George Orwell’s son follows father’s steps in Barcelona during Spanish Civil War

Richard Blair, son of world-famous anti-totalitarian writer George Orwell (whose real name was Eric Arthur Blair), visited the site of the clinic where his father had been treated during the Spanish Civil War.

Orwell, an “old-fashioned socialist,” traveled to Barcelona as a journalist in December of 1936 to find out more about the Civil War, which he felt was being misrepresented by the foreign press. He then enlisted in the war as a Republican volunteer for POUM, a Trotskyist faction.

As he describes in his memoir ‘Homage to Catalonia,’ Orwell was shot through the throat by a Francoist sniper while at the front in Aragon: “Roughly speaking it was the sensation of being at the center of an explosion. There seemed to be a loud bang and a blinding flash of light all round me, and I felt a tremendous shock – no pain, only a violent shock, such as you get from an electric terminal; with it a sense of utter weakness, a feeling of being stricken and shriveled up to nothing.”