Enlisted
The story of our protagonist begins in 1938, when Miquel Serra Grabulosa voluntarily enlisted in the Republican army at the age of 17.
He went to the front in 1938, where he became a political commissar. After being wounded in Blanes during the Retreat, he crossed the frontier in an ambulance and landed in France, where after spending some time in a hospital near Montpellier and then moved to the Saint-Cyprien concentration camp.
With the escalation of the Second World War, he joined the 118th Foreign Workers Company and went to the front again but in May 1940, he was taken prisoner by the Germans at Braydunnes, near Dunkirk, and sent to Germany and Austria, where he was imprisoned for over a year in Stalag 17-B in Krems (Austria), and later in Mauthausen concentration camp (Konzentrationlager Mauthausen). There he joined a resistance organisation.
He survived until the liberation of the camp by Allied troops on 8 May 1945 and was repatriated to France, where he would meet Lluïsa Miralles – a Republican exile and his future wife.
She, Lluïsa Miralles, was the daughter of the last Republican deputy mayor at Ulldecona Town Council, who moved to Barcelona with her family in April 1938, and then to France in 1939, at the age of 10. She suffered a period in Argelès-sur-mer concentration camp and the occupation of France by German troops.
In 1947, with the end of the Second World War, she met Miquel Serra with whom participated in clandestine activities of the PSUC in Spain from France.
From so far to so close.
