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Neus Català, 103: Not ‘just’ a Nazi camp survivor
20/04/2019
IN FOUR months and 11 days’ time, the planet will mark a chilling anniversary only a handful of people alive today will remember the full implications of: the start of World War II, 80 years ago, on September 1. Only a tiny percentage still with us on that date this year will have been adults at the time, meaning what limited oral history we can now obtain about the beginning of Europe's biggest crisis in the last century will be from those who recall how it affected them as children.
Until a week ago yesterday, one resident in Spain would have been able to supply us with an adult's view - Neus Català, who was 103 when she passed away on April 13 at her home in Els Guiamets (Tarragona province).
And not just about what it was like being an adult during World War II, but what it was like on the inside of one of the most horrific places on earth: a Nazi concentration camp.
Neus was the only remaining survivor of one of these torture sites still alive in Spain, meaning a massive chapter of history has been laid to rest with her.
But she had plenty more to tell than the 'mere' fact of being one of the few to get out of a concentration camp with her life intact: a member of the French Résistance who kept dozens of children out of the hands of the Nazis, a post-war anti-fascist and pro-feminist activist, author, historian and politician, Els Guiamets and even Spain were not the only parts of the planet to have been blessed by Neus' having existed.
Nurse, exile, freedom fighter…prisoner
Born on October 6, 1915 - meaning she would have been 104 this autumn - in Els Guiamets, Neus graduated as a nurse in 1937, by which time she had already been an active member of the Catalunya Unified Socialist Party (PSUC) youth squad for some years. She moved to Rubí (Barcelona province) when the Civil War broke out in 1936 - a bloodthirsty three-year conflict which was to see General Franco's Falangists emerge the victors and their leader entering power, placing Spain in the iron grip of a far-right dictatorship until his death in 1975.
Like thousands of Spaniards forced into exile during and just after the Civil War, Neus crossed the border into France in 1939, the final year of the violent internal confrontation, with 182 orphans from the Negrín shelter in Premià de Dalt (Barcelona province) who were under her care.
She kept the children safe from the Nazis and joined the French Résistance, but without leaving her house in Paris, where she eventually settled: Neus was responsible for receiving and transmitting messages and passing on weapons and papers in top-secret, coded operations.
But she only managed to stay safe for the first four years of the War: in 1943, enemies of the Résistance reported her activities to the Nazis, and she was arrested and taken to prison in Limoges, tortured, abused and kept in solitary confinement for months before, in 1944, she was transported to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück, Germany (second picture).
From here, she was moved on to Flossenburg, Germany, and held in the concentration camp in Holleschein (fourth picture, from Neus’ own collection) in what is now part of the Czech Republic.
Unlike in the Jewish death camps, Neus was not among those marched into gas chambers, but instead was among those starved, beaten and forced into hard labour, building weapons and ordnance from sun-up to sun-down, seven days a week.
Many of us have only heard of Neus since her death was reported in the media last Saturday, and we would probably all now like to go back in time and ask her more about her two-year ordeal in Nazi hands, something she has never been reluctant to talk about - rather, the opposite. Did she cling to hope of survival and freedom, or did she consider it inevitable that this would be the rest of her life, or that she was anything from hours to months away from death? Did she dare let herself think about her possible future, or did she force herself to live day to day and to close her mind off to everything outside her immediate situation? Did she ever completely crack, emotionally, during this time, or did she manage to remain psychologically numb? Did she believe, in the end, that it was sheer luck that saved her, or her own resilience, or a combination of both?
We will possibly never know, not completely, even if we now read the books she has written; although plenty of others - her family, friends, neighbours and contemporaries - almost certainly will know, and we fervently hope they will keep Neus' memories, and their memories of her, alive and pass them on through the generations.
Left-wing politics and the communism that was the antidote to Franco
Clearly, survival and freedom were, indeed, on the cards for her, or she would not have lived until the eve of the 2020s and made it to 103. Neus was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945, after VE Day, and returned to France where, despite the hell her previous activism had brought her, she refused to give up on the wider battle for justice and defence of the underdog: she carried on in her clandestine fight against Franco's régime and kept up her membership of the PSUC and the PCC (Communist Party of Catalunya) and, later, joined the EUiA (United and Alternative Left).
Neus was not the only prisoner from Catalunya at Ravensbrück or Holleschein concentration camps, but she was the only person from the region who got out of either alive.
