Joaquim Amat-Piniella

Who was Joaquim Amat-Piniella?

Joaquim Amat-Piniella was a Catalan writer and politician. He took part in the Spanish Civil War on the republican side, and moved to France after the war. There, he was first interned at the French concentration camps in Rosselló, later forced to work on the Maginot line, and finally deported by the Germans to the Mauthausen concentration camp.

He survived for five years in the camp, until he was liberated by American troops. He later narrated his experiences and the atrocities of Nazism in the novel K.L. Reich. Together with other survivors, he founded the Amical Mauthausen in 1962.