In early 1939, when General Francisco Franco’s troops invaded Barcelona during the Spanish Civil War, Neus Català led 182 orphans in her charge out of the mayhem and across the snow-covered Pyrenees to safety in France.

It was just one episode in a lifetime of anti-fascist resistance that Ms. Català, who died on April 13 at 103, would demonstrate.

She then fought with the French Resistance against the Nazis but was captured by the Germans and deported to the Ravensbrück women’s concentration camp in northern Germany.

From Ravensbrück, Ms. Català was transferred to the Flossenbürg camp, where she was part of a forced labor group that quarried granite and sabotaged bullets and bombs while working in a munitions factory.