Albina Fernandes

Also known as Albina Pato, she used the pseudonym “Rosália”. She was born in Soissons, in France, on 5 January 1928, and fought in the French Resistance.¹ An underground PCP activist, she was arrested by the PIDE on 15 December 1961, on the same day as her partner, Octávio Pato, but in different places.¹²

With no one to entrust them to, she took her children with her to Caxias: Isabel, aged six, and Rui, aged two. She laid them down on the only divan and, as she herself told Maria Rodrigues Pato, the children’s paternal grandmother, she “rested on her knees on the floor, with her hands gripping their wrists, so that they would not take them from her”. The testimony is in the book A Força Ignorada das Companheiras (The Unacknowledged Strength of the Women Companions), by Gina de Freitas (1975). The PIDE threatened to hand them over to an institution, and only on 10 January 1962 did it let her entrust them to their grandparents.¹

Tried on 17 November 1962, she was sentenced to three years’ major imprisonment and an extendable security measure, and ended up spending six years and seven months in Caxias. In November 1966, a petition signed by many citizens called for her release, but she was only granted parole on 9 July 1968.¹

Her nervous system badly weakened by the years in prison, she took her own life on 2 October 1970. The National Commission for Aid to Political Prisoners, in a telegram signed by, among other women, Cecília Areosa Feio, Maria Eugénia Varela Gomes and Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, held the Government directly responsible for the “tragic event”. The funeral was a demonstration of grief and of protest against the regime.¹