Historiography about the post-1939 Spanish diaspora usually describes in detail the fates of those handed over to the Nazis by the French authorities and brought to sinister places such as Mauthausen, Dachau or Neuengamme. The transfer to the GULAG of several Spaniards who happened to be in the Soviet Union at the end of the Spanish Civil War is less widely known. Eduardo Pons Prades touches on the issue in his recent work Las guerras de los niños (Madrid, 1997, pp. 398-399) but adopts a highly remarkable perspective.
The group of prisoners consisted of fighter pilots in training and of the crew of vessels such as the Cabo San Agustín, which transported arms and was in the harbour of Odessa in April 1939. Although the crew members said they had planned to depart for Mexico, they remained in the SU until June 1941, when they were arrested and sent to forced labour camps in Siberia. Several died of the hardships there. From 1942 onward they were in Karaganda (Kazakhstan), where they worked the land. Food and sanitation were poor, the work hard, the climate rough and contact with the outside world non-existent. Many suffered from tuberculosis.
Prisoners from other countries who were released after 1946 publicized the fates of these men, including some Jewish women from Austria who had become involved with the Spaniards and even borne their children in the camp. When the Federación Española de Deportados e Internados Políticos (FEDIP), founded in Toulouse after the war, learned of their existence, the staff verified their details with relatives and labour organizations and determined that they were anti-fascists and members of the UGT and the CNT. The subsequent campaign brought about some minor improvements in their situation and permission for them to send mail via the Red Cross but was unsuccessful in obtaining their release. In March 1956 the military tribunal of the Council of the Supreme Soviet finally ordered that they be set free. José Ester Borrás was the driving force behind the campaign. A former soldier in the Spanish Civil War, he had fought in the French resistance and was a survivor of Mauthausen.
In 1998 the Institute received part of the archive of the FEDIP. It contains internal documents, circulars, correspondence with the Spanish government in exile, the French government, the United Nations, the Red Cross, myriad prominent individuals in France and outside and newspaper clippings about the campaign. A large portion of the archive, which spans 0.7 m, consists of individual records compiled by the FEDIP. They contain the organization's correspondence with family members, photographs and poignant letters from the camp. A separate file contains the birth certificates of the babies and paternity statements. The archive also includes items regarding the Commission Espagnole Contre le Régime Concentrationnaire established in 1950 and documents about the pension paid by Germany to widows of former inmates of Nazi camps.