Spanish Holocaust through Memory Representation: Fictional Biography of Neus Català

"No reivindicamos la verdad como unprivilegio, sino por justicia y reconstituciónde una parte histórica que arranca de 1.936;por el respeto a nuestras muertas, pordesagraviar a tantas mujeres olvidadas."

(Neus Català, De la resistencia y la deportación 29)

It is estimated that 15,000 Spaniards died in German concentration camps. However, the troubling reality that accounted for the repression experienced by the Spanish Republicans in occupied France and Nazi Germany during the Second World War has not been widely studied. Although not particularly well known, there are several testimonies, documentaries, and narratives that focus on the Spanish Holocaust.¹

These narratives are especially traumatic because they describe the humiliations suffered by human beings who were stripped of their dignity while detained in the Nazi camps.² According to Michel Leiberich, these texts serve to explore key concepts such as: democracy, human rights, human values, human dignity, and freedom (118).

Despite considerable scholarship about the Spanish Civil War and its aftermath, few publications explore the importance of Spanish women's roles during that time period, and scant attention has been given to the presence of female activists who fought against international Fascism.³ Recovering their silenced voices is the first step towards the rewriting of history, due to the scarcity of narratives that stress women's agency in the concentration camps.⁴ It is important to consider that the last survivors of the Spanish Civil War are currently in their nineties. Their advanced age means that little time remains to address, through retelling their stories, the damage suffered by exiled and deported women.⁵ By hearing these voices—from their memoirs, oral testimonies, and fictional biographies—we can understand their crucial role in the resistance against totalitarian regimes and how they protested the systematic violation of human rights that they endured during times of dictatorship and war. Thus, it is imperative that we recover the missing information about women's activism in order to add their life accounts to the annals of history.

One of these women is Neus Català, born in a small rural town in the province of Tarragona in 1915. She was politically active even in her childhood, due to her parents' affiliation with the Communist Party. At the end of the Spanish Civil War, Català left Spain and joined the French Resistance until the Gestapo arrested her in 1943. Shortly after that, she was sent to Ravensbrück, a concentration camp where it is estimated that 92,000 people died. Her memory text, Cenizas en el cielo: La vida de Neus Català, written by Carme Martí in 2012, reconstructs this deportee's sufferings in Ravensbrück.⁶ At the time of the publication of this novel Català was ninety-six years old, and she felt the urgency of sharing her memories about her experiences in a concentration camp. The text recounts Català's most important life events: her childhood, her maturation, and her traumatic memories of war, repression, exile, and deportation. Using a female, feminist, and anti-fascist political lens, Cenizas en el cielo vindicates the memory of thousands of Republican women who experienced the humiliation of Nazi concentration camps.

Consequently, Cenizas en el cielo reconstructs and reinterprets the forgotten history of the Spanish Holocaust through the eyes of a woman who suffered a systematic violation of her most basic human rights. The protagonist of the novel embodies an ostensibly real and historical figure. In a similar way, the fictional account of this witness in the camp allows the contemporary reader to understand the trauma suffered by millions of people who were detained in the Nazi camps. This text, alongside former testimonies from Spanish Holocaust survivors collected by Català in De la resistencia y deportación: 50 Testimonios de mujeres españolas, establishes an effective link to the study of women's historical memory, especially since, as Català's fictional narrative voice notes in Martí's novel, the deported women have been almost completely forgotten: "los deportados españoles son los grandes olvidados de esta historia, y nosotras somos las olvidadas...