In fact, from the age of 90, when the Amical Ravensbrück association, made up of survivors and relatives of the deceased, was founded, she was its chairwoman right up until her death, as well as honorary member and co-founder of the Pere Ardiaca Foundation, which started in 1981 to continue the work of the communist politician of the same name.
The communist movement in Franco's Spain was not based upon the repression seen during the Cold War or, to a certain but lesser extent, in the only four remaining communist nations today (China, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos). It was a left-wing pro-social ideology largely founded on 'pure' communist principles of removing overall power from the minority of wealthy rulers and placing the power in the hands of the people as a whole, putting the workers in charge of production and guaranteeing everyone's basic needs, promoting a classless society. Modern-day political party United Left (Izquierda Unida), in coalition with the left-wing Podemos as 'Unidos Podemos', has its roots in Spanish communism, meaning it has suffered from public misunderstanding, but its policies are in no way related to, nor does it advocate, a return to the conditions of the countries behind the Iron Curtain back in the 1980s.
A decorated Neus writes for freedom
Neus' left-wing and communist values meant she dedicated over 60 years of her life battling injustice and fighting to keep the memory alive of the 92,000 women who died in Ravensbrück during World War II. She started this latter crusade at the end of the 1960s, painstakingly compiling exhaustive testimonials, and finally publishing them in 1984 in her book De la Resistencia y la deportación: 50 testimonios de mujeres españolas ('Of the Résistance and Deportation: 50 Testimonials of Spanish Women').
Her activism, once in the 21st century, earnt Neus medals instead of imprisonment: she won the 2006 EUiA Alternative Prize, a year after being given the Creu de Sant Jordi, which is Catalunya's answer to the George Cross and the highest award anyone in the region can obtain.
Receiving the Catalán Prize in 2006, Neus was visibly moved and dedicated it to 'all the women who fought for human rights' and 'all the prisoners in concentration camps under the Nazi beasts'.
Also the highest award, but at city level, the Barcelona Gold Medal for Civil Merit was granted to Neus by the metropolitan area council in 2014, and in the year that she turned 100 - in 2015 - the regional government of Catalunya gave her its Gold Medal and its Centenary Medal, as well as declaring this to be The Year of Neus Català.
It also coincided with the 70th anniversary of VE Day and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, making it a very fitting one to be dedicated to Neus, who was just 29 when she was freed.
But 2007 turned out to be Neus' year, too. Although at the bottom of the candidate list for ICV-EUiA in the local elections in Barcelona, she still had a chance of gaining a seat, which would have made her one of Spain's oldest councillors at nearly 92, along with fellow candidate María Salvo. The latter founded the Association of Women of '36, and survived both being a prisoner of Franco's régime and, later, in a concentration camp.
"As a feminist, I'd be really happy if a woman were to represent us," Neus said when presenting her candidature, insisting she was every bit as excited about the whole thing as she had been when she was a young woman.
This was also the year she published the autobiographical novel Testimoni d'una Supervivent ('Testimony of a Survivor'), which she followed up five years later, aged 96 (first picture), with her memoirs, Cenizas en el Cielo ('Ashes in the Sky') (picture five), and which was adapted for theatre in the year she turned 100 in a co-production between the Barcelona International Grec Festival and the Sala Muntaner, with the younger Neus played by famous regional actress Mercè Arànega.
'Ashes in the Sky' recounts episodes from Neus' life in a small village, her youth interrupted by the Civil War, her swiftly acquiring a huge social conscience, her flight on foot across the French border, her first great love, the Résistance, and the radical about-turn her life took when the SS imprisoned her and put her on the Train of Death to Germany.
Home town pays tribute
Els Guiamets town council spoke on behalf of all its residents when it paid tribute to Neus on Twitter on the evening of Saturday, April 13 this year - residents who are said to be devastated at the loss of this brilliant woman, but also grateful that she was able to live such a long life, into her early 100s, long outliving the Nazis who tried to kill her and enjoying a further 73 active and productive years that she, quite probably, never expected to see.
"Today, an anti-fascist fighter and internationalist warrior, #NeusCatala, has left us," the local council (@Aj_elsGuiamets) tweeted, captioning the photograph featured above (third).
"In these dark times we're having to live through, may her memory serve as an example to us."
And to all of us - from Els Guiamets or not, from Catalunya or not, Spanish or foreign, male or female, old or young. Rest in peace, Neus, and thank you for your legacy to the human race.
