Not that the mechanism of the Gulag was ever mindful of ideology or nationality. Among the millions in the camps were representatives of virtually every nation on earth: Germans, Austrians, Italians, French, Yugoslavs, Greeks, Romanians, British, Poles, Norwegians—the list was endless. Spanish soldiers from Franco’s fascist Blue Division were transported into the same system that imprisoned hundreds of Spanish communists who had fled to Russia in the wake of their country’s Civil War. The children of these Spanish refugees were consigned to the same fate.
