Maria Helena Martins dos Santos Pato Noales Rodrigues
Repressionteacherstudent leader (1962 crisis)PCP activistpolitical prisonerleader of the Não Apaguem a Memória (Do Not Erase Memory) movement
Born
19 April 1939, Mamarrosa (Aveiro)
A student leader in the 1962 academic crisis, she was arrested in 1967 and suffered long isolation, beatings and sleep torture in Caxias. She later led the Não Apaguem a Memória (Do Not Erase Memory) movement.
She was born on 19 April 1939 in Mamarrosa, in the district of Aveiro; her father had been under surveillance by the political police and her grandfather had been imprisoned. In 1956 she entered the Faculty of Sciences and joined the MUD Juvenil (Youth Movement of Democratic Unity). As a student leader, she took part in the 1962 academic crisis and was detained for 48 hours.1
After May Day 1962, her husband, Alfredo Noales, left for Paris, and she joined him shortly afterwards. Ill with a fatal lymphoma, Noales asked the PIDE for permission to come back to Portugal to die. On arrival, in November 1965, he was taken straight to the PIDE headquarters, which he left only hours later; he died a month afterwards.1
Increasingly active in the PCP and in the Commission for Aid to Political Prisoners, she was arrested in June 1967 and taken to Caxias. Suspected of links to the armed struggle, she suffered long isolation, beatings and sleep torture, until she was released in November that year. She later took part in founding the Democratic Women’s Movement.1
After 25 April she was on the founding committee of the teachers’ union and, later, led the Não Apaguem a Memória movement.1 On 25 April 2010 she spoke, as a former political prisoner, at the unveiling of the plaque marking the former PIDE/DGS headquarters on Rua António Maria Cardoso.2
From the archives
A documentary edited by Sofia Gomes for the exhibition “Women and Resistance – New Portuguese Letters and other struggles” (“Mulheres e Resistência – Novas Cartas Portuguesas e outras lutas”), with excerpts from the testimonies the Aljube Museum has been recording since 2015: sixteen women talk about resistance to the dictatorship and the struggle for women’s rights. This version has Portuguese Sign Language (LGP) interpretation; the version without LGP is on the same channel (XmUbNbnHgKg, 2022).
Original page Licença padrão do YouTube — embed permitido pelo canal oficial do Museu do Aljube
Museu do Aljube Resistência e Liberdade, on YouTube. The player only connects to that site when you press “Watch”.
In a testimony recorded by the Aljube Museum on 30 September 2015, Helena Pato tells of her arrest by the PIDE, the interrogations, torture and isolation in Caxias. The museum’s keywords also point to women, solidarity and aid to political prisoners.
Original page Licença padrão do YouTube — embed permitido pelo canal oficial do Museu do Aljube
Museu do Aljube Resistência e Liberdade, on YouTube. The player only connects to that site when you press “Watch”.
A communist activist arrested in 1965 and in 1968, she suffered at the PIDE headquarters some of the cruellest and most humiliating torture methods used on a woman, and never talked. Decades later, she spoke about it publicly to denounce the political police.
A law student and MRPP activist, she was arrested by the PIDE on 22 October 1973, interrogated at the headquarters on Rua António Maria Cardoso and tortured in Caxias. By then a public prosecutor, she went back to the door of the building in 2005 to ask for it to be preserved.
A welder from Póvoa de Santa Iria, arrested after the strikes against the 1958 electoral fraud, he died falling from the third floor of the PIDE headquarters on 31 July that year. The wife of the Brazilian ambassador saw the fall and reported it to Cardinal Cerejeira.
A chemical engineer and underground PCP activist, she was in charge of the Eastern Zone of the Lisbon Local Committee, “the most important working-class zone of the capital”. Arrested by the PIDE in 1957, she was, in Caxias, one of the authors of the letters of the Caxias Manifesto.
A communist activist arrested in 1961 with her two small children, whom she kept with her in Caxias. She spent six years and seven months in prison and took her own life in 1970, her nervous system weakened by the years in jail.
A poet from São Tomé whose Lisbon home, on Rua Actor Vale, housed the Centre for African Studies from 1951. Arrested in 1965 and imprisoned in Caxias, she later wrote the words of the anthem of São Tomé and Príncipe.
Notes on the sources1
The year the Democratic Women’s Movement was founded: 1969 (Helena Pato’s biography at the Aljube Museum) or 1968 (Isabel do Carmo’s biography at the same museum).
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