The Botwin group was the only one in which Jews fought as a distinct group. It therefore became the major symbol of the Jewish presence in Spain.
In general, the International Brigades were utilized by the Popular Front as shock troops in the most dangerous places that drew the heaviest casualties. The Botwin Company was no exception. Some 120 of its men were thrown into an assault at the battle of Estremadura, in the defense of Madrid. Only 18 survived. The Company’s courage earned it the Medalla de Valor from the Spanish government.
Whatever it was that drove other volunteers of the International Brigades to Spain, the dominant motive among Jews was ideological. Many of them may have been socialists or communists, but they clearly perceived that they were fighting a sworn enemy of the Jewish people. The Jewish-Zionist angle was no less significant than the socialist-communist.
It is not just the total number of Jews who participated the Spanish Civil War (25 per cent of all the volunteers) that was so extraordinary. Equally important was their sheer courage – their readiness for self-sacrifice. The Jews fired the first shots against Fascism in Spain.
It is no coincidence that the first casualty among the International Brigades was a Jew, Leon Baum from Paris, and the last casualty was a Jew as well, Haskel Honigstern, who was given a state funeral in Barcelona on October 6, 1938. The Spanish poet Jose Herrera wrote of him: “Haskel Honigstern, Polish worker of the Jewish race, son of an obscure land, killed in the light of my homeland.”
It is also no coincidence that when Juan Negrin, head of the Republican government, announced in September 1938 the unilateral withdrawal of the International Brigades from Spain for diplomatic reasons, the Botwin Company formed the rearguard of the troops as they withdraw across the border into France.
Jewish participation in the Spanish Civil War put to lie the assertion that Jews are by nature timid or cowardly, and that those traits inhibited physical resistance to the Fascists and Nazis. When the first shots of World War II were fired, at the very prologue of that ghastly war, Jews were not only present in overwhelming numbers, they incontrovertibly proved their heroism.