Kalle Brolin
Transcription of the interview with Kalle Brolin about “Spanish Kalle”:
1:36.
I made a film called “Spanish Kalle” and it’s about this old guy. Back in my hometown I just heard a story about and old man living near by who had been in the Spanish Civil War when he was young, and I also heard that he was called “Spanish Kalle”, well “Spanien Kalle”, it’s like a saylors name.
2:13
Well, I also heard that he was supposed to be the last one left, because there had been a couple of hundreds of Swedish Men who volunteered to fight on the side of “Frente Popular” and out of all of those who went down there to fight there is now one left and that’s this guy. So I thought, since he is living here by I should go and talk to him and see if he has any good stories to tell. So I did that a couple of times and it turn out that the stories that I had heard about him were not true but then he had a lot of other stories that I didn’t know about, that I hadn’t expected, that were much better.
3:32
Well, about all the stories that he told, I like all of them but I had to cut away a lot because there are hours and hours, and when he was telling the stories he was going back and forth in time and he would also mix up one story with another in very associative way. For example, if he was talking about being in the Spanish Civil War and he was talking about airplanes overhead bombing, then he would shift into another story about airplanes overhead and, suddenly, he was back in Germany in the 40’s when the allied forces were bombing the camp where he was held prisoner.
4:22
Well, I can do a short summary of his life, that’s it: He run away from home, he became a sailor and became active in the union, he heard about the Spanish Civil War and with a lot of unionist and sailors went down to join the side of the Republic. He fought on the side of the communists and the anarchists against the fascists. While he was there he was wound a little bit but not too bad, other people around him were dying but he always managed to get by on luck. After the Spanish civil war he went back to being a sailor for a while and then, during de 2nd World War he joined the resistance in the Nordic Countries and he went to Denmark to work for the resistance there, but he was captured by the German forces who were occupying Denmark at that time. He was sentenced to dead and he was going to be executed, but then was a big negotiation going on between the Swedish Foreign Ministry and the German envoy trying to have the sentence reduced. You can follow this exchange in a series of documents that were classified for 30 years. Eventually his dead sentence was reduced to labour camp, so he went to Germany to different labour camps and he survived again and survived the allied bombing the camps. After the war he decided that he didn’t want to use weapons anymore to fight, it had been the atom bombs and he had become friends with a lot of German Nazis that were keeping him in prison, like the prison guards or the interrogation leaders, and when they were killed he lost friends. So, he became journalist and he worked for some communist newspapers, and he travelled all over the world. He lived for 8 or 9 years in Russia writing about the economic and industrial development in that country. And then he lived in China a couple of years and he wrote about the great leap-forward. And then he moved to Cuba and he lived there for 30 years and he travelled to America, both North and South but more on South where he stayed with various Guerrilla movements in various countries, and he went to prison in different countries in South America but he always was released for some reason or other. Well, that’s his life story.
8:21
And when you hear it you know that his memory is fading, I guess, like the memory of near by times is not as good as memory of all days. for example he might not remember me visiting, when he sees me the next time it would be for the first time.
9:51
So, I thought this guy is like a human document or a human monument. He had the entire history of the 20th Century.