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IN FOUR months and 11 days’ time, the planet will mark a chilling anniversary only a handful of people alive today will remember the full implications of: the start of World War II, 80 years ago, on September 1. Only a tiny percentage still with us on that date this year will have been adults at the time, meaning what limited oral history we can now obtain about the beginning of Europe's biggest crisis in the last century will be from those who recall how it affected them as children.
Until a week ago yesterday, one resident in Spain would have been able to supply us with an adult's view - Neus Català, who was 103 when she passed away on April 13 at her home in Els Guiamets (Tarragona province).
And not just about what it was like being an adult during World War II, but what it was like on the inside of one of the most horrific places on earth: a Nazi concentration camp.
Neus was the only remaining survivor of one of these torture sites still alive in Spain, meaning a massive chapter of history has been laid to rest with her.
But she had plenty more to tell than the 'mere' fact of being one of the few to get out of a concentration camp with her life intact: a member of the French Résistance who kept dozens of children out of the hands of the Nazis, a post-war anti-fascist and pro-feminist activist, author, historian and politician, Els Guiamets and even Spain were not the only parts of the planet to have been blessed by Neus' having existed.
Nurse, exile, freedom fighter…prisoner
Born on October 6, 1915 - meaning she would have been 104 this autumn - in Els Guiamets, Neus graduated as a nurse in 1937, by which time she had already been an active member of the Catalunya Unified Socialist Party (PSUC) youth squad for some years. She moved to Rubí (Barcelona province) when the Civil War broke out in 1936 - a bloodthirsty three-year conflict which was to see General Franco's Falangists emerge the victors and their leader entering power, placing Spain in the iron grip of a far-right dictatorship until his death in 1975.
Like thousands of Spaniards forced into exile during and just after the Civil War, Neus crossed the border into France in 1939, the final year of the violent internal confrontation, with 182 orphans from the Negrín shelter in Premià de Dalt (Barcelona province) who were under her care.
She kept the children safe from the Nazis and joined the French Résistance, but without leaving her house in Paris, where she eventually settled: Neus was responsible for receiving and transmitting messages and passing on weapons and papers in top-secret, coded operations.
But she only managed to stay safe for the first four years of the War: in 1943, enemies of the Résistance reported her activities to the Nazis, and she was arrested and taken to prison in Limoges, tortured, abused and kept in solitary confinement for months before, in 1944, she was transported to the concentration camp in Ravensbrück, Germany (second picture).
From here, she was moved on to Flossenburg, Germany, and held in the concentration camp in Holleschein (fourth picture, from Neus’ own collection) in what is now part of the Czech Republic.
Unlike in the Jewish death camps, Neus was not among those marched into gas chambers, but instead was among those starved, beaten and forced into hard labour, building weapons and ordnance from sun-up to sun-down, seven days a week.
Many of us have only heard of Neus since her death was reported in the media last Saturday, and we would probably all now like to go back in time and ask her more about her two-year ordeal in Nazi hands, something she has never been reluctant to talk about - rather, the opposite. Did she cling to hope of survival and freedom, or did she consider it inevitable that this would be the rest of her life, or that she was anything from hours to months away from death? Did she dare let herself think about her possible future, or did she force herself to live day to day and to close her mind off to everything outside her immediate situation? Did she ever completely crack, emotionally, during this time, or did she manage to remain psychologically numb? Did she believe, in the end, that it was sheer luck that saved her, or her own resilience, or a combination of both?
We will possibly never know, not completely, even if we now read the books she has written; although plenty of others - her family, friends, neighbours and contemporaries - almost certainly will know, and we fervently hope they will keep Neus' memories, and their memories of her, alive and pass them on through the generations.
Left-wing politics and the communism that was the antidote to Franco
Clearly, survival and freedom were, indeed, on the cards for her, or she would not have lived until the eve of the 2020s and made it to 103. Neus was liberated by the Red Army in May 1945, after VE Day, and returned to France where, despite the hell her previous activism had brought her, she refused to give up on the wider battle for justice and defence of the underdog: she carried on in her clandestine fight against Franco's régime and kept up her membership of the PSUC and the PCC (Communist Party of Catalunya) and, later, joined the EUiA (United and Alternative Left).
Neus was not the only prisoner from Catalunya at Ravensbrück or Holleschein concentration camps, but she was the only person from the region who got out of either alive.
