Researcher: Jack Buessing, Stuyvesant '26

Sam Bierman, alias in Spain, Sam Berman, born in 1907, in the Bronx, had a quiet childhood, quitting highschool after a year and a half to work odd jobs, starting with meat packing and ending with snow clearing. During this time, he met a lot of merchant seamen or former merchant seamen, and saw their cause during the 1936-37 strike, learning his Marx and Engels, and striking with them, bringing them food and water, despite not being a seamen himself at the time.


He joined the National Maritime Union (he gave the details of the events, but not the name of his union, and there’s no other candidates), a leftist breakaway union from the larger, more conservative International Seamen’s Union, and participated in the Bremen Incident, a protest against a Nazi cruise liner docked in Manhattan, striking with some of his seamen friends, including Bill Bailey, who would go on to rip the swastika off the ship and tear it to shreds.


Later, he vividly remembered how the Nazi party dressed in full Nazi regalia on the trains, and sung songs in German to try to recruit back before the war. He felt that most Americans were blind to the danger, seeing it as an ocean away, even while it was oh so very close.


After the Spanish Civil War broke out, some of his friends went to join, and following his convictions, he went with them. He figured it was the right thing to do, and thought if the world could show Franco that it wasn’t his to take, Fascism could be stopped there. He believed that Spain was betrayed by the west, which sold weapons to Fascists but not the legal government, and saw an opportunity to get his nation to change.


He never told his family he had left, and was separated from his former wife, so the first indication he was even alive to them was a letter months after he signed up from Spain. His father, despite being an apolitical man, went around telling people “My son is fighting in Spain, my son is fighting for you.” He wrote many letters to his family, though unfortunately they have been lost, but he always ended them with “I love you very deeply, and I hope to see you soon.”


He went to Spain on the Arkadia (documents say differently, but there’s a high chance his documents are forged due to his less than official entry to the John Brown Brigade) during February 1937, and arrived in Paris after a transfer to a train. He stayed in Paris for three weeks before heading to Toulouse for another two weeks, before he was finally driven to the border, where he would begin the hike across the Pyrenees with no directions in English and no map. After making it to the Spanish border, they met up with local guides, who kept them away from Fascist patrols, and continually doubled back, walking all the way on foot, until they made it to Andorra, the guides getting them a few rations, before continuing on to Spain.

A few minutes after crossing the border, they heard the crackling of rifle fire. The republicans sent to meet them were paranoid from the nationalists, and their commander thought they were spies, as they were three days late to the assigned meeting time, before the guides eventually convinced him. After making it to the first town in Spain, two months after he arrived in France, him and the rest of the volunteers were there, and the townsfolk said that “Only communists would hike through mountains like that.” When they finally made it to Karl Marx barracks, locals tried to convince the volunteers to fight with them instead of training, and in the revolutionary fervor, Bierman and some friends heard about an artillery brigade forming in a nearby town, and went over there and joined up. Most of the Brigade joined in the same way, just finding their way over, and eventually they began to be trained.


The Brigade began with French howitzers, which Bierman loved, before moving to large Russian guns, which could barely be moved, and they only had three, donated by the Soviets. They trained for six months, befriending the local town, and teaching the Spanish kids to play baseball. Most of this training was ineffective, speeches and instructions in French, eventually vaguely relayed through multiple languages. Extremadura was their first battle, and it was the first time in fifty years it snowed there, leaving their positions difficult, with little equipment for it. They eventually went to Toledo, where they would spend much of the war, led by Tavlitsky, a Frenchman who went against his superior’s orders to effectively lead the battalion, and Timpson, an American they elected, who had studied artillery in the Soviet Union. Only one gun was able to fire in the beginning, and Bierman was its gunner, serving to aim and fire it. He mentioned that, in this time, he destroyed a bridge, killing the mayor of Toledo.


