Women Absent from Collective Memory: The Mundet Campus Concentration Camp

The project “Women Absent from Collective Memory: The Mundet Campus Concentration Camp” is a project co-funded by the Memorial Democràtic and aims to recover and make visible a forgotten dimension of historical memory: the role of women connected to the Mundet concentration camp (1939–1940), who have traditionally been absent from historiographical and institutional narratives.

To this end, the research combines a critical review of historical sources (prisoners’ testimonies, bibliography, and archives) with an expansion of the available testimonial corpus. Through these materials, the project documents how women played essential roles in the survival of prisoners, including the provision of food and clothing, the transmission of information, the management of administrative guarantees, and the activation of support networks, in a context of extreme precariousness and repression.

A key aspect of the project is to approach the absence of female testimonies not as a limitation, but as a historical fact in itself, resulting from mechanisms of silencing, hierarchies of value, and forms of invisibilization that have shaped the construction of memory.

In addition, the project incorporates a strong pedagogical and social dimension through workshops with students at the Mundet Institute, where historical memory is addressed from a critical, situated, and gender perspective. These activities make it possible to reflect on the current lack of knowledge about the campus’s past and to activate processes of memory transmission in the very place where these events occurred.

Overall, the project proposes a more complex reading of the Mundet concentration camp, understanding repression not only from within the camp and through male experience, but also through the external networks, largely sustained by women, that made its functioning possible. In this way, it contributes to rethinking democratic memory from a gendered, territorial, and critical perspective, questioning what is remembered, what is forgotten, and why.