The Spanish pages are a provincial prison, a Francoist concentration camp and a university residence, running between 1937 and 1969. Miranda de Ebro, beside the Bayas river, was the central holding place for foreigners who crossed into Spain during the Second World War, and Pamplona's provincial prison was a stage on the road to it.12
Ukrainians reached them over the Pyrenees. One original account traces a crossing in October 1943, several weeks in Pamplona and transfer by train to Miranda de Ebro on New Year's Day 1944. A different route opened afterwards: from 1946 Colegio Santiago Apóstol in Madrid, founded by Spanish Catholic bodies to assist students from countries under communist rule, gave displaced Ukrainians accommodation and support while they resumed interrupted studies, and its residents built a choir, a student organisation and a Ukrainian parish in Spain.345
The Spanish figures are narrow ones. The military archive's index to the Miranda admission files runs to about 15,600 entries, eighteen of them recorded as Ucrania, which is a count of files and of the nationality a clerk wrote down rather than of the people who passed through.67
A Madrid university residence gave displaced Ukrainian students a route from wartime captivity to higher education. Its residents built a choir, a student organisation and a Ukrainian parish in Spain while preparing for professional lives there or overseas.
A Francoist concentration camp beside the Bayas river became the central holding place for foreigners who crossed into Spain during the Second World War. Ukrainian testimony and the army’s own index of admission files both record Ukrainians among them, arriving from Pamplona prison on New Year’s Day 1944.
For Ukrainians escaping across the Pyrenees, reaching Spain did not immediately mean freedom. An original account traces several weeks in Pamplona’s provincial prison and transfer by train to Miranda de Ebro on New Year’s Day 1944, in a movement of foreigners that the military archive’s own index describes.