CATALONIA
'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.'
'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.” '
W'hen 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.'
'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.'
'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.'
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