camps, Amat-Piniella enlisted in a Company of Foreign Workers (French: Compagnie de travailleurs étrangers) in charge of reinforcing the French Maginot line along the Franco-German border. Following the German invasion of France in May 1940, Amat-Piniella and his companions fled towards the east and attempted to enter Switzerland on two occasions. However, they were expelled from the country and taken prisoner by the German forces. Initially, Amat-Piniella was imprisoned in the Bougenel (Belfort) barracks and then Fort Hatry, a camp for prisoners of war. Mauthausen However, the Republican prisoners were deemed to be stateless and Franco's minister and brother-in-law, Ramón Serrano-Suñer, made a deal with the Nazis whereby all Republican prisoners of war should be transferred to forced labour camps. Amat-Piniella and his fellow prisoners were moved to the Mauthausen concentration camp in January, 1941. In an interview in 1973, Amat-Piniella described his first contact in the camp with other Spanish prisoners who had been in the camp for a few months: “…they were really skeletons. They looked pitiful. They said to us ‘this is what you’ll be like in a while’. They were completely undernourished, with their faces full of scabs and bruises from blows. All of them limped … They were poorly clothed, in rags, and (this) in very cold weather”.Amat-Piniella was initially sent to work in the infamous quarry, where prisoners were literally worked to death. ‘Extermination through work” (Vernichtung durch Arbeit) entailed carrying heavy blocks of stone and climbing the 186 steps of the “stairs of Death”. He was saved by his friend Josep Cabrero Arnal, who had gained a relatively privileged position in return for producing pornographic drawings for a Nazi officer in the camp, and was able to procure employment for Amat-Piniella in the Effectenkammer, the camp’s clothing warehouse. However, he was to be once again destined to the quarry, where he worked for several months in extremely harsh conditions. Fortunately, as a result of the intervention of some of his contacts, he was transferred to external Kommandos working for Austrian companies and set up by the Valencian anarchist César Orquín Serra, who had managed to convince the SS that the Spanish prisoners would be more productive if they were treated less harshly. Amat-Piniella was freed by US troops on 6 May 1945 at Ebensee, a satellite camp of Mauthausen, the day after the liberation of the main camp. Andorra After passing through Paris,