The reason for this silence was due to the fact that the Bishopric had a decisive participation in the battle, allowing that, under the direct orders of General Moscardó, they destroyed with large caliber artillery a third of the cathedral, only to force the surrender of the militiamen who had taken refuge inside, along with numerous civilians, women and children, who would have died under the rubble had it not been for the Austrian captain of the POUM, Mika Feldman, who organized the defense inside. For a journalist fresh from the United Nations, such relentless censorship was simply intolerable. Throughout the summer I gathered so much information that I was able to redo the battle diary and preliminaries. One of the many tragic anecdotes of this bloody battle shocked me deeply. A militia woman, nicknamed "Chata", was hit in the leg by shrapnel from a shell that shattered the altar of Santa Librada, where the relics of the saint, patron saint of the city, were supposed to be kept. . Some militiamen were able to escape the siege by scaling a wall in a poorly guarded area, but the "Chata" could not escape with her companions because of her serious wounds, and in the face of the inevitable surrender, she begged them to take her life so as not to fall into the hands of the rebels. Following the plot structure of "War and Peace" by Leo Tolstoy, one of my favorite writers, I wanted to place the event in a broader historical framework, and begin the action in 1931, the year of the proclamation of the Second Republic. So I had to rewrite her story, and the "Chata" becomes "Inés", an adolescent peasant girl from a small town near Sigüenza.
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