The concentration camp syndrome in Miranda de Ebro survivors. Part Two

How to cite: Ryn, Z.J. The concentration camp syndrome in Miranda de Ebro survivors. Bałuk-Ulewiczowa, T., trans. Medical Review – Auschwitz. January 2019. https://www.mp.pl/auschwitz/. Originally published as “KZ-syndrom u więźniów obozu koncentracyjnego Miranda de Ebro.” Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1987: 34–44.

Author

Zdzisław Jan Ryn, MD, PhD, born 1938, Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and formerly Head of the Department of Social Pathology at the Collegium Medicum, Jagiellonian University, Kraków. Vice-Dean of the Faculty of Medicine of the Kraków Medical Academy (1981–1984). Polish Ambassador to Chile and Bolivia (1991–1996) and Argentina (2007–2008). Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Physical Education (AWF) in Kraków. Co-editor of Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim.

Part Two

Method and Material

In 1978–1982 medical practitioners of the Adult Psychiatric Clinic (at the time under the headship of Prof. Adam Szymusik) at the Kraków Medical Academy examined five Miranda de Ebro survivors. The aim of the study was to issue a psychiatric opinion on the mental state of the examined subjects and its connection with the traumas and diseases they went through in the camp. The expert opinion was drawn up for the needs of the Polish committee for the disabled and their employment. All the persons examined had submitted applications to the committee to be recognised as disabled as a result of their imprisonment in Miranda de Ebro.

The examination consisted of a standardised psychiatric and psychological interview, a psychological test, and an EEG recording. In some of the five cases we referred the subject to a neurologist for their opinion and had an ECG done on the person. In the interviews we asked for specific, detailed information on the subject’s imprisonment and internment in Miranda de Ebro, and the psychological traumas and somatic diseases he or she went through. We carried out a separate examination of the subjects’ mental state on leaving the camp and its later evolution, right up to the time of the examination. We observed that personality changes, though described separately, were a permanent component of their concentration camp syndrome. This result agreed with the idea put forward by Kępiński, who considered personality changes an integral part of the concentration camp syndrome (Kępiński, 1970).

For each case we determined a clinical diagnosis, compiled a report on the subject’s personality disorders, and assessed the degree to which his or her ability to adjust to life after the concentration camp had been disturbed.

Research results

Brief medical histories

Subject F. K., aged 79, bachelor, no children, single, drawing a full disability pension. His parents have died. He is the seventh of eleven siblings. There were no hereditary disorders in the family. The family’s material situation was difficult. The children had to leave home early and maintain themselves. A few of his siblings died in early childhood. Only two of them are still alive. The parents took good care of the children, were kind and warm‑hearted. The values F.K.’s parents passed on to him included the ability to work with and help others, a sense of responsibility, self-discipline, and a commitment to hard work. These characteristics have helped him on many occasions in various difficult situations in his life, also recently.

As a young man, starting from the age of 17, he served in the Austrian army until 1918. He was held as a prisoner-of-war by the Italians, and on his release returned to Poland (which has recently regained her independence) he served in the Polish army until 1923. In 1929 he emigrated to France to find a job. When the Second World War broke out he volunteered for service in the Polish Army in France and served as a staff and logistics non-commissioned officer.

After France surrendered he was held in several internment camps in the South of France. In November 1942 he crossed the Pyrenees into Spain. He was arrested, held for three weeks in a prison at Lerida and sent to Miranda de Ebro concentration camp. After a month in the camp and a hunger strike he was put on record as “a Canadian” and released. He stayed for a short time in Madrid and travelled to Gibraltar on a transport for England, where he joined the Polish Armed Forces. He returned to Poland in 1956 and worked for a time as a book-keeper, later going on a disability pension.

As a child and adolescent he was never seriously ill and his growth and development were healthy. While in Italian captivity he contracted a moderate form of malaria.