In fact, from the age of 90, when the Amical Ravensbrück association, made up of survivors and relatives of the deceased, was founded, she was its chairwoman right up until her death, as well as honorary member and co-founder of the Pere Ardiaca Foundation, which started in 1981 to continue the work of the communist politician of the same name.
The communist movement in Franco's Spain was not based upon the repression seen during the Cold War or, to a certain but lesser extent, in the only four remaining communist nations today (China, Cuba, Vietnam and Laos). It was a left-wing pro-social ideology largely founded on 'pure' communist principles of removing overall power from the minority of wealthy rulers and placing the power in the hands of the people as a whole, putting the workers in charge of production and guaranteeing everyone's basic needs, promoting a classless society. Modern-day political party United Left (Izquierda Unida), in coalition with the left-wing Podemos as 'Unidos Podemos', has its roots in Spanish communism, meaning it has suffered from public misunderstanding, but its policies are in no way related to, nor does it advocate, a return to the conditions of the countries behind the Iron Curtain back in the 1980s.
A decorated Neus writes for freedom
Neus' left-wing and communist values meant she dedicated over 60 years of her life battling injustice and fighting to keep the memory alive of the 92,000 women who died in Ravensbrück during World War II. She started this latter crusade at the end of the 1960s, painstakingly compiling exhaustive testimonials, and finally publishing them in 1984 in her book De la Resistencia y la deportación: 50 testimonios de mujeres españolas ('Of the Résistance and Deportation: 50 Testimonials of Spanish Women').
Her activism, once in the 21st century, earnt Neus medals instead of imprisonment: she won the 2006 EUiA Alternative Prize, a year after being given the Creu de Sant Jordi, which is Catalunya's answer to the George Cross and the highest award anyone in the region can obtain.
Receiving the Catalán Prize in 2006, Neus was visibly moved and dedicated it to 'all the women who fought for human rights' and 'all the prisoners in concentration camps under the Nazi beasts'.
Also the highest award, but at city level, the Barcelona Gold Medal for Civil Merit was granted to Neus by the metropolitan area council in 2014, and in the year that she turned 100 - in 2015 - the regional government of Catalunya gave her its Gold Medal and its Centenary Medal, as well as declaring this to be The Year of Neus Català.
It also coincided with the 70th anniversary of VE Day and the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps, making it a very fitting one to be dedicated to Neus, who was just 29 when she was freed.
But 2007 turned out to be Neus' year, too. Although at the bottom of the candidate list for ICV-EUiA in the local elections in Barcelona, she still had a chance of gaining a seat, which would have made her one of Spain's oldest councillors at nearly 92, along with fellow candidate María Salvo. The latter founded the Association of Women of '36, and survived both being a prisoner of Franco's régime and, later, in a concentration camp.
"As a feminist, I'd be really happy if a woman were to represent us," Neus said when presenting her candidature, insisting she was every bit as excited about the whole thing as she had been when she was a young woman.
This was also the year she published the autobiographical novel Testimoni d'una Supervivent ('Testimony of a Survivor'), which she followed up five years later, aged 96 (first picture), with her memoirs, Cenizas en el Cielo ('Ashes in the Sky') (picture five), and which was adapted for theatre in the year she turned 100 in a co-production between the Barcelona International Grec Festival and the Sala Muntaner, with the younger Neus played by famous regional actress Mercè Arànega.
'Ashes in the Sky' recounts episodes from Neus' life in a small village, her youth interrupted by the Civil War, her swiftly acquiring a huge social conscience, her flight on foot across the French border, her first great love, the Résistance, and the radical about-turn her life took when the SS imprisoned her and put her on the Train of Death to Germany.
Home town pays tribute
Els Guiamets town council spoke on behalf of all its residents when it paid tribute to Neus on Twitter on the evening of Saturday, April 13 this year - residents who are said to be devastated at the loss of this brilliant woman, but also grateful that she was able to live such a long life, into her early 100s, long outliving the Nazis who tried to kill her and enjoying a further 73 active and productive years that she, quite probably, never expected to see.
"Today, an anti-fascist fighter and internationalist warrior, #NeusCatala, has left us," the local council (@Aj_elsGuiamets) tweeted, captioning the photograph featured above (third).
"In these dark times we're having to live through, may her memory serve as an example to us."
And to all of us - from Els Guiamets or not, from Catalunya or not, Spanish or foreign, male or female, old or young. Rest in peace, Neus, and thank you for your legacy to the human race.
Related Topics
You may also be interested in ...
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