Antón Vidal Filipó 1900 - 1945

Born 21.4.1900 in Valls de Canillo
Died 29.3.1945 in Mauthausen

Biography

Anton Vidal Filipó was born on 11 April 1900 in the Vidal family home in Prats, a small village near to the parish of Canillo (Principality of Andorra). His father was named Anton, like him, and came from the same village, Prats. His mother, Josefa, was from Civís, a Spanish village very close to Andorra. Like the rest of the family, Anton Vidal Filipó mainly worked in agriculture, cattle breeding and smuggling.

In 2006 I conducted an interview with Maria Torres de Cal Puigcernal, a neighbour who had known him in person. She told me that Vidal was a ‘very courageous, somewhat coarse’ man. ‘He never married and had no offspring.’ Torres also remarked that despite the official height of 1.69m given in his passport, it was his great physical strength that she particularly remembered about him. She described him as ‘the strongest man in Andorra. He was capable of carrying 100 kilogrammes on his back from Prats to the French village of L’Hospitalet’.[1] Vidal’s neighbour also remembered some episodes involving him that she had encountered: ‘He could survive for very long periods without food or sleep. I remember that he came home after long and hard days working in the mountains, had something to eat and then slept for two days straight.’ As regards his time in the Mauthausen camp, only vague rumours about his imprisonment reached Andorra but no one of his generation knew exactly what had happened to him. However, he had not only been in Mauthausen; and he never returned from there.

The reason for and exact date of his arrest are unknown. What is certain is that on 25 March 1944 he was deported from the Compiègne prison camp to Mauthausen. 13 Andorrans were incarcerated at Compiègne – nine were transferred to the Buchenwald concentration camp in Germany and four landed in Mauthausen: Anton Vidal Felipó (prisoner number 60674, Pere Mandicó Vidal (prisoner number 56659), Miquel Adellach Torres (prisoner number 61853) and Anton Pons (prisoner number 98904). Mandicó Vidal and Adellach Torres survived. Anton Pons died in the Melk camp.

At 45, Anton Vidal was the oldest Andorran ever to have been in a concentration camp. The possibility cannot be ruled out that, as was the case for other Andorrans, he was arrested for cooperating with the resistance; or perhaps while trying to help Jews or Allied soldiers escape – namely over the French-Andorran border to neutral territory, which is what the Principality of Andorra was during the Second World War.

The record of his arrival in the camp has survived. According to this, he arrived on 25 March 1944, after having passed through the Compiègne camp, at Mauthausen. In this camp he was registered as a famer and, although he was an Andorran citizen, he was classified as a Red Spaniard.

Ralf Lechner, one of the staff at the Archive of the Mauthausen Memorial, explained in an interview in 2006 that Vidal was ‘a prisoner who was relatively well documented. He was deported to several subcamps. First to Linz III, from where he was sent back to Mauthausen for unknown reasons. Then he was deported to the Eisenerz subcamp. At the end, possibly shortly before his death, he was brought back to Mauthausen, to the so-called “infirmary camp”.’ Indeed, at the beginning of 1945, the large number of prisoners in the wake of the German retreat meant the number of deaths in Mauthausen rose sharply. According to Lechner, ‘Mauthausen turned into a death camp. By which I mean that that all prisoners who were unable to work were moved from the Mauthausen main camp to the “infirmary camp”. There they were given practically no medical treatment and no care, no chance of recovery. The majority died within a few weeks. They were simply left there to die.’

This was also the case for Anton Vidal Filipó. His body survived for a whole year though not until the end of the war. He died one month before the liberation of the camp. All that remains is a photo from his Andorran passport, issued three years before his death.

According to the archives I consulted at the Ministry of the Interior, his death is dated as 29 March 1945. The official cause: circulatory problems and a colon illness. However, a small star indicates that this was very probably not the cause of death. Anton Vidal Filipó was the last Andorran to die in a Nazi concentration camp. All the others had died already in Buchenwald or on the death marches.

Jorge Cebrián

 

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