In the internment camp at Perpignan he went down with hunger disease. The sanitary and material conditions in that camp were very bad. He also contracted recurrent dysentery, which left him debilitated. At this time he was also in a profound depressive state and contemplated suicide. He wanted to kill himself by slashing his wrists as he could see no way out of the difficult situation he was in. In Miranda de Ebro he was in a state of inanition and suffered from headaches and dizziness, chronic stomach and intestinal disorders, constipation; he fell into a long-lasting state of apathy and absolute indifference to the people and what was going on around him.

One of the things his detention in Miranda de Ebro made him aware of was that he was lonely and had no one to help him. He had an acute sense of loneliness and being under a threat, and was worried about becoming destitute and falling ill. He only had a few friends among his fellow-inmates, and bringing assistance to them helped him to get over his incapacitating mental breakdown. This mechanism of assistance and mutual responsibility for his friends later helped him to adjust to the new conditions in England.

On his release from Miranda de Ebro he went through another spell of acute diarrhoea. Afterwards he suffered for a time from an abnormally huge appetite; he became voracious and would eat all the food he managed to come by. This was probably why he got burst haemorrhoids requiring surgery.

After his detention in Miranda de Ebro he never recovered his former physical condition, nor his erstwhile optimism and activeness. He gradually grew weaker and weaker, and became increasingly apathetic. When he arrived in England he had three options: to join the Polish Army, the Foreign Legion, or to take up a job in the munitions industry. Due to his poor financial situation, he was considering a job in munitions as his first choice, but he realised that because of the poverty and hardships in Poland, he could not “go for the easy option.” His patriotism won the day and he joined the Polish Army, persuading some of his fellow inmates from Miranda de Ebro to do the same.

However, he was very disappointed when he came up against the mindlessness, or even cruelty of Polish professional junior officers, and started to have doubts whether he had made the right decision. A lot of his time and energy was wasted, and he was sorry he had made an over-hasty decision. He described situations where he and other soldiers were mindlessly made to practise absolutely useless parade ground exercises. He could not be reconciled to the brutal way the officers treated the men and squandered their energy and enthusiasm.

On returning to Poland he took up a job in book-keeping. He did not set up a family as he thought it was too late in life to do so. He found life on his own hard, but cheered himself up by the observation that not all family men were happy and to keep up his spirits took note of all the unhappy married couples he came across. During his stay in England he had become distrustful and suspicious of the people around him and avoided establishing personal relations with others. His wartime experiences had persuaded him that he was incapable of setting up a family and leading a family life. He was convinced that he would not be able to look after his family properly, either in the material or the psychological sense. So he steered clear of engaging in serious or close relationships because he could not stand the thought of making others unhappy or adding to their troubles.

He feels helpless about human problems and difficulties. Even ordinary, everyday problems leave him overwhelmed with fear and dismay. Recently, he has even cut down on meeting with neighbours and friends because every disappointment or problem his acquaintances go through leaves him in a state of nervous breakdown. In his personal relations he is afraid of being rejected or hurt and that he will not be able to cope with the sense of injury. So, although he finds loneliness hard to bear, he has been withdrawing more and more from contact with other people. Lately, he has been full of anxiety about his future, especially about not being able to cope on his own and having to rely on other people’s help.

He is often plagued by insomnia and has trouble with falling asleep. He has nightmares relating to his concentration camp experiences. Year by year he is getting more and more nervous, less and less resistant to problems and changes in his life; he is impatient and prone to losing his temper, over-sensitive to noise, loud conversation, and hubbub. He has also noticed that his memory is worse than it used to be; he forgets important things he has to do and ordinary things that need to be done at home.

He still feels fear and anxiety whenever he sees someone in a military uniform and he cannot control this feeling. He burst out crying when he mentioned a meeting with a WSW military secret police officer,a and it took him a long time to control himself.

Whereas before the War he had been full of energy, active, cheerful, brave and full of vitality, after the War he lost his optimism and is now finding it hard to make decisions; he has become anxious and feels insecure and self-conscious; he keeps himself to himself and distrusts other people.

