El metge Josep Torrubia Zea. Lliurepensador, maçó i socialista

Under the appearance of a cordial doctor, a man who had been, first, a jeweler’s apprentice in Marseilles was hiding and, later, a teacher of a rationalist school in Gràcia. Educated in Barcelona in a family of Andalusian origin, in a free-thinking environment and republican convictions, he studied medicine at the age of forty, married and already father of two children. Accepted by Freemasonry, he belonged to the “Democracy” lodge of Barcelona, while also working in socialist formations. From 1927 he worked as a doctor at Masnou, where he became a doctor loved by the people and municipal authorities. His firm commitment to all initiatives of social change during the years of the Republic forced him into exile in 1939 with his family and a large group of Masnovins. In France, they sought refuge in the countryside, all together, as farmers, until the occupation of the Nazis led them to commit again to the anti-fascist struggle, now in the ranks of the Resistance. After the liberation, Josep Torrubia, "commandant-médecin" of the French Forces of the Intérieur, founded a hospital in Toulouse to attend, first, the wounded of the Spanish Reconquest operation and, a little later, the Spanish refugees. It was the famous Warsaw Hospital, which he led until August 1946, when he had to resign due to internal and external tensions; then, he collaborated with the Spanish Republican Red Cross. A friend of Joan Comorera, the conflicts associated with the Cold War distanced him from the PSUC, without this meaning the renunciation of the ideals of justice and freedom that had encouraged him since his youth.

Rosa Toran. PhD in History and professor in several high schools. In 1988 he obtained the Agustí Duran i Sanpere Study Stock Exchange in the City of Barcelona Awards, and in 2021 he was awarded the I Bones Lletres Prize for Humanistic Essay for the work Hilda Agostini. The weapons of the reason of a republican, Protestant and Mason teacher, and the work carried out together with Celia Cañellas on the school policy of the Barcelona City Council and its political staff, and the women in the consistories during the Second Republic and in the rear during the war. Head of archives and publications of the Amical de Mauthausen and other fields, exhibition curator and author of books and articles on the republican deportation to the Nazi camps, in 2015 she was awarded the Bages Prize for Culture.

Àlvar Martínez-Vidal. Professor of the history of medicine and science, currently linked to the López Piñero Interuniversity Institute-University of Valencia and the Mila i Fontanals Institution for Research in Humanities (CSIC, Barcelona), he is the author of several studies on the humanitarian work carried out in France, in exile, by Spanish Republican doctors and, in particular, by Catalans. Recently, she has coordinated the dossier “La ayuda médica humanitaria a los refugiados españoles en Francia (1939-1950)” (The humanitarian medical aid to Spanish refugees in France (1939-1950) published by the magazine Dynamis (2020), which deals with transnational medical mobilization in the face of the painful health situation, of thousands of refugees, overwhelmed as a result of the Retirada and the exod in France in 1939.