Robert and the airmen laughed, euphoric. They were hundreds of miles south, but so much closer to London.
The guides said they needed to head back; smugglers out after dawn risked imprisonment. Everyone shook hands. The guides pointed to the road. “This will take you to a town,” one of them said.
Robert and the Brits set out, with a plan to get to the village, clean up somewhere, and take a train to Madrid without raising suspicion. Once there, they would cautiously make their way to the British embassy.
Though they had slept little and eaten sparingly, they walked at a good pace, full of life. They reached a thriving market town that morning; it was likely Figueres, the first municipality of any note across the Spanish border. They immediately discovered that it was crawling with police and customs agents. They were three men who had just climbed through the Pyrenees over two sleepless nights—“We looked more like highway robbers than peaceful citizens,” La Rochefoucauld wrote—and before they could find a hiding spot or a public washroom, two Spanish agents approached them on the street. The Spaniards were kind and one of them spoke French. Given their appearance and the toll the trek had taken on them, they felt that any story they might concoct wouldn’t sync with reality. So La Rochefoucauld tried an honest tack, to appeal to the officers’ intelligence. He said he had escaped from France with these British pilots, who had been shot down and fled to the border. The Spanish agents’ faces didn’t harden; they seemed to appreciate the honesty. But the lead officer told the men they had no choice but “to take you with us to the station.” In the days ahead, with Spanish bureaucracy in wartime Europe being what it was, La Rochefoucauld and the Brits went from one law-enforcement agency to another, and ended up at Campdevànol in Girona, twenty-five miles south of Figueres.
Robert Jean Renaud, La Rochefoucauld’s twenty-two-year-old French-Canadian alias, was booked in the Girona prison on December 17, 1942. The Girona authorities found Renaud’s case beyond their jurisdiction and on December 23, they transferred him and, according to La Rochefoucauld, the British pilots to a place even less accommodating: the prisoner of war camp in Miranda de Ebro.
Built in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War, the concentration camp near the Ebro River in the homely flatness of northern Spain first housed Republican soldiers and political dissidents who defied Franco’s fascism. Its watchtowers, barbed-wire fences, and barracks in parallel lines across 103 acres of Castilian soil were designed with the help of Paul Winzer, a Nazi member of both the SS and Gestapo, then working in Madrid. Franco’s men understood cruelty as well as any budding Nazi. They shipped the Republican prisoners to Miranda in cattle cars, starved them, humiliated them, exposed them to weather conditions and savage guards and all the diseases that thrive in overly populated spaces. The twenty-two barracks, made to hold two thousand men, held 18,406 prisoners at one point in 1938. All told, an estimated ten thousand people died there during the Spanish Civil War.
With Franco’s victory in 1939 and the outbreak of World War II, the camp was converted into a prison for refugees fleeing Hitler’s Europe. Its political allegiances shifted and baffled both the Allied and Axis powers. One would think a Nazi supporter as fierce as Franco would listen to the Germans and allow them sway within the camp, considering an SS man built the place. But Spanish officials informed the Nazis that because they’d overseen the prison since 1937, they didn’t need any outside guidance. No German helped to direct it during World War II. And because of Franco’s friendliness toward Great Britain and the diplomatic dexterity of British ambassador Samuel Hoare, to whom the general listened, British prisoners at Miranda served shorter stints than nationals from any other European country.
But that didn’t endear the remaining Allied prisoners to the Miranda staff. It routinely complied with the German embassy in Madrid, which issued exit visas and repatriation documents for its “subjects,” the Czechs, Poles, and French who had fled the German occupation of their home countries.
In short, it was a bad time to be a Frenchman entering Miranda—which is why French-Canadian seemed such an inspired nationality for La Rochefoucauld’s nom de guerre Robert Jean Renaud. To say he was a Canadian freed La Rochefoucauld from a forced return to Vichy France, or from the more barbaric treatment the Miranda staff imposed on certain French nationals: the beatings and the exhausting, morally degrading forced labor.
None of this meant, however, that Robert’s stay in Miranda was enjoyable. After his and the Brits’ booking, the guards shoved all three in the same cell, which other political prisoners described as “cattle stalls” or “windowless huts.” It was little better outside their unit. Miranda was well beyond its capacity of 2,000 prisoners, holding 3,500 by the end of 1942. Everyone risked whippings or smaller humiliations from taunting guards. In January 1943, some prisoners began a hunger strike.
Every day the two British pilots wrote letters to their embassy in Madrid, begging for release. While they awaited a response, food was scarce and the three subsisted on little more than the morning’s slice of bread and conversation. The winter wind whipped through the airy barracks and inmates froze in their thin uniforms. Medical care was inconsistent, and when doctors did perform rounds they often asked that hot irons be pressed onto inmates’ dirty clothes, to kill off the lice. Scabies and diarrheic diseases, which prisoners called “mirandite,” were rampant. Rats attacked the camp dogs in broad daylight. To visit the latrines at night “necessitated a good deal of courage,” the British spy and Miranda survivor George Langelaan wrote, because there the same great rats “fought and squealed furiously, regardless and unafraid of men.” Sleep came fleetingly. The guards on night patrol sporadically shouted Alerta!, either to make sure other guards were awake or to torture dozing inmates. In the morning, everyone stood outside for roll call and on Sundays they marched by the commandant and his officers who were clustered around a Nationalist flag on a miniature grandstand. The Miranda staff, dressed in their Sunday best of white belts, white epaulets, and white gloves, formed a band, and the prisoners walked behind it in time to music. This amused the elderly officers in their large silk sashes. Inevitably, one of the band members fell out of step or grew confused by the complicated formations, and the prisoners