He believes his over-sensitivity to injustice and wrongs done to people is connected with his experiences in the concentration camp; he cannot stand seeing violence; he avoids talking about the War and does not like to recall that period of his life.

In recent years, he has generally been in a depressed mood, has felt sad and dejected; occasionally he goes through intense anxiety states. He has been suffering from sleep‑wake inversion; at night he cannot get to sleep, but feels very sleepy during the day. He has become emotionally unstable, tearful, sometimes weeping for no specific reason.

For eight years now, he has been facing a new worry since being diagnosed with diabetes. He is on a diabetes diet. He feels he is living in an emotional vacuum, alienated from the outside world. He has not found a place where he can feel comfortable, nor a person whose company he can enjoy and who makes him feel at ease. He is worried and apprehensive about his future.

The psychological examination carried out by Dr Elżbieta Leśniak, a clinical psychologist, confirmed F.K. was suffering from post-concentration camp personality changes and disorders in his social relationships of the type known as deracination traumatic syndrome.

EEG test: low-voltage recording with a predominance of fast rhythm. Alpha rhythm slight. Suppression reaction observed but occurring infrequently. Dispersed low-voltage theta waves from all the leads. No change in EEG with hyperventilation and stroboscope. Diagnosis: flat record with numerous dispersed theta waves. Dr Julian Gątarski, M.D.

On the basis of the conducted tests and observation, we diagnosed a moderate psycho‑organic syndrome with mixed features of dementia and characteropathy. Anxiety‑depressive states are periodically superimposed on this syndrome. These disorders are related to the psychological and physical traumas the subject experienced in the prisons and concentration camp in which he was held. His disorders are chronic and progressively becoming more acute, and they affect several organs in his body. In our recommendation for the committee on disability and employment, we confirmed that there was a cause‑and‑effect relationship between the subject’s medical disorders and the traumas he experienced during the War and his confinement in prisons and the concentration camp.

Subject O. R., aged 59, resident in Poznań, university-educated, in a second marriage, in full-time employment.

He was confined in Miranda de Ebro concentration camp for two years (from July 1941 to April 1943), most of the time in army barrack No. 22, where conditions were worse than in other barracks. He did not have a bunk, and had to sleep on the floor. It was full of rats, which ran across inmates’ faces during their sleep. Many of the prisoners were scratched by the rats. They were endlessly pestered by lice and bedbugs. For ten months in the camp he was registered as “stateless” and “of no nationality,” but as there was no chance of an escape, he tried to get out by submitting an application for a transfer to another national group, e.g. the Canadian or the German group. This is why he was discriminated against by other Polish inmates and was treated less favourably in material, political and social terms. He never received any parcels or assistance, and for many months went hungry, he stole potatoes. In the camp he contracted jaundice, followed by an acute mental crisis. He suffered a breakdown and chronic depression; fellow-prisoners provided him with extra food, and for a time they carried him. He recovered thanks to aid dispensed by fellow-prisoners. Later he went through a period of acute stress in connection with the psychiatric condition of another prisoner, who was very aggressive, threatened him with a knife, and was eventually taken to a mental hospital.

O. R. was one of the organisers of a plan to escape from Miranda de Ebro. A group of about sixteen to eighteen men decided to dig an underground escape passage from the chapel and under the camp’s perimeter fence. They were all obsessed by the idea and within a few months did a vast amount of underground digging, working naked by night and using the most primitive tools. They managed to dig a passage 33 m long. Since they had to crawl and because of the shortage of air along it, they could only work for an hour at a time, and by the end of their task only for a quarter of an hour. Their original enthusiasm was supplanted by fears and anxiety. They were continually having gravel falling on them, and there was a danger of it trapping them underground. He still experiences the fear today. The plan was that all of the prisoners in his barrack would escape. Unfortunately, at the last moment the Spanish guards discovered the escape route, many of the prisoners were punished, and there were staff replacements.

