Lois Orr

Who is Lois Orr?

Lois Orr, also known as Louise Cusick, Lois Cusick and Lois Culter, born in the Jewish hospital in Louisville, Kentucky, lived in Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, where she was a member of the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification female militia. She and her husband, Charles Orr, survived the Stalinist attack on the POUM in June 1937, after the fighting of the Barcelona May Days.

They were arrested on 17 June, the day after Andrés Nin and the POUM executive were arrested, but were released on 1 July and placed by the US consul, Mahlon Perkins, on a ship bound for Marseilles on 3 July 1937. They were in Mexico in 1940 when Leon Trotsky was murdered.

An edited collection of her letters home to the US from Spain were published in 2009.