Famed war journalist Martha Gellhorn reported from every major war zone in her lifetime. At 28 years old, she covered the Spanish Civil War from Barcelona. At 80, she was in Panama reporting on the American invasion.
She was Ernest Hemingway’s third wife, a fact which threatens to overshadow Gellhorn’s legacy as one of the greatest war reporters of the twentieth century. She died in 1998, at 89 years old, after a 60-year career in war correspondence and travel writing.
She also published 21 books, both journalism and fiction. Her well-honed writing skills and activist attitude made Gellhorn a compassionate asset to the wars she covered.
Her warfront dispatches were published in Collier’s Magazine, the Atlantic Monthly and the Guardian, as well as her most famed book of war reportage, The Face of War (1959).
It is this book that hides the gem of Gellhorn’s long career: a report from the first Nazi concentration camp, simply titled “Dachau.” It needs nothing more than this. Her writing is so intense, so perceptive, and so penetrative that it is impossible to read the story without feeling permanently altered by it.
“All I did was report from the group up, not the other way round,” Gellhorn told her editor at the Daily Mirror, Hugh Cudlipp.