Marina Ginestà Coloma (29 January 1919 – 6 January 2014) was a French-born Catalan veteran of the Spanish Civil War and a member of the Unified Socialist Youth. She became famous due to the photo taken by Juan Guzmán on the rooftop of Plaça de Catalunya 9, 08002 Barcelona, Catalonia, Barcelona during the July 1936 military uprising in Barcelona. It is one of the most iconic photographs of the Spanish Civil War. Ginestà was born in Toulouse, on January 29, 1919, into a working-class leftist family that had emigrated to France from Spain. Her parents were both tailors: Empar Coloma Chalmeta, from Valencia, and Bruno Ginestà Manubens, from Manresa. She moved to Barcelona with her parents at the age of 11. Ginestà later joined the Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia. As the war broke out, she served as a reporter and a translator assisting Mikhail Koltsov, a correspondent of the Soviet newspaper Pravda. Before the end of the war, Ginestà was wounded and evacuated to Montpellier. As France was occupied by the Nazis, she fled to the Dominican Republic where she married. In 1946, she was forced to leave the country because of the persecution by the dictator Rafael Trujillo. In 1952, Ginestà married a Belgian diplomat and returned to Barcelona. She moved to Paris in 1978. Marina Ginestà died there at the age of 94 in January 2014. When Marina Ginesta heard on 18 July 1936 that the Spanish military had risen against the country's democratically elected government, her first thought was that the army's rebellion was to stop the People's Olympiad, the alternative Olympic Games in Barcelona planned in protest against those held in Nazi Germany in the same summer. "We had no idea what was really happening, we were that innocent," Ginesta, then a member of Spain's Socialist Youth movement and helping to organize the Olympiad, recalled. Instead, the military uprising ushered in a brutal Civil War, and a photograph of Ginesta, born in Toulouse and believed to have been the last French survivor of the Spanish conflict, became one of its best-known images. Taken on 21 July 1936, the photo shows Ginesta as a 17-year-old militiawoman, standing bareheaded and smiling on the rooftop terrace of a central hotel in Barcelona. She has a look of innocence in her eyes, perhaps, but – as the rifle slung over her back would suggest – her idealistic determination to defend the Republic against the army's treachery and simultaneously implement a Socialist revolution in Spain is equally plain. Sources · https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/marina-ginesta-socialist-activist-whose-photograph-became-one-of-the-most-memorable-images-of-the-9078488.html ·