Joan Pinsach Palomeras 1916 - 1941

Born 29.10.1916 in San Julián de Ramis
Died 21.11.1941 in Gusen

Biography

Joan was the second of five children of the couple Pinsach Palomeras, based in Sarrià de Ter. He was born in Sant Julià de Ramis on October 29, 1916. The father, Salvador Pinsach Fornells (1888–1957) of Sarrià de Ter, was a farmer and his mother, Concepció Palomeras Capell, from Sant Sadurní de l’Heura (1890–1962) was a farmer and housewife. Three children were born in Sant Julià, Josep (1914–1970), Joan (1916–1941) and Rosa (1918–2000) and, in Sarrià de Ter, Pere (1921–1997) and Emilia (1930).

The family had to move to Sarrià de Ter, on Carrer del Carme 21, around 1920 in one of the houses known as “the new houses”. Years later, after the war, the couple would buy two houses of the same line, numbers 27 and 29, next to Cal Boter, in Llibert Marcè, where they would live, in one, the parents with their single child, Josep, and on the other, brother Pere, married to Maria Bartí. The couple Pinsach Palomeras also acquired a plot in the same street where, later, when the girls were married, a house was built. These houses have been the addresses of Rosa Pinsach with Joan Planas and his daughter Joaquima Planas Pinsach and that of Emilia Pinsach with Francesc Cornellà and his daughter Conxita Cornellà Pinsach.

Josep and Pere, as well as working in the countryside, made tragines from a house called “ca l'Omedes”, with the car they owned, bringing cement bags to customers or to the train. It is to be assumed, then, that Joan Pinsach, a young man, also learned and worked as a farmer with his father. For children, the Pinsach brothers had gone to the national school of the main street of Sarrià, with the teacher Pere Rius and the naturalist Isidre Macau, who worked in Sarrià de Ter from 1927 to 1932.

Joan Pinsach's journey is very unknown to us. With the nieces, Joaquima Planas Pinsach, Conxita Cornellà Pinsach and Joan de Emilia's sister, Emilia, we have tried to find out what happened in the years of the Spanish Civil War and the Second World War. The family keeps a photo of when he was young and two from the time he was in the war, but they could not date or locate. In one it seems to make a paella with a group of Spanish soldiers. In another, in France, with colleagues from the CTE (Foreign Workers' Company) and a gendarme, in some mountainous place. This photo came to them through the International Red Cross and prepared a package with food and blankets. After receiving the photo, they prepared a second shipment, but they no longer got an answer.

No more memories, no letter, no card. The family never received notification that Joan Pinsach had died in Mauthausen and found out at the time that the book of Montserrat Roig The Catalans in the Nazi camps was published in 1977.

The reference of the book is the first data that we have been corroborating or denying.

The first documentary proof comes out of the archive of Sant Julià de Ramis, with the birth certificate, dated 29 October 1916, which does not coincide with that put in the book by Montserrat Roig (and retrospect all “Official” documentation  of the Mauthausen camp, which is cited on 30 March 1916, and that of the French Ministry of Defense). The Marina Canals, a civil servant at the Sant Julià de Ramis Town Hall, commented to me that I vaguely remembered seeing that name in the recruitment list. Indeed, in the recruitment documentation it is found that in 1937, when they call the front of Joan Pinsach, the City Council of Sarrià de Ter communicates to that of Sant Julià de Ramis that the young man is at the front, since he has enlisted voluntarily to the People's Army. Sign the letter the republican mayor of Sarrià de Ter, Esteve Almoyner. In other words, in order to be able to go to the front, Joan Pinsach falsified his birth date and he enlisted at age 20, instead of the 21 who belonged to him.

When the war was declared, on 18 July 1936, in Josep Pinsach, born in 1914, he was doing military service, which was then three years. His brother John, surely pushed by the effervescence of the moment, decided to get ready. There was one who believes that volunteering was a better destination, but that decision led him to die in a Nazi camp.

From his passage through the front we know almost nothing. Her sister Emilia believes that more than going to the front was militating in a political party. In a communication from 1940, when the city council recruited young people who had gone to war or had partially completed recruiting, the mother, Conxita Palomeras, reported that they had no news of their son since from August 1938.