O.R. recalled a special experience in the camp involving a rat that “became fond of him.” This rat grew so accustomed to him that almost every night he would come onto his bunk, lie down at his feet, and save him from being visited by other rats.

In the camp O.R. was constantly going through degrading and humiliating experiences. He had been brought up to cherish the patriotic ideals and observe the moral principles. As an army man, he had considered himself called to carry out a special mission and had felt he was a lucky man, meeting outstanding individuals, who later became distinguished commanders. Yet in the camp he found himself in the company of primitive people from the margins of society, psychopaths, criminals, and the “riff-raff” from the International Brigades. With them fights, scuffles, robbery, and the law of the jungle were the order of the day. He could not come to terms with his social degradation, which made him feel very frustrated, anxious, and under a threat.

The traumas he experienced in the camp left him with certain habits which he still has today. He noticed them as soon as he left the camp. During his journey across Portugal, to Gibraltar and Africa, he noticed that he had developed an obsession to hoard bread, even though at that time there were no bread shortages. He always had to have some bread on him, which he kept in a special bag. He would also sub-consciously put a piece of bread into his pocket or under his mattress. His friends tried to get him out of the habit, but it was no use.

He is still worried that there may be a bread shortage and he might go hungry. He hoards bread and only eats it once it is stale. He never eats fresh bread, as he eats the bread he has saved on previous days in the first place. This gets him into numerous misunderstandings, but he cannot get rid of the habit.

Another of his habits involving food is that he eats all the food he is given; he is unable to refuse another helping if it is offered, so sometimes he ends up eating a double or even a triple portion. Hence, he often has liver and digestion problems, but he just cannot say no to an extra serving, he eats it as a sort of reserve. It is a vicious circle he still cannot get out of today.

Another habit he has from the time spent in the concentration camp is the tendency to cover his head with a blanket when in bed. Inmates did this in the camp to protect their faces against the rats.

The threats and anxieties he experienced in the camp have left him with an “instinct of an imaginary danger.” He sees threats to his health and life lurking everywhere, especially when he is travelling, for instance in a cable car he always tries to take a seat near the door, and will only board a lift if there are not many people in it; when boarding a train he never chooses a front carriage because the front of the train is most at risk in the event of a head-on collision with another train, etc. If there are a lot of people in the room, he tries to “protect his back” by standing behind others with the wall to protect him or to have an easy escape route; he avoids situations with someone standing behind him.

His confinement in the camp has made him antisocial, taciturn, reticent, and withdrawn. He is a teetotaller, and the very thought of alcohol gives him goose pimples.

He has the sense of living on the margins of society; he has not fully adapted to normal life and still experiences the complex of “someone who has returned from the West.” This feeling was particularly aggravating in the 1950s. Since that time he has felt he has been wronged, and his merits for his country have been overlooked and treated unfairly. The prevalent emotion in his recollections at a meeting of Miranda de Ebro survivors was the feeling of a wasted life, especially his young days.

His psychological condition is characterised by readiness to become emotional, mood swing, recalcitrance, and a tendency to burst out in anger. His superior intellectual skills are attended by traits like pedantry and over-scrupulousness.

His results in the psychological tests were indicative of a high level of neuroticism and introvert personality traits. O.R. showed a tendency to present himself in the best possible light. He also had a tendency to be introspective, preferring to read a book rather than to socialise. He is reticent, does not have many friends, and is highly selective in their choice. He treats everyday matters very seriously and likes a well-ordered lifestyle. He tries to keep his emotions strictly under control. He tries to carry out all the duties he accepts conscientiously and enjoys the reputation of a person who is reliable. He treats the ethical values very seriously. His outlook on the future is somewhat pessimistic.

He is emotionally oversensitive and dysregulated, his resilience to stress is low, and he is overexcitable. The distribution of O.R.’s scores plotted on the E and N axes of the Extraversion-Neuroticism chart put him in the melancholic segment, with character traits such as unsociability, reserve, pessimism, moodiness, rigidity, apathy, and anxiety.

