Ángeles Flórez Peón, memory keeper of Spanish Civil War, dies at 105 (2024)

The death was announced by the historical association in Gijón, a northern seaside town where she lived since 2003 after more than a half-century in France. No specific cause was noted.

Over the past decades, Ms. Flórez wrote two memoirs and was sought out by scholars and historians. Quick-witted, wry and possessing a prodigious memory, she engrossed audiences with vivid and heartbreaking recollections of the nearly three-year civil war (1936-1939) that claimed at least 200,000 lives and left the country under the iron-grip regime of Franco, who ruled until his death in 1975.

Ms. Flórez also represented a bridge to the celebrated cadre of women who joined anti-Franco units as fighters or in support roles — and who sometimes became international symbols of the battles in newsreels, propaganda leaflets and reports from journalists that included the writer Ernest Hemingway. “The image of women fighting mobilized the men,” Spanish historian Beatriz de las Heras Herrero wrote.

“I was always a rebel,” said Ms. Flórez in a 2016 interview with the Spanish newspaper El País.

When she was 15 — while learning the seamstress trade — state security forces unleashed a brutal crackdown against a Socialist-led strike protesting a political deal to allow a conservative faction into a government coalition. Her brother Antonio was among about two dozen people killed in the northern village of Carbayín in October 1934.

Amid her grief and anger, Ms. Flórez joined the youth wing of Spain’s Socialist Party. The political rifts in the country continued to deepen. The military, under the sway of right-wing commanders, grew increasingly hostile to any perceived left-leaning leadership.

On July 18, 1936, Ms. Flórez was preparing for opening night of the political play “¡Arriba los pobres del mundo!” (“Poor people of the world, rise up!”) in which she played a character, Maricuela. Just then, word arrived that military units loyal to Franco and his allies had launched a coup.

The anti-Franco factions gathered quickly in the village of Pola de Siero, where the play was to be staged. Volunteers were requested. Ms. Flórez and two other women stepped forward along with dozens of men. “We marched off to the trenches,” she recounted.

She took a nom de guerre after her role in the play, Maricuela, which was how she was widely known in Spain for the rest of her life. “I never picked up a rifle,” she told the Spanish newspaper El Diario in 2016. “I was in charge of making food and taking it to the trenches among the bullets and bombs.” She described how she sometimes needed to crawl under gunfire to reach the front-line positions.

She joined a battalion known as Los Mártires de Carbayín, or the Martyrs of Carbayín, after the bloody events that claimed the life of her brother and others. One day, she left the front lines to visit her family. A friend took her place and was mortally wounded by shrapnel from a bomb dropped on the guerrilla position.

“At first there was a lot of hope because we believed that the European democracies were going to side with the republic,” Ms. Flórez recalled, “but over time came disillusionment. We were alone, but we had to continue.”

She later helped in a field hospital in Gijón. The pro-Franco Nationalist forces steadily made gains across the region of Asturias, and the guerrilla lines finally collapsed. Ms. Flórez was captured in October 1937 and, early the next year, sentenced to 15 years by a martial law council. The proceedings, she said, lasted less than 15 minutes.

She spent the next three years in prison, then was granted a supervised release in August 1941. She found jobs at a bar and a pharmacy, while she and her husband, Graciano Rozada Vallina, worked in underground groups opposing the Franco regime. “On our wedding day I told him, ‘Don’t expect me to be a piece of furniture at home,’” she recalled.

Rozada fled to France in 1947 with authorities closing in. Ms. Flórez and their young daughter tried to lay low until she could make her move to leave. That came just before Easter in 1948.

Anti-government groups arranged for a boat to wait at a port on the Bay of Biscay. On the way to the vessel, Ms. Flórez and the girl were told to pretend they were on a sightseeing day excursion if stopped. No luggage was allowed, as baggage might raise suspicions. “What I did was put on three dresses, a coat and some high heels,” she recalled.

They left on the bottom of the boat covered by an oilcloth. Hours later, they crossed into French waters.

From France, the couple led Spanish political resistance groups in exile until the transition to democracy began after Franco’s death in 1975. Generations later, Ms. Flórez became a caretaker of stories that she feared were in danger of being lost — especially the role of women in the Spanish Civil War.

“The men fought. They were brave, and they were recognized,” she said in a 2022 interview with the Spanish news site El Cuaderno. “Okay, but the stories of many women were hidden and that is unfair, very unfair. Besides, what are we without memory?”

Ángeles Flórez Peón was born in Blimea, a mountain village in northern Spain, on Nov. 17, 1918. Her father was involved in leftist political and labor groups; her mother was a midwife.

Ms. Flórez left school at 9 to help bring in some money. Her first job was scrubbing floors. When the civil war broke out, she said she never appreciated the risks — even though she had often visited the burial site of her brother after the 1934 bloodshed.

“I was very young and lived the war like it was natural, probably due to ignorance, and the truth is we didn’t think they would really kill us,” she told the Spanish news agency EFE in 2016.

Just once during her time in France did she risk coming back to Spain. In 1960, seeking to see her family, she was arrested at the border but was eventually allowed to make the journey and return to France.

After her husband died in 2003, she resettled in Gijón. Her published works included two books, a 2009 memoir “Las sorpresas de Maricuela,” or “Maricuela’s Surprises,” and “Memorias de Ángeles Flórez Peón ‘Maricuela’” (2017), which includes accounts from the 1934 strike and the civil war.

Survivors include a son, José Antonio Rozada. “Those who thought she was immortal were wrong,” he said at her funeral. “She was just indestructible.”