In May 1939 , France extended the proposal to regiments in operation and companies of foreign workers . Armand Pueyo enrolled in one of these foreign companies , doing manual work in different towns in France .
In June 1940 , when France was occupied by the Nazis , one million political prisoners occupied the Stalags , the name Nazi Germany gave to the camps of war prisoners , where there were 1,000 Spaniards .
Armand Pueyo was sent to Stalag VIII C , near current Zagan in Poland , and from there he wrote a letter to his daughter Eugenia . It was the last missive his family received .
About Soledad Tartera i Vilanova
No one will know more of you , Penelope , than the design Homer and the mythologies forged for you
Olga Zamboni
Canción de una dama a la sombra ( title of a poem by Paul Celan ) dismantles the story of Penelope , narrated by Homer three thousand years ago in The Odyssey . This myth tells the legend of Odysseus -a magnificent hero who fought in the Trojan War and who took twenty years to return home- and his wife , the Queen Penelope , who waited for him all that time in her house -weaving and unravelling a shroud on a loom- , rejecting a group of suitors who relentlessly pursued her . Historically , Penelope has become the female ideal of the passive wait , marital fidelity and absence .
The Spanish Civil War transformed the lives of thousands of women in many aspects . In the words of the historian Mary Nash : it gave them autonomy of movement and decision which they used immediately . The new participation of women in male tasks such as trench warfare , community service and social work , work in factories and on transport , was for many women a liberating experience .
Civilian resistance and everyday survival during the war can be explained by the enormous effort and energy of thousands of anonymous women , whose voluntary aid work was a major contribution to the war economy and the functioning of civil society .
The experience of the war brought with it a new dimension to the classic functions of a mother , housewife and household provider , because now women provided food , care services and basic needs for the daily survival of the entire civil population .
All of these women shared the experience of waiting for their husbands , lovers , sons , fathers and brothers who had been sent to the front .
With the end of the war and the arrival of the new regime , a tremendously conservative female ideal was imposed . Under the Franco dictatorship , the main social function of women was to be mothers , which is why work , education , social activity and emancipation were considered to be threats to “ their biological destiny as procreators of the future generations of the Spanish homeland ”.
The repression of the Franco dictatorship brutally closed off women ’ s path to freedom . However , there were many women who secretly fought against fascism , or who reverted the prototype of “ the angel in the house ” as they needed to continue working .
I wanted to construct an account from the perspective of the women who waited , focusing on the figure of Soledad Tartera i Vilanova , Armand Pueyo Jornet ’ s wife .
For obvious reasons , I managed to gather more information about the life of Armand , than that of Soledad . Even the twenty-eight letters that have been saved from their epistolary relationship , are his , logically kept by Soledad . Those that she wrote , were probably destroyed when Armand entered Mauthausen .
Armand Pueyo Jornet was murdered in Gusen in May 1941 . Soledad found out that her husband had died almost ten years later . For her whole life she had to live with the stigma that it meant in Franco ’ s Spain to have a “ commie ” husband , a sister-inlaw who escaped from prison , and was “ under search and arrest ” and to be a woman who worked , contradicting the ideal of “ the perfect wife ” and the “ angel in the house ”.
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