Neus Català: lifelong anti-fascist resistance fighter, Nazi concentration camp survivor

Neus Català lived an extraordinary life that encompassed the major tragedies of the 20th century. 

Born in 1915 in the rural southern Catalan town of Els Guiamets, she lived through the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, was just 21 when the Spanish Civil War kicked off, was one of the hundreds of thousands forced to flee the country and live in exile after the Civil War, took part in the French Resistance during the Second World War, was imprisoned and sent to Nazi concentration camps, and couldn't return to her home country after World War 2 for fear of reprisals from the Franco's fascist regime. 

Yet still, after she was able to return to live in Catalonia following Franco's death in 1975, she remained positive and kept fighting for a better world throughout her life, dedicating her final decades to collecting, documenting, and sharing the memory of those who had suffered some of the gravest atrocities in human history at the hands of fascism, working to prevent it from ever happening again. 

Early life and Civil War

The daughter of farmers in rural Tarragona, Neus Català's political awakening came from her father, and by age 14, she was already demanding equal pay for women on farms. She joined the Communist Party, PSUC, from a young age, and it’s through this left-wing political activism that she actively joins the fight against fascism. 

Inspired by a doctor who sought refuge in Els Guiamets, she became a nurse to help people, and moved to Barcelona in 1937, in the midst of the Civil War, to study. A year later, she was stationed near the French border, caring for orphaned children.

As Franco’s forces approached, hundreds of thousands of republicans fled north to avoid being imprisoned, tortured, or killed. Neus Català was one of the 450,000 or so Spanish nationals who crossed into France during what is known as 'La Retirada.'  

Català helped 182 orphaned children to cross the border to escape the approaching Francoist forces and find a new life in France. Under Franco, tens of thousands of children of republicans were removed and separated from their families and kept in homes run by the state. Català would later say that saving those children was the greatest achievement of her life. 

“Children, from now on you have to do like the soldiers and wrap your blankets around your neck," she is quoted in her biography, written by Elisenda Belenguer Mercadé. "You can lose anything but the blankets, I don’t want you to freeze to death.” 

The arrival of the Spanish republicans in France was anything but warm. "When they crossed the border, they were installed in internment camps, normally close to the border and close to the beach," historian Alejandro Acosta explains to Catalan News. "Their living conditions were very harsh; they lived in the open, without electricity, in the cold, with very little food."

French Resistance

Just months after arriving in France after the Spanish Civil War came to an end, the Second World War kicked off, and Neus Català actively took part in the French Resistance.

At first, before the country was occupied, she would cycle from town to town, spreading information and urging people not to support Hitler. "I told them that if Hitler won the war, France would disappear, it would stop existing as a nation," she said in her biography.

Later, the fight become more serious when the Nazis occupied France, and her Resistance work was then done in a more organized and engaged way.

The fact that Neus Català was a woman, during this "patriarchal war," as Acosta puts it, was an advantage, as "in the eyes of the collaborationist Gendarmerie, the women were not suspicious; whatever a woman could do, it was considered harmless." 

Català and other women carried messages, participated in escape networks that saved lives, provided food to guerrilla fighters, and gave wrong information to the Nazis to confuse them. 

She also allowed her house to be used as a safe house for the guerrilla fighters, and Català and her first husband were eventually denounced by a local pharmacist. This is how the Nazis arrested her. 

Concentration camps

Català and her first husband, Albert Roger, were sent to prison first in Limoges, where they were beaten and tortured. After their trial, they were then sent to different concentration camps and never saw each other again. 

Català was first sent to Ravensbrück, the largest concentration camp for women. In her biography, she explains that her “profound hatred for the Nazis” was what helped her keep grounded during the torture. "My poor head was hit so many times," she wrote in her biography. "I used all my strength to not lose consciousness, and I concentrated however I could on the hatred that I felt towards the Nazis. I didn’t want to give them the pleasure of seeing me fall to the ground, and I held myself up." 

The concentration camp had been built to house 3,000 people, but when Neus arrived, 10,000 women were imprisoned. Català and the other prisoners were forced into hard labor, starved, had medicine withheld, tortured, and even experimented on medically. At the camp, women received injections that stopped their periods. Neus didn’t get her period between 1944-1951, and thought she had become infertile.

To survive the horrors, the women adopted different strategies of survival. They built solidarity with each other, shared their food, saved pieces of bread for the children, and create family-like bonds, naming each other 'mother' or 'daughter' depending on the age.

In the spring of 1944, Català and others were moved to the Holleischen concentration camp. There, she and the other women were forced to work in the munitions factory to produce war material. They reluctantly accepted this role, but chose to use it as an opportunity for sabotage. 

The women "reduced the diameter of the base of the bullets, destroyed some machines," Acosta explains. "It is estimated that, thanks to this sabotage, they rendered some 10 million bullets useless." 

Liberation, return, and legacy

On May 5, 1945, Holleischen was liberated, and Català was finally free. However, after the Second World War, she returned to live not in Spain, but in France. 

"Franco's regime, after the Second World War, was consolidated; the Catalan antifascists could not return to their country," Acosta says. "If they tried to return to Spain, they would be judged, maybe they would be imprisoned."

Català was disappointed with the Allied forces for allowing Franco to remain in power. Many republicans viewed the Second World War as a continuation of the Spanish Civil War and hoped that Spain would be liberated from Franco’s dictatorship after the Nazis were defeated. Instead, she had to settle in France. 

Català lived for decades in exile but continued the fight against Franco from abroad. She took up the role of editor-in-chief of a communist newspaper which reported on Franco's Spain, and she participated in the organization of the Spanish Communist Party from France, as it was outlawed in Spain.

In 1950, the French government prohibited much of the work of exiled Spanish republicans, including the newspaper. Català characterized this as a “witch-hunt,” but kept working anyway.

French citizenship made her an even more useful asset to the party, as this allowed Català to cross the border and carry messages much more easily.  

Her work also included collecting and documenting the testimonies of the Spanish republicans who had been imprisoned in Nazi concentration camps, particularly of Spanish republican women, stories that, for a very long time, society was unaware of.

During a political conference in the 1960s, Català got to know other people who had been through similar experiences she had, and co-founded the association Amical of Mauthausen, a group for victims of Nazism in Spain, which was founded in secrecy as such a thing was still outlawed under Franco. 

The goal was to gather survivors and foster a support network, but also to gather a strong team of lawyers to apply for widows’ pensions in Germany. 

After Franco’s death in 1975, Català was finally able to return home, but her fight never stopped. She continued to fight for a better world in the last decades of her life, giving talks about her experiences and advocating for egalitarian ideas until her death in 2019. 

The Fundació Neus Català was founded in 2023 to continue her life's work standing up against the far-right and fascism in all forms.