and Jim tended to deflect from their own story; they felt they represented forces bigger than themselves—a Spanish people forever grateful to the more than 35,000 international volunteers from over sixty countries who made their way to Spain to help defend Spain’s democracy.**  

It could be said there’s a mythical element to the intertwined story of Manuel Alvarez and Jim Higgins which keeps rising like the Phoenix; once more to rise with the publication of Jim’s book, Fighting for Democracy.

*The Tall Soldier: My Forty Year Search for the Man Who Saved My Life, by Manuel Alvarez was first published by Virgo Press in Toronto in 1988. A subsequent edition was published by Vancouver’s New Star Books. It was also translated into Spanish and distributed in Spain under title of El Soldado Alto. All can be found used online.

**Estimates have varied widely over the years. These are the latest numbers. See Giles Tremlett’s new book, The International Brigades: Fascism, Freedom and The Spanish Civil War.

© Janette Higgins

Fighting for Democracy: The True Story of Jim Higgins (1907-1982), A Canadian Activist in Spain’s Civil War can be ordered here.

Fighting for Democracy by Jim Higgins is the latest book about the Mac-Paps (members of the Mackenzie Papineau Battalion), Canadians who were part of the International Brigades in the Spanish Civil War. Other books about Canadians in the Spanish Civil War include Not For King or Country by Tyler Wentzell , Mac-Pap by Ronald Liversedge with David Yorke and Renegades by Michael Petrou.