Roser Rosés, one of the "Russian girls" exiled during the Civil War, dies.

Barcelona"I was terrified of the bombings. There were days when we slept on the subway, because they bombed every three hours." This is how Roser Rosés (Barcelona, ​​1926-2025) remembered her childhood, marked by the Civil War and World War II in Barcelona. Rosés, who died last Friday at the age of 99, was one of the "girls from Russia": when she was 12, her parents sent her to the USSR to save her from the ravages of war. Separated from her parents, she lived through World War II there and fled from Nazi troops.

Rosés wasn't able to return to Barcelona until 1947. After a long journey through Mexico and the United States, she was reunited with her parents during the Franco dictatorship. She had to do so with falsified documents, and to avoid reprisals from the dictatorship, her parents later erased all documentary evidence of their daughter's time in the USSR. "It was very nice to be able to speak Catalan again, which I hadn't spoken to her since," Rosés recalled in an interview with ARA. "My parents were never aware of the traumas I suffered because of the war. Silence was imposed by the dictatorship. It protected us and made us complicit in the situation," she lamented.

Many decades would pass before Rosés was able to publicly recount everything she had experienced. It was through her book. Chopped braids. Memories of a Russian girl (Caligrafo, 2016), a volume of memoirs in which she compiled her experiences, described in first person, and which has gone through five editions. After the book's publication, Rosés devoted herself to giving talks and lectures, especially in schools and institutes, to disseminate her story and recover historical memory.

Throughout her professional life, Rosés dedicated herself to proofreading, translating, and teaching Catalan and Russian. She also collaborated with UNESCO and volunteered at the Museum of the History of Catalonia. In 2017, she received the LiberPress Award, and next week she was due to receive the Valors Award, awarded by the Catalan Bar Council and which her family will accept. The documentary premiered last February. Roser Rosés, a child of war, directed by historian Josep Puy and produced by Antoni Verdaguer and featuring actress Rosa Aguado.