Neus Català (1915–2019)

Neus Català was born in Els Guiamets, Spain on October 6, 1915. She began working in the fields at the age of 14. During the grape harvest, she demanded equal pay for girls and won. She received a degree in nursing in 1937 and was put in charge of an orphanage in Barcelona. In early 1939, when mostra altro General Francisco Franco's troops invaded Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, she marched the 182 orphans in her charge over the Pyrenees into France, where she helped place them in foster homes. She stayed in France and married a French citizen. When Adolf Hitler invaded France in 1940, she and her husband became active in the French Resistance. The couple was exposed and arrested in 1943. In 1944, she was deported to Ravensbrück. From there, she was transferred to the Flossenbürg camp, where she was part of a forced labor group that quarried granite and sabotaged bullets and bombs while working in a munitions factory. The camp was liberated in 1945. With Franco still in power in Spain, she once again settled in France and remarried. She resumed her anti-fascist work, acting as a messenger for the Spanish Communist Party's underground. She tracked down other survivors of Ravensbrück, gathered their remembrances, and published them in a book entitled Resistance and Deportation: 50 Testimonies of Spanish Women. Her memoir, Testimony of a Survivor, was published in 2012. She received the Croix de Guerre from France. She died on April 13, 2019 at the age of 103. (Bowker Author Biography) mostra meno