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Carmen Arrojo Maroto was born in Madrid on August 4th, 1918

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Born and raised in Madrid, her father didn't send her to school as a means to prevent her from being persuaded by the Catholic Church. Her father, who was the #4 ranking member in Federacion Socialista Madrilena, would help set the stage for Carmen's life of resistance.

"Yeah I grew up in this neighborhood and I didn't go to school. I didn't go to school because my father didn't want us taught religious education."

"My father was number 4 of the
Federación Socialista Madrileña."

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At 14, she was able to join the Juventudes Socialistas thanks to her father's influence among socialists in Madrid. She would work on a Leftist magazine as her first job within the group. This was her introduction to the socialist party, and she would remain with this group for her entire life.

"And I asked my father, I wanted to join the Juventudes Socialistas but you had to be 16 to join the Juventudes Socialistas. And then my father, who, by the way, pulled strings everywhere, well, he got me Draft admitted when I was just 14 years old. And then I already started working in the Juventudes Socialistas."

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Black Biennium was a result of the October Revolution of 1934. Because of this, many leftists were arrested, and the youth movements (like the one Carmen was a part of) were dissolved. However, they began meeting in secret.

"And then during the Black Biennium, as they did with the uprising of October, well, all the leftists went to jail. And they dissolved the youth movements and we were banned from meeting. But we kept meeting secretly."

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Del Rollo, Calle del Rollo, Madrid, Spain

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Del Rollo, Calle del Rollo, Madrid, Spain

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Del Rollo, Calle del Rollo, Madrid, Spain

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This is the location where Carmen had her first introduction to war. She had gone to the Círculo Socialista on Del Rollo Street and has she climbed the stairs she saw two men dragging another down the stairs to take him to be killed. She recalls

"Two people brought down an individual with guns aimed at him, and the guy was wearing a wig, which was crooked and saying, “For your mother let me fix my wig.” They said, “You such and such. You’re not going to need the wig anymore. What do you care?” Turns out this guy was a gunman from José Antonio Primo de Rivera who’d been shooting at people from a roof and had killed 7 people. Of course, he hoped that [unclear] I figured that his future was very dark. But to me that
feeling of seeing that person asking not to be killed and the others determined to kill
him. It was a very horrible thing. It was my baptism into savagery.

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Her first real involvement in the Civil War. She helped organize and run soup kitchens for those going to the front and those who were escaping the violence and starving.

"Then the first thing I did with another lady who live in La Paloma was very authentic."

"And then we installed some soup kitchens
there for those who went to the front, because for the front it was in Carabanchel, in Universitaria, and Cuartel de la Montaña and these people, and there were many people who came from the villages running away from what they thought and they had nowhere to eat or anything."

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Carmen went to San Isidro to work as a field nurse. She worked in a field hospital that was located in the San Isidro cemetery.

And, by the way, we had to be in the house of the tombstone maker who made the slabs for the cemetery and some said, “Oh, look, sleep on the slabs” I said, “My children, we better sleep on top of them, so that the slabs are not on top of us”

"Having arrived there with the first wounded, I saw an eye taken out that made a very bad impression on me. Things like that. In general, it was the people who arrived with bullet wounds, but we were in the second line of fire that took
us to the mortars and the first night we arrived, because we arrived at night I remember. They told us to bend down, and they crawled."

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Carmen worked at a printing house on Nuncio Street for a time during the war. However, she recalls when it was bombed and the aftermath of that.

"and one evening the fascist aviation
came to bomb the exit of the schools. Well, they bombed our printing house. And the next day, when I went to see the printing house, there were the brains of some of those
who were living in the printing house. It was horrible. It was horrible."

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La Taberna Errante, Carrera de San Francisco, Madrid, Spain

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La Taberna Errante, Carrera de San Francisco, Madrid, Spain

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La Taberna Errante, Carrera de San Francisco, Madrid, Spain

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Here Carmen organized a daycare center for the children whose parents were casualties of the war, but unfortunately, the children had to be relocated as the Republican Army made its advances.