O.R.’s results for the Sacks Sentence Completion Test show that he does not have a very strong emotional bond with his parents, and his attitude to his father is distinctly negative. His attitude towards his current family is slightly more positive. He is demanding in his relations with colleagues at work, friends, and subordinates. He has a negative view of his superiors. His outlook on the future is pessimistic and he is very apprehensive about his country’s future (the psychological tests were carried out by Dr Józef K. Gierowski).

In his EEG there were some not very numerous spikes and theta waves in the bilateral temporal and forehead recordings. Basic rhythm was normal. No paroxysmal or focal traits or lateralisation were observed (EEG report by Dr Julian Gątarski, M.D.).

On the basis of these test results we diagnosed the symptoms of an incipient neurasthenic-depressive psycho-organic syndrome, in a person with marked personality changes - a high level of neuroticism and introversion. The habits and psychomotor stereotypes he developed in the concentration camp have made it difficult for him to fully adapt to normal life. On the basis of the psychopathological condition we observed in this person and the dynamics of his disorders, we conclude that there is a cause-and-effect relationship between his current state and the traumas he experienced in the concentration camp.

Subject A. P., aged 60, college-educated (economics); has an adult son by his first wife; now living with his second wife. He is the younger of two siblings. His mother died when he was six and he was brought up by his stepmother. His father, a railway clerk, died of old age.

He has unpleasant memories of his childhood, especially after the arrival of his stepmother. He felt a grudge against his father for bringing her into the family home. He recalls the event as a very difficult experience for him; he cried a lot and was very miserable. He was good at school and until 1939 attended a secondary grammar school in Kraków.

He was seventeen when the War broke out. In December 1939 he crossed the border into Hungary and was put into a refugee camp, where he stayed for three months. He got to Yugoslavia on a forged passport, and subsequently to France via Italy. This was in March 1940. He joined the Polish Army in France and served in a motorised reconnaissance unit in the Second Infantry Division. He took part in combat until the fall of France and sustained a not very serious shrapnel wound in the left leg. He managed to reach the unoccupied part of France and was put in the care of the Polish Red Cross, which sent him to a Polish school near Grenoble. There he passed his school-leaving examination and started university, reading Literature. He completed the first year of his course.

In November 1942 he got to Spain via Andorra. He and a group of twenty-one other Poles were caught near the border, and for the next two months they were held in a series of prisons. The worst was the one at Lerida, which was accommodated in an old monastery. There was a food shortage; twice a day they got a bowl of hot water with cabbage leaves and a slice of bread. That was the starvation ration they got for two months, during which he lost a considerable amount of weight, went scrawny and physically debilitated.

From Lerida he was transported to Miranda de Ebro, where he spent about eight months, from December 1942 to July 1943. The way prisoners were treated at Miranda de Ebro was no different from what he heard about the German concentration camps. All the time the food was short, and prisoners were beaten, kicked, abused, and treated in an inhumane way.

During registration on arrival in the camp he said he was a Canadian from Toronto, as he had been advised to do beforehand because it was easiest for Canadians to obtain a discharge from the camp. At this time, however, the camp stopped releasing Canadians, so he spent a long time in detention. There was a food and water shortage in the camp. Prisoners lined up in a long queue with their cups for a water-pump known as the fountain. The worst affliction was hunger and low temperatures, especially by night. He lived in one of the barracks and had a bunk to himself with straw for a mattress.

For a fortnight he was ill with a severe form of flu. He was in the infirmary, viz. the prisoners’ hospital. He was running a temperature and was given some medication.

One day when some of the prisoners were mocking a convoy of Spanish soldiers driving past the camp he was beaten up and kicked in the stomach by a sergeant on duty. He fell and nearly passed out. The sergeant put him in the calabos.

