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Title: Floreal Barberà Blanch Author: Stuart Christie Date: 2019 Language: en Topics: obituary Source: Retrieved on 16th May 2021 from https://www.katesharpleylibrary.net/6m91mm
I’ve just heard [2019] from Xavier Montanyà that Floreal Barberà Blanch,
another of the unsung heroes of the anarchist anti-fascist struggle, has
died at the age of 98. A veteran of the 117^(th) Brigade of the 25^(th)
Division on the Levante front where he fought until the final exile in
France. His extraordinary life story is too action-packed to compress
into a few paragraphs, but suffice it to say among other things he was a
key member of the Ponzan escape network (sometimes known as the Réseau
Pat O’Leary). As a 23-year-old he saved the lives of a caravan of sixty
members of the Jewish Combat Organisation (OJC) who had been abandoned
by their guides crossing the Pyrenees into Spain, preventing them
falling into the hands of the German border police. Barberà had been
particularly tasked with safeguarding the life of a man he knew only as
Dika, who was in fact Captain Jules Jefroykin, founder of the OJC, a man
desperately wanted by the Gestapo. “In the event of a confrontation with
the Nazis in the mountain, leave everyone and save Dika, who must not
fall alive into the hands of the Germans.” Those were his secret orders.
In July 1944 he was arrested in the Cerdanya on another mission for the
CNT and remained in jail, in Barcelona, until the Christmas of 1945.
During this time he and others set up the FRI, the Resistance Forces of
the Interior, a short-lived organisation that sought to unite all the
anti-Francoist resistance groups under one flag. It was later endorsed
by the government of the Spanish Republic in exile, headed by Álvaro de
Albornoz, who named Floreal Barberà as its agent in the interior. It was
the last time the government of the Spanish Republic in exile claimed to
want to activate the armed struggle in the interior. The government
endorsement was also the cause of its demise!
Floreal Barberà subsequently went into exile in Venezuela, his passage
paid for by Dika, where he worked for the reunification of the CNT and
collaborated with Venezuelan organizations against the dictatorship of
Perez Jimenez. He also worked closely with Garcia Oliver and Octavio
Alberola, then exiled in Mexico, to reinvigorate the anti-Francoist
struggle which resulted in 1962 in the founding of Defensa Interior (DI)
the clandestine body that reactivated the armed struggle against Franco
inside and outside Spain.