Neus Català, Freedom Fighter

From the Washington Post - 

 

Obituaries

Neus Català, fighter against fascism in Spain and France, dies at 103

By Phil Davison 

April 26, 2019 at 5:08 p.m. EDT

 

 

To the end of her 103 years, the Catalonian anti-fascist activist Neus Català, believed to have been one of the last Spanish survivors of the Holocaust, was proud that, in her words, “I never once wept or got on my knees in front of a Nazi.”

She was a Catholic-born communist who fought alongside the French resistance against the Nazis during World War II. As a young woman, before and during the Spanish Civil War of 1936-39, she had fought for the republican side against the nationalists led by Gen. Francisco Franco.

During that conflict, she did not carry a weapon but supported the republican soldiers fighting Franco’s ultimately successful nationalists. In France, she was armed. “We women were not assistants,” she later wrote in a memoir, “we were fighters.”

Fleeing Spain for neighboring France in 1939, she joined the French resistance when Hitler’s forces invaded in May 1940. Working with her new husband, Albert Roger, a Frenchman, she carried weapons, falsified documents or messages under a headscarf or under a basket of vegetables on her bicycle, charming her way through Nazi checkpoints.

After a French collaborator betrayed her, she was arrested by the Gestapo in November 1943 and deported to the women’s concentration camp at Ravensbrück, north of Berlin, while her husband was sent to Bergen-Belsen, also in Germany.

From Ravensbrück, Ms. Català was moved to another concentration camp at Flossenbürg, Bavaria, near the Czechoslovakian border, where she was part of a forced labor group quarrying granite as well as making parts for fighter planes and ammunition.

Ms. Català persuaded her fellow female workers to boycott or disrupt weapons production, and they became known by their Nazi guards as “the Lazy Kommando.”

“We boycotted everything we could in the manufacture of weapons,” she recalled in 2013 to the magazine of the General Union of Workers, a Spanish trade union. “We used sabotage to produce about 10 million faulty bullets and thousands of unusable artillery shells. We threw everything into the production line — flies, cockroaches, oil, our own spit. The Nazis called us ‘Snow White and the Seven Mechanics’ because they constantly had to come to fix our machines.”

Approximately 30,000 prisoners died in Flossenbürg from malnutrition, overwork, executions, or during the death marches forced on them by the Nazis as the Allies approached. Roger died within days of liberation in 1945.

When Ms. Català was freed around the same time, she was critically ill. “We were just skulls with eyes,” she told the trade union magazine. “I was a bag of bones.” Yet she survived for almost 75 more years, dying April 13 in a nursing home in the Spanish village of Els Guiamets, her daughter Margarita Català announced. She did not provide a specific medical cause.

Neus Català Pallejà was born in Els Guiamets in Catalonia, where the northeastern corner of Spain meets the Pyrenees on the border with France, on Oct. 6, 1915.

Her father was a farmer, growing olives and grapes while serving as the village’s only barber. He was helped, in the fields and the barber shop, by his wife. By 14, Neus (pronounced Nay-oos) was working in the fields, and her first struggle was to demand equal pay for women during the grape harvest. She succeeded.

She joined a Catalonian communist youth group in the 1930s and, after the Spanish Civil War erupted, moved to the Catalan capital, Barcelona, to study and qualify as a nurse in 1937. Amid the bloodshed, she found herself running an orphanage for children of war victims.

When Franco’s nationalists moved into Barcelona in 1939, she fled on foot with 182 orphans across the snow-covered Pyrenees into France. There, she secured shelter and safety for the children, often in foster homes, while she settled in the village of Carsac.

Having met her future husband, also of communist leanings, she joined him in the French resistance against the Nazis. After their liberation, she recalled seeing and waving to her husband when their two trains stopped at the same station. She never saw him again.

After learning that her first husband had died, she got married in 1947 to Félix Sancho, a Spaniard. They settled near Paris and had two children, Lluis and Margarita, both of whom survive.

Ms. Català returned to Catalonia in the 1970s after Sancho died. She continued to fight, not with arms but with words, against the dictatorship of Franco, who had banned the use of the Catalan language in public. After his death in 1975, Spain eased toward democracy. Ms. Català continued to fight for the independence of Catalonia from Spain.

She dedicated the rest of her life to the memory of women who died in the concentration camps, especially Ravensbrück, many of them Jews. She was named Catalan person of the year in 2006, and the provincial government of Catalonia dedicated the year 2015 to her to honor her 100th birthday.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/neus-catala-fighter-against-fascism-in-spain-and-france-dies-at-103/2019/04/26/5bbe36c2-6623-11e9-a1b6-b29b90efa879_story.html