Eudósia: the Galician refugee that Castro Laboreiro hid

This is the story of Eudósia, a refugee from the Spanish War who found safe haven in Castro Laboreiro. It is the story of the young 19 year old teacher and the dangers that the Castro people went through to hide her.   On 18th July 1936, the Spanish Civil War broke out. In the Galician village of Fradalvite, from one day to the next friends become enemies and fear reigns. This was where the young teacher Eudósia Lorenzo lived with her parents, Agustín and Basilisa. On the day he receives a threat against his family if he does not pay 50.000 pesetas to the Falangistas, Agustín decides to make the jump to Portugal.

Years later, Eudósia would write to her son: “We set off up the mountain to the river that forms the border between Spain and Portugal; I remember that when I crossed it, I rolled on the grass full of joy. It was one of the best moments of my life; at the age of 19, I feared a death without reason; I imagined my body devoured by worms; what I feared most was being raped by these illiterate brutes; in secret, I always carried a penknife (which I still have) to cut the veins in my left arm before I fell into their hands.”

“They had to flee, otherwise the enemies would do to them what they did to others. They were going to slaughter them… a scandal! It was the most scandalous war in the whole world.” Delfina Fernandes, 96 years old, does not hide her indignation when she recalls those times.

Sitting in the shade of her house in Queimadelo, in Castro Laboreiro, Delfina Fernandes tells the story she lived inside. She was a friend of Eudósia, the young and beautiful Galician teacher who left her mark on the people of Castro Laboreiro.

This is a story that, despite being 80 years old, is told in the first person. Delfina was 13 years old when she saw Eudósia and her parents arrive at the Alagoa wintering place. Agustín was known in those parts for working as a shepherd between Galicia and Portugal, and he knew the roads. “They crossed the border at Entrimo and then came through Janeiro de Baixo, until they reached Alagoa”.

“Eudósia taught me to read”

“For the first three months, Eudósia slept with me and my sister in the same bed. Her parents slept in a house where the supplies were. During the day they came with us. They ate their own food, but they came with us.

In those days, the climate was more inclement and the roads difficult, so the people of Castro Laboreiro would go down to the more sheltered inververneiras (winter woods) in December, returning to the “brandas” in March.

Delfina Fernandes was very young when she met Eudósia, but the memories of those times were engraved on her forever. And so, she remembers well that – when they moved to Branda – Eudósia and her parents moved on to another place. “There was a woman (Antónia Rendeiro de Adorna) who encouraged them and told them to go to Rodeiro: ‘come to Rodeiro because I have a hiding place there that nobody knows about’. We were all one and we covered them up and how!

In Delfina’s words, eyes and gestures, the pride she feels that her people – “we were all one! – to have hidden the Galician refugee family.

The hiding place she speaks of is still visible today, in a stone house of the branda do Rodeiro, easily identifiable for having a little soul in one corner. Now in ruins, we can see the cubicle under the kitchen where whenever there was news the family used to hide.

Eudósia and her parents managed to live hidden for three years among the people of Castro Laboreiro. During this time, the young teacher taught many of the village children to read and count, and for this reason her name has remained in the collective memory of these places. “It was she who taught me to read the plots and to count. Up to a million I learned and she taught me. But the first letters my father taught me”.

Eudósia and her mother adopted the customs of the land and wore their Castro costume. In a letter to her son, Paul Feron, the teacher recalls a time when the police entered the house where they were refugees and her mother did not have time to hide. She was dressed as a castreja and Antónia Rendeiro de Adorna said she was mute, so she did not arouse suspicion.

The Galician family was sheltered in António Domingos Rendeiro’s house for the rest of the time they stayed in Castro Laboreiro. Both Franco’s police and the political police PIDE (then PVDE – Police of Vigilance and Defence of the State) were on their trail early on.

On the PIDE’s radar

In a letter dated 18 November 1937, the head of the Peso (Melgaço) post asked for the capture of the family, “elements propagandists of communist theories”. At that time, the political police had lost track of Eudósia and her parents, who had always remained in Castro Laboreiro. The document says that they would have gone to Arcos de Valdevez and from there “to an unknown destination”.

But soon Lorenzo was back on the radar of the political police (PIDE).

“There came an occasion when there was a guy from Castro who had problems with the police, and that’s when the police came to know about them”, recalls Delfina Fernandes. The denunciation was made to the police and the national guard and the political police began to circle Rodeiro more persistently.

“In Rodeiro, the place where I was told the whereabouts of EUDOZIA and his parents was certain, it was very difficult for me (…) I had the information that they would be hiding in a mine, in the river that borders this place or in António Domingos Rendeiro’s house, in a hiding place near the fireplace”. Thus begins the report of the capture of Eudósia. The house was measured inside and out and nothing unusual was found.

In the document, it is said that the owners of the house were taken under arrest to the river, but nothing else is said about the interrogation methods. Delfina has no doubts: “They grabbed her and took her to the river, they made a thousand miseries of her, but she did not discover them.

The ill-treatment continued at home. Eudósia and her parents were hiding under the kitchen and when they realised that their benefactors were being tortured, they decided to act. “Eudósia was the first to come out and said: ‘here we are at your disposal, leave the woman she is not at fault at all'”.

Let’s go back to the capture report which, as always, omits the methods used to obtain the information: “I made them remove from a corner of the fireplace enormous bundles of heather and a very heavy stool, all set on a flagstone floor.

“When I asked for an iron or a hammer to see if I could get the hollow from one of these, I was surprised by the very slow lifting of one of these, and by voices pleading for clemency:

“There they were, as if buried in a tomb, covered with straw, Agustín Lorenzo Puga, Basilisa Diz and Eudózia Lorenzo Diz who, with great difficulty, came out, through a relatively small hole, leaving traces of great suffering on their faces.”

Manuel José Domingues witnessed the capture as a child, and his testimony is recounted in the article Memories of the Civil War in the north of Portugal, by Sérgio Domingues: “When the guard wanted to arrest her, she asked him earnestly to move away. I was small and I was inside the house and she and the guard were talking at the door. She, with her graceful manner, said to him: ‘Listen to me, please. Kill me but don’t arrest me. I forgive you for my death, it will be no crime’.”

“The policeman was enchanted by her”

Delfina Fernandes and Manuel José Domingues agree on one thing: the policeman “charmed Eudósia”, right at the moment of capture or during the walk to Melgaço. The truth is that the young teacher and her parents escaped the normal fate of Spanish refugees in Portugal who, when caught, were handed over at the border to the Guardia Civil or fascist militias and many were shot.

Eudósia, Agustín and Basilisa stayed in Melgaço in custody, awaiting developments. “They had many friends here and there were many people asking for her. In Melgaço there was a communist – against Salazar and Franco – a well educated man, Ferreira da Silva, who took care of everything for her,” recalls Delfina.

The women waited in the hospital and the father was taken to prison, which today is the Solar do Alvarinho. The good news came from Lisbon. The French Consul had found out about the story and gave them the safe-conduct to go to Morocco, then a French colony, as long as each one brought two photographs.

On 18 August 1938, Eudósia and her family left for Casablanca on board the steamer “Jamaíque”.

Delfina and Eudósia met again many decades later. The Galician girl never forgot the people of Castro Laboreiro to whom she owed her life and the Castro girl always kept alive the memory of the young and beautiful teacher who taught her mathematics.

The Castro people welcomed her during the dark years of the Spanish Civil War and during Salazar’s dictatorship. In Castro Laboreiro, the Galician woman lived up to her name, from the Greek Eudoxia: the one who is well seen.

Eudósia Lorenzo died on the island of Reunion on 16th December 2004, aged 87.