https://archive.org/details/conversationswit00casa
Throughout his life, Pablo Casals placed music at the service of the ideals of peace, justice and freedom. In 1917 he refused to play in Soviet Russia and a few years later, in 1933, he refused to play in Hitler’s Germany. From exile he helped thousands of refugees from the Spanish Civil War and with the Second World War he intensified his commitment and his benefit concerts for the victims. In 1946, he refused to play for the Allied countries because of their tolerance towards General Franco’s regime, and he went into a long musical silence.
In the late 1950s, Pablo Casals broadened the scope of his struggle against Francoism in particular and dictatorships in general to the achievement of world peace. Concern about the nuclear threat at the time of the “cold war” strengthened his hope for and attachment to world governance: the United Nations organization, to which he was invited, on three occasions. This attitude earned him, among others, the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United Nations Medal of Peace and a nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.