War, prison, exile and deportation followed one another in the life of Mercedes Núñez Targa, a Spanish republican who left the memory of her terrible experience written, and who has been remembered these days in Berlin in a tribute organized by the Ravensbrück memorial, the field Nazi women’s concentration camp in which she was a prisoner. Before being deported to Germany, the leftist Núñez Targa had been imprisoned in the Francoist women’s prison in Ventas, in Madrid, and she had traveled through France, where she joined the Resistance. After the Allied victory in World War II and her liberation, the dictatorship in Spain forced her to return to exile and she settled in France. She was not able to return to live in her country until Franco’s death. She died in Vigo in 1986.
“She always said that 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 discussed ”, recalls his son, Pablo Iglesias Núñez, in conversation with La Vanguardia before the tribute, held on Thursday at the Cervantes Institute in Berlin.
The autobiography of Núñez Targa The value of memory. From Sales Prison to Ravensbrück Camp (Renaissance ed.), compiled from 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 Franco’s Spain did not give 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 she joined the PSUC and did administrative tasks for the party during the Civil War, until in 1939 the Communist Party commissioned her to reorganize the party in Galicia. She was arrested there and in 1940 transferred to the Ventas prison in Madrid, of dismal memory, where a Francoist court sentenced her to twelve years in prison.
But in 1942 she was released due to a bureaucratic error, and she took the opportunity to escape to France. There she 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 she joined the French Resistance. She was detained by the Gestapo along with other resisters, she was deported in horrendous conditions to a camp in Sarrebruck, in western Germany, and then to Ravensbrück.
“The Spanish women from Ravensbrück arrived in the convoys that came from France, and they 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 imprisoned between June and July 1944, until she was selected for forced labor in an arms factory near Leipzig, where she participated in sabotage. Before the allied advance, the Nazis abandoned the place on April 13, 1945, the day that Mercedes, due to being ill, had been included in the list of gas chambers to be assassinated, something that she later discovered.
“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. The Catalan Neus Català died in 2019 at 103, when she was the last Spanish survivor of Ravensbrück.
“Back in Galicia, my mother dedicated herself to preserving historical memory, and managed to identify some 200 Galician deportees.”
Did your parents, Mercedes Núñez and Merardo Iglesias, give you the name Pablo in honor of the historic socialist founder?
“I don’t know, I never asked; a socialist friend who was with her in jail gave me a postcard from Pablo Iglesias and I thought that my mother called me that because of that, but I didn’t know for sure either”.