Welcome to the clandestine apartment where three women stood up to Franco

BarcelonaIn 1940, Franco's repression was more bloody and brutal than ever, but in an apartment in Barceloneta, at number 37 Grau i Torres Street, Soledad Real, Isabel Imbert, and Clara Pueyo resisted. Maria Salvo didn't live in the apartment, but she had a close relationship with the other three women. They produced propaganda material, and the building was known as... oasisBecause it was in the middle of the desert of the dictatorship. That building no longer exists, because it was demolished. However, it is possible to enter the clandestine apartment, hear the voices of those brave women, and perceive what they must have heard while writing or hiding people. You only have to go up in an elevator, where everything is as it was in the 1940s and where a gramophone plays Francoist propaganda, and enter the installation created by La Inefable and curated by historians Fernando Hernández Holgado, Oriol López Badell, and Toni Vidal Arnan, in Casa de la Barceloneta 17. The visitor's mailbox is a small one. If you pick up the phone, you feel how a modest, shared apartment became a center of clandestine anti-Francoist activity. Bulletins were written, propaganda was distributed, and people in need were given shelter. The voice invites you to open a door to discover one of the "most powerful examples of female resistance during the immediate post-war period." In the first room, where everything is very dark, there's a sewing machine, because this space of resistance had the appearance of a sewing workshop. On the table are old photo albums of the three young militants from the Unified Socialist Youth of Catalonia. You can hear the sound of a typewriter hidden behind a door that looks like a wardrobe. On the other side is the table where the women wrote pamphlets and bulletins, a bed covered in letters they wrote, and three old telephones. If you pick them up, you can feel the struggles inside and outside the party and the story of what happened on August 22, 1941, when the police officers stormed the apartment and ransacked it. On the telephone on the bedside table, the story being told is that of Soledad Real. She was suffering because of a letter and asked the officers if she could take some cloths from there because she was menstruating. An officer made her undress in front of him until she was left in her bra and panties, then turned away. Real took advantage of that moment to put the letter in her panties and tore it to pieces in the bathroom.

The Mysterious Disappearance of Clara Pueyo

The three women were arrested. Soledad Real's mother, knocking on every door, obtained endorsements from neighbors and also from the houses where Real had worked as a seamstress in an attempt to lessen their sentences. All three were interrogated and tortured and imprisoned in the Les Corts women's prison. The documents the police found in the apartment led to the arrest of Maria Salvo as well. In 1942, while Real was in prison—like her companions, she spent sixteen years there—her partner, Josep Fornells, died as a result of police torture. In June 1943, Pueyo escaped from prison with false documents, as part of an operation planned by the leadership of the PSUC (Unified Socialist Party of Catalonia). What happened when she walked through the prison gates remains a mystery, because she disappeared after that day. Imbert's fate is also unknown. There is no documentary evidence of where she lived or what she did after serving her sentence.

Real, when she was released, continued fighting. She became a prominent activist in the neighborhood and feminist movements. Salvo presided over the Catalan Association of Former Political Prisoners of the Franco Regime and co-founded the Association of Women of '36. "We wanted to pay tribute to the women who fought against Francoism in Barceloneta, a combative neighborhood with a working-class tradition, and it's also an invitation to young women to continue the struggle—it's worth fighting for," explains Oriol López. The exhibition is an initiative of EUROM and Casa de la Barceloneta 1761.