Josep Almudéver, 101, Dies; Last Known Veteran of International Brigades

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/05/30/world/europe/josep-almudever-dead.html

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MADRID — Josep Almudéver, the last known survivor of the International Brigades who had volunteered to fight in Spain’s Civil War in the hope that they could stop Fascism, died on May 23 in Pamiers, in southwestern France. He was 101.

His death, in a hospital, was confirmed by his daughter Sonia Almudéver. She did not specify the cause.

Mr. Almudéver was born in France to Spanish parents and held dual citizenship. He was a teenager living in Spain when Francisco Franco and other generals launched a military coup in July 1936 against Spain’s Republican government and plunged the country into a three-year civil war.

He had to lie about his age to enlist in a Republican militia, but he was soon wounded and sent home. It was then discovered that he had been too young to fight. But after recovering from his injury, he managed to rejoin the war as a member of the International Brigades, in which tens of thousands of foreigners had enlisted in order to fight Franco.

Mr. Almudéver was one of many of the Brigades’ left-wing volunteers who viewed the conflict in Spain as a broader fight against the advance of Fascism across Europe; Franco was receiving military support from Nazi Germany and Italy.

Giles Tremlett, a British journalist and historian who last year published a book about the Brigades, said that the death of Mr. Almudéver “brings the curtain down on what was a remarkable phenomenon of a transnational volunteer army, whose creation was compared at the time to what had happened during the Crusades.”

People traveled from all over the world to join the International Brigades, but Mr. Tremlett noted that the units had also included Spaniards, some of whom, like doctors or artillery engineers, helped fill specific needs.

The Brigades, a force that was shaped in part by Soviet adviser, enlisted a total of about 35,000 foreigners during the war and at their peak numbered as many as 42,000 soldiers.

Many of the foreigners had to sneak into Spain because their countries, including the United States, had remained neutral. (The last known American member of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade, Delmer Berg, died in 2016 at 100.)

Josep Almudéver Mateu was born on July 30, 1919, in Marseille, France, to parents who had come from the eastern Spanish region of Valencia. His father, Vicente Almudéver Mari, was a builder who had moved to France in search of work. His mother, Adela Mateu Paterna, was a homemaker who in her youth had been part of her family’s traveling circus and who had met her husband while touring in France.

After living in Marseille, the family briefly moved to Morocco, then returned to Spain in 1931 when Mr. Almudéver’s mother fell seriously ill, just as the Republican government was taking power.

Mr. Almudéver was detained by Franco’s troops in Valencia in 1939 on the eve of Franco’s victory and held in work camps and prisons until his release in 1942. Determined to continue the struggle against Franco, he joined an underground Communist labor union that was helping guerrilla fighters in northeastern Spain.

When some fighters were caught and executed in 1947, he fled on foot across the Pyrenees to the French town of Pamiers, where one of his brothers lived. A year later his wife, Carmen Ballester Vicens, managed to join him in France.

Almudena Cros, the president of the Association of Friends of the International Brigades, which was formed in Madrid in the 1980s, said that she was “99 percent sure” that Mr. Almudéver was “the last man standing” and that there was no other surviving member of the Brigades.

She said that he had contributed greatly to promoting the historical importance of the Brigades, not least because he had remained “so sharp, forceful and clear” when recalling his wartime experience.

“He loved whenever he could visit schools and speak to young people about the lesser known aspects of our own Spanish history,” Ms. Cros said.

Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez of Spain said on Twitter that Mr. Almudéver had stood out because of his “political engagement and perseverance,” noting that he had not only fought for democracy and against dictatorship but had also suffered “postwar repression and exile.”

Like his father, Mr. Almudéver worked in the construction industry while devoting much of his spare time to keeping alive the memory of the civil war, his daughter Sonia said. He published an autobiography in 2014 and two years later joined Ms. Cros on a tour of Spain to mark the 80th anniversary of the Brigades’ creation.

In an interview that year with La Marea, a Spanish publication, Mr. Almudéver said that he still had shrapnel in his leg from the wound he suffered during the war. The civil war, he said, was lost because the Republican government was “stabbed” by his own French government and because other nations had failed to support the Republicans against Franco.

Mr. Almudéver is survived by one of his three siblings, Vicente, who also fought on the Republican side during the civil war and is now 103. In addition to his daughter Sonia, his other survivors include four more children, 10 grandchildren and six great-grandchildren. His wife died in 2006.