“A flight over Barcelona: this was her reward for doing well at school. She sat behind the pilot and the Italian military seaplane rose up over the water of the port. She was thirteen and the flight summed up the struggle between destiny and the will that had insistently intruded upon the life of Roser Ferran Gayet. »
She was born in Barcelona in 1915 as Europe was consumed by the Great War. She grew up in Mussolini’s Italy, witnessing the first fascist salutes. Without meaning to, she took control of a wartime industry while Barcelona was being bombarded. After her time at Pirelli, nothing would be the same again.
She survived as a refugee at the concentration camp in Argelès-sur-Mer and worked with the French Resistance during the Second World War. She witnessed the end of Francoism from the balcony of the Hotel Oriente in Madrid, where, on the 3rdof October 2015, she turned one hundred.
The extraordinary story of the girl who ended up running a wartime industry quite by chance.
Buffeted by fate but determined to keep moving forward, her life has been as long as it is extraordinary, living testimony to European history in the 20th Century.
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