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Google Doodle remembers Gerda Taro

GOOGLE dedicated its home page today to pioneering photographer and socialist icon Gerda Taro on her 108th birthday.

The search engine displayed a “doodle” image of Ms Taro, whose death in the Spanish civil war made her the first female photojournalist to be killed in armed conflict.

Born Gerta Pohorylle in Germany in 1910, Ms Taro fled the nazi regime in 1933 after being arrested for distributing anti-fascist leaflets.

Settling in Paris the following year, she was active in anti-fascist organisations and studied photography under fellow Jewish political exile Endre Friedmann, who was from Hungary. He later became a famous war photographer under the name Robert Capa.

Ms Taro made a name for herself during the war in Spain, reporting from the republican side for French communist newspaper Ce Soir, before being killed during the battle of Brunete.

She was laid to rest on her 27th birthday at Paris’s Pere Lachaise cemetery, where a mass funeral was organised by the French Communist Party.

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