Antonio Téllez Solà

(Updating this post.)

Thanks to the anonymous reader who let me know that the Kate Sharpley Library has now published a fuller obituary of Antonio Téllez Solà here.

Antonio Téllez, one of the leading figures in the younger generation that fought alongside the Libertarian Movement, has died. He died in Perpignan, the French border town where he settled in his enforced exile in France, a town that knows so much about anarchists' attempts and schemes to overthrow Franco and put paid to his oppressive rule. Along with people like Octavio Alberola, Eduardo Pons Prades and others, Téllez belonged to the legendary breed of libertarian resisters who taught us practically and through their research that there were some folk who refused to surrender. It was largely through their quiet efforts and hush-hush attempts to undermine the dictatorship that we can today speak with some justification of the recovery of historical memory. They showed us the way. Antonio Téllez Solá was born in Tarragona in 1921 and was barely 16 when he immersed himself in the fight against fascism. Having enlisted in the Republican Army, he saw action on various fronts up until February 1939 when, with thousands of other anti-Francoist fighters, he was forced to cross the border into France. At the age of 18, with the vigour of a youth moulded in the image of the exemplary effort and selflessness he had witnessed on the battle-field, he endured the policy that the French authorities enforced on the vanquished, winding up in one of the many concentration camps set up to "welcome" a people who had held Nazi-fascism at bay for three years. On French soil, and with the advent of Allied forces imminent, he, like other leading members of the Libertarian Movement, like Cipriano Mera or Juanel, he joined the resistance and helped liberate the town of Rodez.

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Tags: fascism, Franco, anarchism