Biografia
Rosario Sánchez Mora, known as La Dinamitera, a militia woman during the Spanish Civil War, is famous for her work in the Republican front. A poem by Miguel Hernández, Rosario, Dinamitera, is proof of that.
Her father, Andrés Sánchez, had a workshop in Villarejo de Salvanés, and her mother died years before the war. She lived in her hometown until she turned 16. Then, she moved to Madrid in 1935, to live with some friends that took care of her after her mother's death. After she arrived in Madrid, she became a communist supporter and was working as a seamstress apprentice in the Unified Youth Socialist Cultural Circle when the Spanish Civil War broke out.
At the age of 17, she joined the Workers' Militia of the Fifth Regiment. On July 19, 1936, they left for Somosierra to stop the troops of General Mola. Rosario, as a young woman, did not have any military or artillery training. With the Republican militia women, among them Angelita Martínez, Consuelo Martín, Margarita Fuente and Lina Ódena, she participated at the front and was armed, far from the classic tasks of auxiliaries and nurses which women usually performed at war. After two weeks of fighting, in which they managed to contain the Francoist rebels, the war in the mountains ceased to be an open battle and became a battle of positions assigned to the dynamiting section, who made homemade hand bombs. There, handling dynamite, she lost a hand when a cartridge exploded, a thematic motif sung by Miguel Hernández in the poem Rosario, dinamitera. Seriously injured, she was operated on at the Red Cross war hospital in La Cabrera, where they managed to save her life.
After her release from hospital, she rejoined the division, in charge of the Republican General Staff switchboard in Ciudad Lineal, Madrid. It was there that Rosario met Miguel Hernández, Vicente Aleixandre and Antonio Aparicio, poets in the service of the Republican cause.
She participated in an attack to Brunete. The attack was so brutal that the town surrendered in just a couple of hours.
Rosario was chosen to become head of the post of her division, with the rank of sergeant, responsible for liaising with the General Staff in the capital and carrying the soldiers' correspondence. […]
On September 12, 1937, she married Francisco Burcet Lucini in a civil ceremony, a sergeant of the Regimental Muleteer Section, and got pregnant soon after. But on January 21, 1938, her husband left for Teruel. Meanwhile, Rosario started working in the office that Dolores Ibárruri, la Pasionaria, had set up at 5 Calle de Zurbano in Madrid to recruit women to fill the jobs that men left vacant when they went to the front. She worked there until the birth of her daughter Elena.
After the battle of the Ebro, which meant a disruption in the balance between Republican and Francoist troops, she stopped receiving correspondence from her husband, and Rosario did not know whether he had died, had managed to escape to France or was one of the thousands of men taken prisoners by the rebels in their advance.
Rosario tried to escape through Alicante with her father, leaving her daughter with his second wife. They were captured there, along 15,000 republicans who were hoping to go into exile aboard League of Nations ships that never reached port. They were taken to the Almendros camp, where Andrés Sánchez was executed. Rosario was released and transferred weeks later to Madrid, where she was arrested again by Falangist neighbours from her village, who imprisoned her in the Villarejo prison and then in the Getafe prison, while an emergency summary proceeding was opened against her. The prosecutor's request for death was commuted to 30 years' imprisonment for the crime of joining the rebellion.
She was transferred to the Ventas prison and was then moved to the prisons of Durango, Orúe and, finally, Saturrarán. On 28 March 1942, after suffering three years of imprisonment and all kinds of calamities, she was released thanks to the penitentiary benefits that Franco's regime was forced to decree periodically to empty its prisons. On the very same day she was released, Miguel Hernández died in an Alicante prison.
She was sentenced to exile 200 kilometres away from her village and settled in El Bierzo, with a fellow prisoner who had already been released, but the need to see her daughter made her return to Madrid despite the prohibition to do so. Her daughter was in the care of her mother-in-law and, from there, she began to search for her husband, who had been missing since the end of the war. From information provided by relatives she learned that her husband had rebuilt his life in Oviedo once the Franco regime had annulled all civil marriages during the Republic. Rosario remarried and had another daughter, but separated after two years. To make a living, she began selling contraband American tobacco in the Plaza de Cibeles. Later, she set up a tobacconist shop in Madrid, in Peña Prieta Street in the Vallecas neighbourhood.
Rosario died on April 17, 2008. The Republican flag was hoisted in her funeral, which many renowned politicians attended.
Heroínas, retrieved on 15/03/2022, http://www.heroinas.net/2019/04/rosario-sanchez-mora-la-dinamitera.html