He and other prisoners took part in a collective hunger strike to protest against the conditions in the camp. He did not eat for several days and lost all his strength. One day he could not get down from the tiered bunk and fell down. He could not get back into it on his own. At night he hallucinated due to starvation; he saw various food products, especially fresh bread, and had a distinct sense of its enticing smell. However, he cannot remember this period clearly as he had patches of memory loss because he became profoundly apathetic and excessively sleepy. The hunger strike made his condition so severe that even two months later, once he had reached England, he had to go into hospital for intensive care with a long period of convalescence afterwards.

On his release from Miranda de Ebro he stayed for a short time in Madrid before he and other survivors were taken to Gibraltar. After three weeks of waiting [in Gibraltar] they were put on board of an American ship returning to England from Africa. On board he met General Sikorski and General de Gaulle. The ship was on the return journey from a convoy to Africa. At first, the Poles were put up in the cabins on the bottom deck, and it was only after General Sikorski intervened that they were moved to the first-class cabins on the upper deck.

When he was in Scotland he volunteered for the air force and completed a training course. He was due to join Squadron 309, but since the War was just coming to an end he never took part in combat. In Scotland he again saw Antoni Kępiński, whom he had first met in Miranda de Ebro. He remembers Kępiński also wore an air force uniform.

When the War was over he applied for admission to Edinburgh University but was not accepted. He returned to Poland in 1948. He had a lot of problems and was faced with numerous obstacles; he could not complete his education—the university did not admit him as there were not enough places.b For a time he worked for Orbis, a state travel agency, although he tried to get a job in foreign trade. His longest period of employment was with Bumar, a Polish state enterprise for the defence industry, where he worked for about 16 years. He went on early retirement.

For a long time after the War he did not feel well and often fell ill. He developed rheumatism, often caught a cold and suffered from lumbago. He was diagnosed with spine demineralisation. Despite treatment and rehabilitation, he has problems with walking and standing.

After his release he has never recovered his mental and psychological condition prior to his confinement in Miranda de Ebro. He lost his resilience even to the slightest traumatic stimuli. It does not take much for him to break down and he is often depressed. He avoids seeing people and being in company, and prefers to be on his own. He suffers from spells of chronic insomnia and has trouble with falling asleep; still, he has spells of intense mental excitement. He is constantly being troubled by the idea that he has wasted his life and failed to achieve his ambitions; he did not complete the education he wanted and he did not get a job that satisfied his professional ambitions. All the time he has felt he is a “second-rate” person. He feels hurt and puts the blame for his failures on ill-fortune.

Unwanted memories of Miranda de Ebro come to him very often. He is often vexed by realistic, unpleasant memories, which come suddenly and against his wishes. At such times he gets the impression he is watching a film about the camp. He often recalls the hunger strike and the violence: being kicked and beaten up, and falling down from his bunk. He often has nightmares about the camp.

He often resorted to alcohol when depressed or lonely, and for a whole year was an alcohol abuser. Alcohol improved his mood a lot. That was during his first marriage. Now he is living “withdrawn and out on his own borderland,” isolated off from social and political life. His first marriage lasted for eighteen years and broke down due to a conflict with his mother-in-law. In his second marriage things are going much better.

He thinks many of his somatic illnesses, especially rheumatism, are connected with his confinement in the concentration camp, and that the extent of his experiences in the camp has given rise to his general exhaustion and desensitisation. The only people he has a sense of belonging with are Miranda de Ebro survivors. He can understand them and they are the only people with whom he can share a conversation on a subject of mutual interest. The only friends he has are Miranda de Ebro survivors. He attended a survivors’ meeting in Warsaw, but was disappointed. He expected the emotional bond between them to be livelier and more intense, hence he was quite disappointed with the meeting. He thinks a lot of time has passed and many of the experiences have been forgotten.

There was a time when he was writing up the story of his life, along with his concentration camp experiences, in a memoir. He is a heavy smoker.

