The Democracy Archive of the University of Alicante (UA) has published the identity of 1,760 Spanish republicans who were interned in the concentration camps of Bouarfa (Morocco) and Colomb-Béchar (Algeria) in which most of them were forced to to work on the construction of the Trans-Saharan railway.
This work has been possible thanks to the “conscientious” work carried out by two members of the advisory council of the UA Archive, the historian Juan MartÃnez Leal, who is a specialist in the matter and who has had the support of Mercedes Guijarro, according to informed the academic institution this Wednesday in a statement.
Both researchers have recovered the documents of the International Red Cross (Geneva), which visited the camps in the summer of 1942, a digital copy of which has been provided by the Historical Memory Documentation Center (Salamanca).
This list can now be consulted in the new section of the Republican Exile website in North Africa under the name ‘Trans-Saharan forced labor camps’.
This project is open and is “enriched day by day with new materials”, according to MartÃnez Leal. Thus, since the inauguration of the website in 2020, this section of the Democracy Archive of the University of Alicante “has not stopped” incorporating new content until it has become the “reference Internet publication” on this subject, both for researchers, family members, and those interested in general by this lesser-known Republican exile, but of “important” significance, “especially” for the province of Alicante.
The Bouarfa and Colomb-Béchar fields were the nerve centers of what was the Trans-Saharan railway construction project, in which the Vichy French collaborationist government came to concentrate the 12 Foreign Workers Companies (GTE), the vast majority of them made up of Spanish republicans.
Both populations were about 140 kilometers away on either side of the border that separated French Algeria from the French protectorate of Morocco.
The internment in these two camps and the rest of the area was in a forced regime, with miserable pay, harsh working conditions, mostly with picks and shovels (chopping the stone, clearing and moving it to place the sleepers) in climatic conditions insufferable extreme heat and burning sand, very poor food and attention from armed guards that included mistreatment and punishment.
The analysis of the data obtained in the documentation of the Archive of the International Red Cross allows us to know the origin of the internees and, among them, there is a “strong presence” of those born in the province of Alicante, followed by Murcia, Madrid, Malaga and Valencia.
Information is also available on the professions or trades declared by the inmates, among which the unskilled trades related to agriculture and all kinds of mechanical trades, such as turners and fitters, among others, predominate.
Although they are in the minority, it is also worth noting the presence of non-manual trades, including journalists, doctors, artists and musicians.
The Allied landing in North Africa began in November 1942 with Operation Torch; however, the liberation of the camps did not come until several months later.
The Republican Exile in North Africa page aims to recover the memory, deepen and disseminate knowledge of one of the “most forgotten” exiles, that of the Spanish Republicans in the lands of North Africa, since the end of the war civilian, in March from 1939 to 1962.
“We are talking about the life and fate of some 15,000 Spaniards, most of them men, but also women and children, sometimes entire families, who left everything to save and rebuild their lives,” according to what is stated on the page itself, which “aspires to to become a meeting point for those who are today the family descendants of those expatriates and for researchers from both shores of the Mediterranean”.
This idea, underlined by the director of the Democracy Archive, Emilio Rosillo, “indicates the importance of adding more testimonies and stories of struggle, survival, life and hope.” “It is important that they know that we do not forget them”, as specified on the web.