"I also organized a daycare center. I
organized the nursery because of course, there were children whose parents had disappeared due to the bombers and with these things, because the parents had died
and all those children without any help. So, I organized a nursery here at the Carrera de San Francisco and had the kids there. But when the thing came, they got closer and
closer so that this turned into a war zone..."

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She spends some time in the war away from Madrid, in Alicante, working as an administrative assistant in a hospital.

"I placed myself as an administrative assistant in a hospital and in that hospital there is a hospital in transit. I placed myself and I was there for a month working because then
they told this girl that her father was dying, and we had to organize to come to Madrid. It cost us a horrible job because it was a historic trip too."

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Traveling back to Madrid, Carmen worked as the secretary of the secretariat of students until the end of the war.

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Carmen was captured here at the end of the war with her boyfriend. They had the opportunity to escape the country without certain capture, but her boyfriend chose to stay and fight as a way to fulfill his duty to his cause, and Carmen chose to stay with him. Here they witnessed terrible things. The situation was so hopeless that a man slit his own throat with a razor in front of his daughters, and another threw himself off a cliff into the ocean. All of this just so they wouldn't have to face the horrors of capture.

"He was with his two little daughters, one who was not yet 15 years old and a younger one, and he did it right in front of the two children. Then, I went to throw my gun into the sea because they said we had to hand them over when
all the chaos was over. I already said that I wasn’t turning it in, and my boyfriend came,
Draft and I threw it in the sea. And when we were going back, a man came running, and running he threw himself into the sea. And he drowned because we were in a part where the warships were going and there was a tremendous deep depth of water. We couldn’t do anything for him there. He drowned himself in front of everyone."

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After her capture, Carmen was taken to the Los Almendros concentration camp for a few days before being moved to a  theater in Alicante, and then on to prison after that where they were starved, and if any Spanish guard recognized a prisoner, they were executed immediately.

"To the movie theater. Some, not all, because we were so many. I, of course, went to the movie theater. First, we were taken to Los Almendros concentration camp."

"We were in the prison for eight days, which was horrible
because they would come at night with a flashlight, and they would look at us this way. And if there was a familiar face, they’d take you out and walk you to the beach."

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From this prison, she was sent back to a concentration camp in Alicante. She spent time in this camp until she was sent on her way after appearing in court. She was sent on her way because the camps were so overcrowded, and so many people were being sentenced, they had to let some people out. Carmen still being very young, wore a disguise so as to not be recognized, and was sent on her way by a judge who thought she was just a random girl who got swept up in a mess she had nothing to do with.

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This was Carmen's first residence after being released from prison. Though she had been let go, she was still in danger because she had no sort of identification papers, (she had torn them up before her capture in Alicante) had she been caught without them, she would surely be arrested and most likely executed.

“If the police come we will warn you and you can go to the messiest room because no one else lives here but us. You go into one of those rooms and that’s that.” And when someone appeared [sound of haste], I would change residences and go to the other side.”

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After spending time in Madrid, Carmen moves to Galicia and stays at a boarding house where she learns to cook, sew, and teach because she was the caretaker of the children of the woman that ran the boarding house.

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Carmen left Galicia and moved to Lugo to cook for and live with a couple who owned a bank. While she was there she became a great cook. However, she had to leave when the man of the house found out about her not having papers and was preparing to have her arrested.

"The man was a scoundrel. Do you understand? I was lucky to
stumble upon people who were not evil. "

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After leaving Lugo, she went to Cerezales where she worked on a farm. She raised pigs, and cows, cut grass, and did typical farm labor for someone living in a small village at the time.

"So, then I head out Cerezal, wonderful in
Cerezal. There I worked taking cows out for walks, cutting grass, raising pigs with bottles. All those things that are done in the villages. Soaking up all that stuff. I was
there until 1943.

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Carmen spends the next couple of decades of her life bouncing around Spain teaching, nursing, and doing whatever else she needed to do to survive. During this time period, she was never in one place long enough for her to mention.

"In other words, from 1939 to 1948 I was out and about. And later I came home, here. Then at home I devoted myself to teaching."

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On September 14th, 1968 Carmen became a licensed teacher and moved to Paris, France to begin her new life as an educator.