In his opinion, the Poles in Miranda de Ebro were more resilient to traumas than prisoners of other nationalities. They were more integrated with each other as a group. Most of the leaders of the strikes, hunger strikes, and protests of other kinds were Polish. Poles were the “trendsetters” in the camp—the ones who started the strikes and organised cultural events such as concerts and educational courses. His camp experiences have generally left him with an enduring dislike of Spain, which is why he has never wanted to visit that country.

A.P. had a normal ECG. His EEG was on the border between normal and pathological.

We diagnosed several multi-organ psychosomatic conditions he was suffering from, such as rheumatoid arthritis and degenerative spine disorders. His predominant mental and psychological condition is depression with insomnia and distressing recollections of episodes from his concentration camp experience. These disorders have made it difficult for him to adjust to life in both the intimate and the broader social context.

Subject T. W., aged 61, resident in Kraków, the elder of two siblings, born into a working-class family, completed secondary education and started a course of higher education in engineering after the War worked for about thirty years in motor transport.

During the War he was in the Polish Army in France, serving in the air force squadron. After France surrendered, like many other Poles he tried to cross the Pyrenees into Spain, get to Gibraltar and England. He crossed the Pyrenees at a point near the Mediterranean; actually, it was an area of highland “under scrub mountain pine.”

The police detained him and other Polish men on a train bound for Barcelona. After a fortnight in jail he was sent to Miranda de Ebro.

His first reaction to imprisonment was a mental breakdown and a sense of giving up. He was twenty when he arrived in the concentration camp and spent one and a half years there.

For almost all of that time he was suffering from hunger and sometimes from thirst too. Another type of suffering he went through was being homesick for his family and his country. Other annoyances were the lack of news, a sense of being cut off from normal life, and having no future prospects. The monotony of life in the camp brought on apathy and keeping himself to himself. For long stretches of time he felt locked up in a cage and that all of his room for free movement had been blocked up. He developed an obsessive idea about escaping or jumping over the camp fence. At times when the hunger intensified he had starvation hallucinations and escaped from reality into a world of fantasy, where he dreamed about sophisticated food. After a time he adapted to life in the camp and learned how to “organise” extra food. He witnessed a few unsuccessful attempts at escaping from the camp.

He was beaten up on several occasions by the camp functionaries. He was held in solitary confinement of the calabos (viz. the camp prison) for a week for using abusive language against a cabo. He was flogged with a bullwhip so hard that the pain made him defecate, yet he did not lose consciousness because he managed to cover his head with his arms. The incident made him angry and humiliated. On another occasion when he was in the camp’s canteen he was hit on the face and head with a rifle-butt and a whip. He saw other prisoners being beaten up and abused for minor infringements of camp regulations. For instance, if a cabo found a louse or a bedbug on a prisoner, he would force him to wash in urine or to lick up urine. Such punishments were very offensive and brought back bad memories because they humiliated the prisoner in the eyes of his fellow inmates.

The diseases he had in the camp, apart from hunger disease, were dysentery, and most probably jaundice as well. In the worst period he was extremely emaciated and physically weak. He went through long spells of restlessness and anxiety, was afraid of violence and did not know what lay ahead for him. He thought of escaping and dreamed of having wings to fly away from the camp. He wrote letters to his family in Poland and after a year got the first letter from them, which made him cry like a baby, unable to hide his emotions.

Like other Polish prisoners, he had a sense of injury and felt he had been cheated by the Polish mission in Madrid, which the prisoners thought was not doing enough for their release.

For a long time after the War he felt weak and unable to work. For a few years he was ill with somatic diseases. He had pleurisy with effusion on the left side; eventually, he was diagnosed with bone tuberculosis. He had treatment for several years and was on an invalid’s pension for a time. For a few years he was in a state of torpor and apathy, and at times felt run down mentally and had no will to live. At this time he was worried he would be put in plaster because of the bone TB.

His first marriage broke up quite soon. He married the second time in 1966. He has two daughters, one from each marriage. He thinks that his first, unhappy marriage, had a bad effect on his later life. There have been conflicts in his second marriage as well, and he has been through serious crises and periods of estrangement.

