Spanish Civil War Memory Project

Summary

Joan was born in Terrassa, Catalonia, on Dec. 30, 1920, to a middle-class family that suffered economic hardship in the early 1930s. Joan left school at age 12 to begin working to help his mother, becoming an apprentice mechanic at 14. At age 15 he joined the CNT in Terrassa. He gives a summary of events leading to the outbreak of the Civil War, interspersed with his own activities during the time. In 1938 he joined the Durruti Column on the Aragon Front. After the war he escaped to France through the Pyrenees, spending time in concentration camps and also working as a machinist in a Toulouse airplane factory. With the Nazi occupation of France he was sent to work in the mines of Decazeville, where he worked underground with other CNT militants. At this point he got married and soon after emigrated to Argentina in February of 1951, where he worked at various workshops and factories as a machinist. He celebrated upon Franco's death, and soon after returned to Catalonia for a visit, relocating to Spain definitively in 1982. He lives in Terrassa, where he remains a CNT militant and member of the Esquerra Republicana de Cataluyna (ERC)