Spanish Civil War heroine exiled for 55 years dies aged 105 (2024)

ÁNGELES FLÓREZ PEÓN: 1918 - 2024

Ángeles Flórez Peón, who has died aged 105, was thought to be the last militia woman of the Spanish Civil War; known as Maricuela, she spent four years in prison and 55 years in exile, becoming a symbol of the Spanish women who fought against fascism.

Her story began when her eldest brother, Antonio, was among the 24 “martyrs of Carbayín” murdered in Asturias by government troops during the general strike of October 1934. “They killed them with bayonets,” she said. “When they found my brother’s body, his jaw was missing.” The atrocity inspired her to join the Socialist Youth.

When civil war broke out in July 1936, Ángeles Flórez Peón was playing the protagonist Maricuela in Jacinto Sanchez’s play Arriba los Pobres del Mundo (Up with the Poor of the World) and her character’s name stuck. She enlisted in the militia, recalling that men and women were treated equally.

“We moved between shootings and bombs and slept with our clothes on so we could run when necessary. I remember that one of the things I enjoyed most when I came home on leave was sleeping in a bed with sheets,” she said. While she did not bear arms, she was “never afraid of General Franco’s bullets”.

To her regret, women were withdrawn from the front and she was instead deployed to a field hospital as a nurse. After the fall of Asturias in October 1937 she was arrested at home during dinner: “They took my sister and me… we were not even 20. They put us on the truck and they took an accordion that had belonged to my brother Antonio and they played it.”

During a 15-minute court hearing Ángeles Flórez Peón was accused of killing two soldiers. “They were lies. What was true is that I belonged to the Unified Socialist Youth and that I went to the front as a volunteer,” she said. Jailed for 15 years, later reduced to nine, she was guarded by nuns at Saturrarán women’s prison.

From her cell she could hear fellow prisoners being taken out to be shot. “What truly keeps me alive and active is that desire to remember all those women who were tortured, murdered without trial and erased from history,” she later said. In 1939 her boyfriend, Quintin Serrano, was shot and killed.

Released on parole in August 1941, Ángeles Flórez Peón joined her sister in the Basque town of Baracaldo, working in a pharmacy. In 1946 she married Graciano Rozada Vallina, a miner and union official who had been captured while serving with Republican forces.

Before their nuptials she told him: “If you want to get married, I’ll get married, but I’m not going to be another piece of furniture in the house… I believe in the equality of women and men.”

‘I never had a doll and I never went to school.’

Angeles Florez Peon

With disappearances and arrests continuing, her husband fled to France in August 1947. A few months later Ángeles Flórez Peón learnt that she was being sought as a terrorist and joined him, arriving by boat with her 10-month-old daughter in her arms. After presenting herself to the French authorities she was fined 1,000 francs for entering the country illegally.

She remained in exile for over half a century.

Ángeles Flórez Peón was born in Blimea, northern Spain, on November 17, 1918, the fourth of five children of José Flórez Llusia, a miner, and his wife Restituta Peón Iglesias, a midwife.

They separated when she was young and by the age of nine she was earning a living scrubbing floors. “I never had a doll and I never went to school,” she said, adding that she learnt to read in prison.

After Franco’s announcement in 1960 that those without blood on their hands could return to Spain, she decided to visit her mother but was detained at the border.

Eventually a kindly colonel allowed her to pass, though the experience deterred her from trying again until her husband’s death in 2003, when she returned to Gijón, in Asturias, to bury his ashes. She remained in Spain for the rest of her life, and is now hailed as a heroine there.

One of her first acts was to persuade socialists and communists to stop celebrating separately the annual tribute to the martyrs of Carbayín. Later she became honorary president of the Socialist Youth of Asturias.

Determined that the world should not forget the women of the Spanish civil war, she published two books: Memories of Ángeles Flórez (2009), relating the hardships she had known; and Maricuela’s Surprises (2013), describing the good things that had happened since her return. At 97 she opened a Facebook account, saying: “Without memory we are nothing.”

Ángeles Flórez Peón continued to stand up for her beliefs, taking part in Pride marches and joining protests to protect pension rights. She maintained that “the fascists are still there to undermine freedoms.”

She is survived by a daughter and a son.

The Telegraph, London

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