One of the photos that Joan Pinsach made them arrive is from a group of soldiers at the time of making a rice field. It is not even recognized in this group, nor is it known where it is made or what year.

It is supposed that Joan Pinsach left with the backward movement and went to France with the Republican soldiers, surely in some concentration camp on the beaches of Roussillon, but from the archives of the Department of the Eastern Pyrenees they have informed us that they do not have any information referring to him. It is also strange, if it happened through Pertús, that it did not stop for Sarrià de Ter. Therefore, another option is likely, that it would pass through the Andorran band and go to the Septfonds field, near Toulouse. From the Tarn-Garonne archive the answer is also negative and, in addition, they comment, they conserve little documentation of the field.

The existence of the refugee camps on the beaches of the Northern Catalonia, Argelers, Sant Cebrià, Barcarès and Rivesaltes and so many others, like Septfonds, near Toulouse, has been a fact very unknown to the Catalans and the French themselves. Many supposed that when crossing France, the exiled ones already could be installed in some house of the field or they were able to take a boat towards South America. The literature and the facts explained by the exiles who survived hid a new reality, those who never returned. Many Republicans died in the sandy fields, and those who did not receive financial support, especially those who had formal trades, remained in the hands of the French government, which tried to get rid of them.

Initially, the French government encouraged Republican soldiers to return to Spain, chiefly to those who believed that their personal circumstances would not be prosecuted. In the middle of 1939, in France there were about 200,000 refugees. In September 1939, when the War with Germany was declared, the French government offered Republicans to join the Foreign Legion, the Battalions of the March, or be part of the so-called CTE, Companies of Foreign Workers, at the which was most of the Republican combatants. Each CTE consisted of 250 Spanish “volunteers”.

Benito Bermejo, historian, researcher on this period, estimates that 50,000 Republicans were left in the CTEs, 12,000 of whom were sent to work to reinforce the Maginot Line, near the war front, and another 30,000 working between this sector and the Loire. In the Battalions of the March, integrated in the French army, they enlisted about 5,000 soldiers.

The existence of these foreign work companies is once again one of the dark episodes of France and that nowadays it is now beginning to study in depth. There is not yet an exhaustive list of who each company formed and it was not possible to follow the journey of Joan Pinsach since leaving the concentration camp until it was taken by the German military. The only list for now where data are updated is that of the web www.cartasdelexilio.fre.fr, which also shows a photo of soldiers in a mountain CTE, similar to that kept by the Pinsach family. This website, created by Mr. Alban Sanz, grandson of an exiled Republican, is updated as new information is provided. From this page we have been able to access another list, that of prisoners n. 34, published on October 21, 1940, where we find the reference – Pinzal (Juan) 30-3-1916, Sarrià (Esp) 2a.cl 79e CTE 142 –, so we deduce that Joan Pinsach was at the Foreign Worker Company n. 79 and then taken to the frontstalag 142 in Besançon, where it is already since October 1940. Alban Sanz informs us that the 79th CTE was assigned to the 6th Army and that it worked near the Maritime Alps, between Les Jourdans and Reotier.

The photo where Joan Pinsach is seen with a gendarme and companions, in a mountain meadow with tents to the bottom, makes him believe that he corresponded to one of the CTE aimed at reinforcing the Maginot line on the border with Germany, near Switzerland. In May 1940, the Germans entered France, leaving the defense of the Maginot line obsolete and surrounding all French and Spanish Republican soldiers, including what is called the “Vosges bag”, a triangle between the towns of Épinal, Belfort and Selestat, where are half a million French soldiers and about 10,000 Spaniards. In June of 1940, they are already caught in front of the zone.

The French soldiers are considered prisoners of war and they remain in France. The Spanish soldiers are considered foreign workers, stateless according to the Franco government, and the Germans are assigned to work camps, in this case in the Mauthausen quarry in Austria. France, with the collaborationist government of Vichy, stands out from the Spanish prisoners, whom it considers deportees.

Joan Pinsach, he joined the frontstalag 142 of Besançon (Doubs) France, with the number 2,564, which already exists from 21 October 1940. On 10 January 1941, he sent a convoy to Stalag XI-A from Altengrabrow near Magdeburg, Germany. They leave Altengrabow on 24 April  1941 in a train convoy and arrive at Mauthausen two days later, on 26 April  1941.