After Toledo, the Brigade joined the Lincolns at Wesker, and shortly after, Bierman went on vacation to Valencia with Mike Bailin, another member of the Brigade, and there they often heard rumor of the International brigades being withdrawn, and upon heading back, they had to fight along cold, muddy slopes, making it difficult for them to fight. They withdrew to Barcelona, going to barracks by the port, which was a beautiful view, but very bitter for him in later years, as he often visited upon the merchant ships, and knew that it was full of Republican prisoners, until Franco’s death. They then got on a train to Cherbourg, though their train was shot at by Fascist machine gunners.


When they made it back to France, the first thing they noticed was the electric lights, as Spain’s power grid was utterly decimated during the war, leaving them with only gas lamps and often torches. Crowds of French civilians gathered to meet them at the port in Cherbourg before they left for the states, but they weren’t allowed to leave the gates of the harbor to see them, so the French protestors started singing revolutionary songs, and they sang some of the war songs they made, and John Brown’s Body (mentioned a reference to John Brown in the song, and that’s the most logical conclusion.) The American ambassador to Spain, Claude Bowers, was sympathetic to their cause, and gave them all embassy passports to get home, and when he made it to the port in March 1939, he was asked by the immigration officer how he lost his passport, and said ‘The Fascists were a-comin, and I was a-goin.’


It was the end of his story in Spain, but only the beginning elsewhere. Bierman initially tried to raise money for the Republicans, and “educate them as to the danger of Facism in this country.” Six weeks after making it home, he joined the NMU as an official member, and became a merchant marine, working on ships for the navy. The NMU was reaching the peak of their power, a progressive, powerful, democratic union, which he was deeply involved in, though he never wished to take a leadership role.


During WWII, he served in the merchant marine, ships he was working on crossing the Atlantic to deliver vital supplies to the allies, fighting Nazi submarines and planes before the United States was even in the war. His ship was the first to succeed in crossing to Murmansk, a Soviet port near Finland, and along the way sinking three German submarines and eleven planes.


Bierman specifically mentions Churchill’s Iron Curtain speech as beginning the Red Scare, which hit the unions especially harshly, as conservatives within the NDU effectively performed a coup, removing or sidelining progressive members. When the Korean War broke out, the Coast Guard began examining the histories of seamen, and upon seeing his details, they just said ‘forget it’, taking away Bierman’s license to sail. After an eight year legal battle, only settled because the courts didn’t want it to appeal to the Supreme Court, the sailors won, gaining them their papers again, but the now conservative union tried to bar them after another few weeks, resulting in a much shorter legal battle. Though he was now sixty, Bierman still signed on again. Nine years later, he retired, moving to Florida, but regularly going to Costa Rica with old work buddies and members of the Brigade. On his thoughts about the meaning of it all, he said he only wished he fought harder, and did more, and that the most important thing for future generations is education and getting informed, not just knowing the news or reading the opinion pieces, but understanding it all, and your place in the wider world. Gerassi, the interviewer, notes how satisfied he is, even living in a tiny house with a messy garden out back, still the man who fought and believed in the cause.

Sources

Bierman, Sam. Interview by John Gerassi. Audio interview, November 28, 1991. ALBA Audio Collection, ALBA Audio 018.6m906212. Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/alba_audio_018/audio/6m906212/
Bierman, Sam. Interview by John Gerassi. Audio interview, November 28, 1991. ALBA Audio Collection, ALBA Audio 018.bcc2g2hz. Tamiment Library & Robert F. Wagner Labor Archives, New York University. https://findingaids.library.nyu.edu/tamwag/alba_audio_018/audio/bcc2g2hz/
Student Contributors. “Mike Bailin.” Stuyvesant Commemoration Website. Accessed June 13, 2025. https://scwnyc.stuy.edu/archive/Mike%20Bailin.html
“Blast from the Past: Artillery Series.” The Volunteer: A Publication of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA), July 8, 2015. https://albavolunteer.org/2015/07/blast-from-the-past-artillery-series/.
“Sam Berman.” Abraham Lincoln Brigade Archives (ALBA). Accessed June 13, 2025. https://alba-valb.org/volunteers/sam-berman/.