Sofia Ferreira

She was born in Alhandra on 1 May 1922, the daughter of farm labourers.² At ten she was already working in the floodplain fields (lezírias) of the Ribatejo, and she went to Lisbon early on as a domestic servant. Her sisters, Georgette and Mercedes, were also communist activists.³ She joined the PCP in 1945 and went underground in 1946, in a clandestine printing works in Figueira da Foz.²³

Under the name “Elvira”, she lived in a clandestine house in Luso with Álvaro Cunhal, who was “Manuel”, and Militão Ribeiro. In the early hours of 25 March 1949, six PIDE agents and members of the GNR arrested the three of them.¹⁴ Sofia was held for three years.¹ In 1957 she was elected to the Central Committee, and in 1959 she was arrested and tortured again.² She was held in Caxias Fort, where she led the PCP cell with Maria Alda Nogueira.⁷ In all, she spent more than thirteen years in the dictatorship’s prisons.²

After some time in the Soviet Union, she returned to the underground struggle in 1969.² In a testimony published in 1975 in Mulheres Portuguesas na Resistência (Portuguese Women in the Resistance), she held the PIDE doctor José Godinho Gama Barata responsible for the death of Albina Fernandes: the doctor gave her “no assistance at all”, despite having himself been an “eyewitness” to her attacks in prison.⁵ She died in 2010, aged 87.²