Eduard Pons Prades was born in 1920. Son of
labor unionist parents from L’Horta Nord,
Valencia. Pons worked in the wood industry, which was
collectivised at the outset of the
Spanish Revolution of 1936. At the age of 16, he volunteered to fight in the
Spanish Civil War. He fought in the
siege of Madrid and the
battle of the Ebro, and in 1938, he was wounded during the
Catalonia Offensive. In early 1939, as the
Nationalists advanced through Catalonia, Pons put together a team to evacuate 20,000 wounded people from Spain. When he arrived in France and told the authorities that the Nationalists had murdered wounded Republicans in their hospital beds, he was met with disbelief. In the
French concentration camps where Spanish refugees were interned, Pons reported that disease spread rapidly, with many internees suffering from
dysentery,
pneumonia,
scabies or
mental disorders. Following the
battle of France, Pons joined the
French resistance and fought against the
Vichy regime in
Aude. While fighting in the resistance, in 1942, he met the Catalan photographer
Agustí Centelles in
Carcassonne. After the
Allied victory in
World War II, Pons clandestinely returned to
Francoist Spain. He was detained there in January 1946, but he managed to escape and fled back to France. He lived in France until 1964, when he decided to return to Spain. Pons then settled down and became a historian, writing about the recent history of Spain. He authored numerous history books and a novel, and contributed to several publications. After the
Spanish transition to democracy, in 1976, Pons and Centelles went back to Carcassone and recovered an archive of photographs Centelles had taken during the civil war. Together, they organised the material into a book, which they published in 1979. In the book, Pons celebrated the
anarchist militias that defeated the
military coup in
Barcelona, placing Catalan workers at the forefront of his depiction of the war and revolution. In August 1981, while Pons was working as a
journalist for
Diario de Barcelona, he was interviewed by
Martha A. Ackelsberg about his experiences during the Revolution. On 1982, Pons published the book, El mensaje de otro mundo, The message of anaother world, when he describes an encounter with seven extraterrestrial beings in 1962. Eduard Pons Prades died on the morning of 28 May 2007, in Barcelona's
Hospital de Sant Pau. ==Selected works==