City council accused of sidelining Peironcely 10 campaigners who have tried for years to turn building into centre celebrating the war photographer’s work
O
ne winter’s day almost 90 years ago, the Hungarian-American photojournalist Robert Capa paused on a street in southeast Madrid to take a picture that would echo around the world and down through the decades.
In it, three children sit on a rubble-strewn pavement in the working-class Vallecas district of the Spanish capital. Behind them squats a plain, single-storey house pitted with the shrapnel of a fresh bombing raid.
Not only did the picture, which appeared in the international press, confirm the civilian cost of the aerial campaign waged by Nazi Germany and Italy under Mussolini in support of Francisco Franco’s coup, it also rallied international volunteers to the anti-fascist cause.
