War, prison, exile and deportation took place in the life of Mercedes Núñez Targa, Spanish republican who left a written memory of her terrible experience, and who has been remembered these days in Berlin in a tribute organized by the Ravensbrück memorial, the Nazi women’s concentration camp in which she was a prisoner. Before being deported to Germany, the leftist Núñez Targa had been taken to the Francoist women’s prison in Ventas, in Madrid, and had traveled through France, where she joined the Resistance. After the Allied victory in the Second World War and the liberation, the dictatorship in Spain forced her to resume the path of exile and she settled in France. He could not live in his country again until Franco’s death. He died in Vigo in 1986.
“She always said she had to live to tell everything; since I was a child, I always heard at home that my mother had suffered repression in Spain and Nazi deportation to Ravensbrück, I don’t even know at what point in my childhood I found out; but for many relatives of deportees it was a topic that was not talked about”, recalls his son, Pablo Iglesias Núñez, in a conversation with La Vanguardia before the tribute, held on Thursday at the Cervantes Institute in Berlin.
Núñez Targa’s autobiography The value of memory. De la cárcel de Ventas al campo de Ravensbrück (ed. Renacimiento), compiled with the two books she wrote and published in 2016, has now been translated into German by Carsten Hinz. There is also a French edition. “My mother would never have imagined that her book would be published in German and that it would be presented in Berlin,” reflects Iglesias, 73, who lives in Vigo and traveled to the German capital for the occasion. He was born in 1949 in Paris, stateless like his parents, and Francoist Spain did not grant him Spanish nationality until 1966.
Mercedes Núñez Targa was born in Barcelona in 1911, to a Catalan mother and a Galician father. She worked as a typist and was Pablo Neruda’s secretary when the poet was consul of Chile. In 1936 he joined the PSUC and did administrative tasks for the party during the Civil War, until in 1939 the Communist Party commissioned him to reorganize the formation in Galicia. There she was arrested and in 1940 transferred to the notorious Ventas prison in Madrid, where a Franco court sentenced her to twelve years in prison.
There he ended up in the Argelers camp, where the French authorities confined thousands of Spanish exiles with undignified treatment. In 1943 she went to work as a cook for the German occupation forces in Carcassonne, and joined the French Resistance. Arrested by the Gestapo with other resisters, she was deported in horrific conditions to a camp in Saarbrücken, in western Germany, and then to Ravensbrück.
“The Spanish women from Ravensbrück arrived in the convoys coming from France, and were characterized by their strong political commitment”, explained the director of the memorial, Andrea Genest. Historians estimate that in this Nazi camp, 94 kilometers from Berlin, there were between 300 and 400 Spanish women. Mercedes was taken between June and July 1944, until she was selected for forced labor in an armaments factory near Leipzig, where she participated in sabotage. In view of the Allied advance, the Nazis abandoned the site on April 13, 1945, the day Mercedes, due to being ill, had been included in the list of gas chambers to be killed, fact that he discovered later.
“Of the Spaniards deported to Nazi camps, some men wrote their memoirs, but my mother and Neus Català were the only women who wrote and published what they had experienced; this is very important for the new generations, because oral testimony is no longer possible”, warns Iglesias Núñez.
“In Galicia, my mother dedicated herself to preserving historical memory, and managed to identify around 200 Galician deportees.”
Did his parents, Mercedes Núñez and Merardo Iglesias, name him Pablo in honor of the historic socialist founder? He doesn’t know, but he suspects it.
