Capa, born Endre Ernö Friedmann, Robert.

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Capa, born Endre Ernö Friedmann, Robert, born on 22-10-1913 in Budapest, Hungary, as Endre Friedmann  the second of the three sons of Dezső Friedmann and Júlia Henrietta Friedmann. Always irrepressible, the teenage Capa ran afoul of the Hungarian government by promoting left-wing  politics.  He spent a few days in jail before his father managed to get him out. Deciding that there was little future under the regime in Hungary, he left home in 1931 at the age of 18 after finishing high school. He found work in photography in Berlin and grew to love the art. In 1933, he moved from Germany to France because of the rise of Nazism, but found it difficult to find work there as a freelance journalist. Capa adopted the name “Robert Capa” around this time – in fact “cápa” (“a shark”) was his nickname in school. Like most he had faults, but his faults were invariably charming and his virtues never boring.  He dressed well, ate well, and picked up the check. He drank frequently, but never to get drunk. From 1936 to 1939, he was in Spain, photographing the horrors of the Spanish Civil War.
  At the start of World War II, Capa was in New York City. He had moved there from Paris to look for new work and to escape Nazi persecution and met Gerda Taro
  and would work with her. Gerda Taro (Stuttgart, 01-08-1910 – Brunete, 26-07-1937, age 26), pseudonym of Gerta Pohorylle, was a war photographer. She is often regarded as the first woman to work as a photographer at the front, and to die there.Pohorylle grew up in a Polish Jewish family in Germany. In 1929, just before the rise of Nazism in Germany, the family moved to Leipzig. Pohorylle fought against Nazism and was arrested in 1933 for spreading anti-Nazi propaganda. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, Taro and Capa went to Barcelona to report on the war. Taro got her nickname “la pequeña rubia” (the little blonde).Taro was injured while working at the Battle of Brunete. She was riding in a car transporting wounded soldiers when it was hit by a tank. Taro suffered serious injuries and died the next day. However, her cause of death is controversial. British journalist Robin Stummer, who relied on Willy Brandt, later Chancellor of West Germany, for his statement, stated that she may have been the victim of an attack. However, this was never proven.Given her compassion, Taro had become a symbol of anti-fascism. On August 1 (the day she would have turned 27), the French Communist Party gave her a grand funeral in Paris. She was buried in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris. Alberto Giacometti made her grave monument.
The war took Capa to various parts of the European Theatre on photography assignments. Capa jumped into Sicily with the paratroops
    and went on to the attack on “the soft under belly of the Axis” in the cold grim winter campaign of 1943-44. Soon after Anzio he left Italy for London, and a wild intermission of poker playing and partying with such old friends as correspondent Ernest Miller Hemingway Between the two world wars Hemmingway became the spokesperson for the Lost Generation because in his early work he best reflected the problems and mentality of that generation. In addition to being an active writer, Hemingway was also a journalist and war correspondent, as well as an adventurer, angler and big game hunter, which is reflected in the subjects he chose for his short stories and novels. During his final years he suffered from severe depression that ultimately led to his suicide on 02-07-1961, aged 61. Ernest left behind three sons: John, with his first wife Hadley Richardson, and Patrick and Gregory, with his second wife Pauline Marie Pfeiffer. Her son Gregory was arrested in the ladies’ room of a theater on 01-10-1951. When Ernest Hemingway called her about it and the couple argued about it, she died. Gregory later studied to become a doctor and studied his mother’s autopsy report. He believed that Pauline suffered from a pheochromocytoma, a tumor on the adrenal glands. The excitement of the telephone conversation caused the tumor to secrete an overdose of adrenaline, which would have caused her death.
On June 6, 1944, an assault barge landed Robert Capa on Omaha Beach. Stumbling ashore under heavy fire, he exposed four rolls of the most famous films in history. (see Philippe Kieffer)
   
Phillippe Kieffer (Port-au-Prince, 24-10-1899 – Cormeilles-en-Parisis, 20-11-1962) was a French officer, political personality, and was seen as a hero of the Free French during and immediately after the war.
Together with two of his men, Philippe was one of the first Free French troops to invade Paris for the Liberation of Paris. Unfortunately for Kieffer, his 18-year-old son, who had recently joined the French Resistance (also called the Maquis), had been murdered around the same time.
Philippe died on 20-11-1962 at the age of 63 due to hemiplegia in Cormeilles-en-Parisis. He is buried in Grandcamp-Maisy, Calvados, where after the war he owned a house next to the local church.
As luck would have it, all but eleven frames were ruined in Life’s London darkroom when the emulsion ran in an over-heated drying cabinet. However, Life, and the world press, published the surviving images, calling them “slightly out of focus” from the blurred emulsion. Capa never said a word to the bureau chief about the loss of the rolls of his D-Day landing film.
Capa maintained his dangerous franchise as the most colorful war photographer. Life magazine asked him to go on assignment to Southeast Asia, where the French had been fighting for eight years in the First Indochina War. On 25-05-1954 at 2:55 p.m. they were passing through a dangerous area under fire when Capa decided to leave his Jeep and go up the road to photograph the advance. About five minutes later, his companions heard an explosion, Capa had stepped on a landmine on the spot right.

Death and burial ground of Capa, born Endre Ernö Friedmann, Robert.

When they arrived on the scene, he was still alive but his left leg had been blown to pieces, and he had a serious wound in his chest. Mecklin called for a medic and Capa was taken to a small field hospital where he was pronounced dead on arrival. He died, age 40, with his camera in his hand. He is buried on the Amawalk Friends cemetery in New York
   

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