On This Day She: Putting Women Back into History One Day at a Time by Jo Bell & TANIA HERSHMAN & AILSA HOLLAND

Author:Jo Bell & TANIA HERSHMAN & AILSA HOLLAND
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2022-08-13T00:00:00+00:00

2 JULY Fanny Schoonheyt

(1912–1961)

In July 1936, Fanny Schoonheyt began fighting against the fascists in the Spanish Civil War, the only Dutch woman to take up arms for the Republican cause. She became famous for her technical knowledge and bravery and was called la reina de la ametralladora – “the queen of the machine gun” – by Barcelona newspapers.

In 1934, Schoonheyt had left the Netherlands because it was “dusty, musty, flat and boring.” A year later, she stood out at Communist Youth Meetings in Spain: tall, blonde and smoking a cigarette. In 1936, she worked as a press agent for the planned People’s Olympiad, which was canceled because of Franco’s coup. Schoonheyt fought in the defense of Barcelona against Franco and later became an officer in the Spanish Republican Army.

In 1937, all of the 600–800 Dutch citizens who fought for the Republicans were declared stateless by their government; many ended up in concentration camps. Schoonheyt, helped by the Emigration Service for Spanish Republicans, moved to the Dominican Republic, where the dictator Trujillo was welcoming white European immigrants.

For the rest of her life, Schoonheyt spoke little of her radical youth. It was her biographer, Yvonne Scholten, who first informed Schoonheyt’s daughter of her mother’s actions in Spain: “When I told her that her mother had been famous as ‘queen of the machine gun’ and the bravest girl of Barcelona, she was flabbergasted.”

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