In this convoy 468 Republicans travel, 261 of whom will die in Mauthausen. They come from frontstalags 142 (Besançon) and 140 (Belfort). In the same convoy, from the frontstalag 140, are Joaquín López Raimundo (brother of Gregorio López Raimundo and uncle Sergi Pàmies), Francesc Boix (the photographer of Mauthausen) and Gregori Verdaguer Dorca, sister of the Sarria's Anna Verdaguer Dorca, who will also die at Gusen.

Companions of the same 79th CTE and the front-facing 142 who found the death in Mauthausen were Francesc Campo Vilardebó, from Barcelona; Antoni Rosselló Roig, from Ibiza; Carmel Carrera Botines, from Albatàrrec, Lleida; Eloi Ferré Díaz, d 'Utiel, Valencia; Joaquin Ibáñez Elhombre, of Samper de Calanda, Teruel and Antonio Arrauz Barrio, of Segovia.

Joan Pinsach enters Mauthausen with the number 3,774, where he is six months, until 20 October 1941, when he is sent to Gusen.

Mauthausen, near Linz, Austria, is not considered a field of extermination, but death. Vaging conditions, malnutrition, hunger, cold, promiscuity, extreme working conditions in the quarry and the ladder of death make him a field to die. In the quarry, young people who no longer weigh much more than 50 kilos, force them to carry 40 and 50 kilos stones. They die of exhaustion, by underhuman working conditions.

It is estimated that in this camp and its Kommandos there were 6,980 Spanish Republicans, 2,194 of whom survived. More than 60 % were found death, 4,738 people, in the relationship that historian Rosa Toran made in the introduction of the reissue of Montserrat Roig's 2017 book.

The total of Republican soldiers deported to Nazi camps is 9,003 people.

The transfer to the Kommando of Gusen takes place on 20 October 1941. Enter with registration number 13.714 and died after a month, on 21 November 1941. This is how the document records its death, which is kept in the archives of the International Tracing Service (ITS) Arolsen Archives.

When Montserrat Roig began to seek information for the book about the deportees Catalans that was commissioned by lawyer and historian Josep Benet Morell, he obtained the list Amicale de Mauthausen in Paris had collected and that he was transcribed by the Girona historian Jaume de Puig. This information had been made possible thanks to Casimiro Climent's valencià, in addition to Joan de Diego and Josep Bailina, who worked on seven lists that gave representatives of the Red Cross and others. In the photographic lab, Francesc Boix, Antonio García Alonso and José Cereceda Hijas worked together, who copied and hid many photographs that used to incriminate the SS in the Nuremberg trial. Thanks to this action, the Mauthausen camp is one of those who keep more images that illustrate the horror that lived there. Some of the negatives of Francesc Boix (died in Paris in 1951) were kept by his friend Joaquín López Raimundo and came to light with the work of Montserrat Roig.

The information about the deportees is in the throat. The French government, in 1950, opened a file by Joan Pinsach, no. 73,199, in the Ministry of former combatants and victims of War, the Directorate of Contentions of the Civil State and of Investigations. Consisted as deceased deportee in Gusen, Austria. Despite knowing the direction of Sarrià de Ter, nobody, and even less the Spanish state, communicated it to the family.

The Francoist authorities did not show a brim of humanity. Not only were they relinquished from the exiled Spaniards, but they did not even grant them documentation to return and they were considered stateless. The families left in the country were humiliated. Joaquima explains that her mother, Rosa Pinsach, and other girls, forced her to clean the town hall, as there were soldiers and soldiers who referred to the Water Bridge and was rummaging.

To the combatant Joan Pinsach, a republican soldier killed in Gusen, Komando de Mauthausen, he remembers him at the Mauthausen Memorial, in the names room, as Juan Pinsà Palomeras (1916–1941). Until now, his appearance was unknown and he was anonymous person within this well of unknown people killed on the occasion of the Spanish Civil War and the Barbarism of the Nazi Holocaust. With this search, Joan Pinsach is no longer an anonymous person, but a republican pope who fought for the Republic and fell into the hands of the French government and the Nazis, who mistreated him until he found death in the Nazi camp of Gusen.

 

Assumpció Vila

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