Miranda de Ebro

A camp beside the railway

Established following an order of 5 July 1937, the camp stood at La Hoyada beside the Bayas River and the Castejón–Bilbao railway. The municipal history gives a site area of approximately 42,000 square metres. Initial barracks used materials from a circus stored in the town. Its first prisoners came from the Spanish Civil War.

The municipal memory project records that the camp was built on land belonging to the Sulfatos Españoles company and that the requisitioned circus materials came from the Circo Corzana, stored in the town since the start of the Civil War. It puts the camp in operation from June 1937, the longest lived in Spain, and gives its first-phase capacity as about 1,500. The town had served as the northern army’s rear area since the Third Carlist War.

Changing prisoner groups

From summer 1940, foreign refugees and prisoners escaping the European war were interned at Miranda. Its populations overlapped: Republican prisoners and International Brigaders, people fleeing German occupation, and later German officers and soldiers escaping the collapse of the Third Reich. The camp’s changing population cannot be described as one national community.

The municipal account notes that the German soldiers and collaborators who arrived from 1944 were treated far better than earlier prisoners, some being allowed to walk in the town. Until February 1947 the depot remained a disciplinary unit of the army ministry, which controlled custody, internal regime and the rules for admission and release.

Inside the depot

Matilde Eiroa’s study of the camp, drawn from the military archive at Guadalajara, describes a rectangular enclosure behind a two-metre wall and barbed wire, with sentries every fifty metres. Two rows of fifteen barracks faced a main avenue that served as the meeting place of what she calls a tower of Babel. Each barrack had an earth floor and a boarded upper level that doubled its capacity to about 100 to 120 men. The usual maximum for the whole camp was 2,000 to 2,500, a figure far exceeded by the mass arrivals of the first quarter of 1943, when two further barracks were built.

Administration ran through a command office, an information and investigation office, a foreigners’ office, a kitchen service, stores and a canteen. The information office registered each new arrival, interrogated him, confiscated his currency, censored correspondence and sat in on visits. Internees were grouped by nationality, and each nationality had a group chief, usually a military man chosen by the internees or by their legation, who acted as the link with the camp direction, handled relief funds and carried disciplinary authority. The Ukrainian memoir records instead a last barrack set aside for the stateless, men with no legation to speak for them.

The routine ran from a bugle call and flag raising through breakfast, walking, sport, the fascist salute and Sunday mass. There was a canteen, barracks given over to gambling, and ways of earning money by portraits, haircuts or making bunks, alongside a well established black market in which some of the guards took part. The Ukrainian account adds a cinema with a stage and a piano, an international library, a reading room, an infirmary, a chapel, a large square and a swimming pool, and constant tunnelling under the wall, none of it successful. In January 1943 an eleven-day hunger strike led by the Poles won the release of internees over forty and under eighteen, the transfer of officers to Jaraba and improvements to the buildings.

The Ukrainian route into detention

A Ukrainian memoir published in 1971 describes two men crossing the Pyrenees in October 1943, then spending several weeks in Pamplona provincial prison. On 1 January 1944, they were taken by train to Miranda. The account recalls officials repeatedly recording them as Russian despite their Ukrainian identification. It also records further Ukrainian arrivals. These observations establish Ukrainian presence without providing a complete Ukrainian population count.

The memoir sets out how the misclassification began. At the frontier post at Orbaizeta the commander answered their attempt to say they were Ukrainians by correcting them to Russians, and only with difficulty did they get the words ruso blanco written on their provisional papers. The same argument was repeated at the identification formalities in the camp. A Spanish official in Pamplona, they recalled, showed off his knowledge that Ukraine had a great deal of wheat and then wrote Russian.

The Ukrainians in the stateless barrack

For several months the two men were the only Ukrainians in the camp. The memoir names the author, Antin Drahan, and the engineer Yurii Karmanin, who was living in Toronto when the account was published in 1971; a photograph on the same pages carries both names. In the spring three more arrived, remembered only by their first names as Mitka from the Kuban, Petia from Zhytomyr and Valentyn from Poltava. They had been conscripted into the Red Army, taken prisoner by the Germans, sent to a camp in France to look after army horses and had escaped from there without a guide. Two Georgians who had escaped German captivity in the same way followed later.

Their position was precarious in a way the western internees’ was not. As Soviet citizens they were the responsibility of the British legation, which represented Soviet interests in Spain, and its representative called from time to time to say that they would soon be taken home. Eiroa notes that the stateless, Jews and others with no diplomatic recognition, went unassisted for a long time until the International Red Cross supplied the papers that let them leave Spain. One of the three answered the camp clerk’s question about nationality by insisting that his nationality was sporting, having found that every other answer had gone badly for him.

Living behind the wire

Eyewitness accounts describe crowded sleeping quarters, vermin, inadequate food and the uncertainty of release. A French account explains how embassy assistance and Red Cross parcels could materially change a prisoner’s prospects. Inside the camp, there were kitchens, an infirmary, a chapel and spaces for reading or performance. The Ukrainian memoir recalls guards calling through the night and improvised attempts to keep bedbugs from climbing onto beds.

Closure and remembrance

The detention camp closed in early 1947. Its grounds subsequently served military training before industrial development removed most buildings. Surviving traces include water installations, a guard structure and parts of the perimeter; conservation work took place in 2006. The municipal interpretation centre presents documents, photographs, drawings and reconstructions of the camp.

The municipal memory project records that all the camp buildings were destroyed in the 1950s to make way for a factory complex, and lists what survives: the water tank, the wash house, the base of a watchtower, sections of the perimeter wall and a small guard building, all now protected under the town plan. A memory garden was created alongside the interpretation centre.

The surviving records

The military archive at Guadalajara preserves 119 boxes relating to foreign internment, including admission and release papers, lists, financial matters and escapes. It also holds material on separate spa facilities used for foreign officers when Miranda was overcrowded. Those associated places require their own evidence of Ukrainian presence.

Within that fondo, the series of personal admission files fills 104 boxes covering 1938 to 1947, and its alphabetical index, compiled at Guadalajara by F. Javier López Jiménez, lists roughly 15,600 entries, each giving box, file number, name and nationality. Eighteen of them are recorded as Ukrainian. Another fifty-three are recorded as Russian and about 175 as stateless, so the eighteen are a minimum rather than a count of Ukrainians at Miranda. Two of the eighteen, entered as Anton Drajan and Georg Karmanin, correspond by name to the memoir’s author and to the engineer named in its photograph caption; the files themselves have not been read.

The index explains what each file contains: a personal record card, an interrogation, censored correspondence, personal documents confiscated on arrest and claims from legations or the Red Cross asking for release. It also states that foreigners detained in Navarre arrived at Miranda accompanied by the file and interrogation carried out at the Pamplona police station, which is the administrative counterpart of the journey described in the Ukrainian memoir. On admission men were classified by belligerent or neutral nationality, by age, and as escaped prisoners of war, doctors, clergy, undesirables, deserters or unfit.