The historian and former president of the Amical de Mauthausen association, Rosa Toran, has died this Friday at the age of 75 as a result of a serious illness, as explained by the entity in a statement, which highlights that Toran was “an irreplaceable reference for his knowledge , rigor, coherence, mastery, generosity and friendship”.
The El Masnou City Council, where he had lived for more than 30 years, has also expressed its condolences to the family and friends of Toran, who worked as a high school teacher and especially investigated the deportation of Spanish Republicans in the Nazi camps.
Born in Manresa, Toran’s parents and uncles were retaliated by Francoism. Her uncle was deported to the Mauthausen concentration camp, where he died. In 1983 she received a doctorate in History from the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She was a history teacher at various institutes. She studied the municipal politics of the Barcelona City Council during the Bourbon Restoration and the Second Republic, as well as women’s political action, work for which she received several awards. Many of her works were carried out by her in collaboration with Cèlia Cañellas, with whom she published several books and collaborated on many collective works. She also collaborated regularly in the press and specialized magazines.
She was also president of the Amical de Mauthausen and curated various related exhibitions. Toran investigated deportation and life in Nazi camps, with the publication of the books ‘Life and Death of Republicans in Nazi Camps’, ‘Mauthausen: Graphic Chronicle of a Concentration Camp’ and ‘Nazi Concentration Camps: words against oblivion’.
In 1988 he obtained the Agustí Duran i Sanpere Study Grant, within the framework of the Ciutat de Barcelona Awards. In 2003 she won the first Leonor Serrano y Pablo Prize, in the history of education, for the book ‘Dolors Piera, teacher, politician and exile’, with Celia Cañellas Julià. In 2015 she won the Bages de Cultura prize for her professional career and for her work on the republicans who fought against Nazism in France. In recent years, she has published several books on the history of El Masnou. In 2021, with Celia Cañellas, she published the work ‘Hilda Agostini. The weapons of reason of a republican, protestant and mason teacher’, who received the Good Letters Award for Humanistic Essay, granted by Grup 62 and the Barcelona Academy of Good Letters.
Politically, she was active in ICV and, later, in En Comú Podem, the party of which she was the local coordinator.