He has never recovered his former health since the end of the War. He felt exhausted and was prone to fatigue even though he kept a job. His disposition changed as well, he became more and more irascible, impulsive, and susceptible to mood-changes. His ability to put up with traumatic situations and instances of rudeness went down. In situations of conflict he has outbursts of temper and can come to blows; there have been occasions when he used violence in the family.

He has observed a progressive loss of memory; he forgets friends’ names and telephone numbers; he is forever losing or mislaying things, and then searching for them and getting angry. His sleep is generally bad, interrupted. He often has nightmares of the camp and some of the incidents that happened there. They are always unpleasant and connected with anxiety and a sense of danger—falling into a precipice, acrophobia, having the ground collapse under his feet. These nightmares are exhausting and bring on anxiety.

Nearly every year he goes through spells of apathy and depression. At such times he is miserable, not very active, and afflicted by sad thoughts. Suicidal thoughts often come to him, even though he considers suicide cowardly.

He has become parsimonious and has a tendency to keep various things he has no need for; he hoards food and worries that he might again go hungry. He is over-fastidious about cleanliness and tidiness. He is pedantic, which is the cause of most of the rows in his family. He feels he is not being understood.

He thinks he has wasted his life: “I’ve devoted my life to my country, and what’s my country done in return?” For a long time he was making desperate efforts to be recognised as a war invalid, was treated badly by ZBoWiD officials and humiliated on many occasions, so he has a grudge against them and feels hurt. He takes no part in social activities, sees his post-concentration camp life as just vegetating, and thinks he has not achieved anything in life. His interests focus on his family life, his home, and garden. He has no close friends and has not been able to create a happy home. He tends to be distrustful and suspicious of other people.

These personality traits reported by T.W. were reflected in the results of his psychological test. His Eysenck Personality Inventory test results showed a high level of neuroticism with an extrovert personality structure. T.W.’s personality is characterised by emotional dysregulation and hypersensitivity, a tendency to become anxious and apprehensive, and a low level of resilience to situations of stress and frustration. He is prone to nervous breakdowns when faced with a difficult situation. His high level of extroversion shows that he needs other people’s company and conversation. He has a need for external stimuli, and that is why he acts under the impact of the situation he is in. He is impulsive, irascible, likes change, and can become aggressive. His emotional life is not fully controlled by his intellect and the generally accepted social rules. The distribution of his results along the neuroticism-extraversion axes corresponds to the choleric temperament with traits such as touchiness, changeability, excitability, restlessness, and impulsiveness.

The results for the Sacks Sentence Completion Test show a fairly good relationship with his father. He is distrustful and suspicious of friends and acquaintances, and his relations with people he is less familiar with are very superficial. He experiences anxiety due to his disturbed relations with other people. Despite having a fairly good opinion of his own ability and potential, he is pessimistic about his future prospects, which he thinks are bleak. This is a clear indication of his depressed mood (the psychological tests were carried out by Dr Józef K. Gierowski).

T.W.’s EEG was on the border between normal and pathological (EEG report by Dr Julian Gątarski, M.D. ).

The tests and observations we conducted of T.W. over several years in outpatient conditions showed that he has a chronic and progressively increasing acute syndrome of organic characteropathy. Its main components are emotional and stimulus disturbances with a tendency for mood-change, excitability and impulsiveness, and a poor degree of intellectual control of his behaviour, especially in difficult or conflict situations. The somatic illnesses he sustained in the first years following his release from the concentration camp were directly related to the traumas he experienced in the camp. The memory of the incidents which caused his traumatic experiences has survived in his nightmares. His family, social and interpersonal relations have become permanently and profoundly disturbed. One of the further consequences of his confinement in the concentration camp is his belief that his life has been wasted, his sense of having been wronged and treated unfairly, and a depressive feeling that his life has little or no sense.

Subject H. V., aged 66, resident in Warsaw, an engineer working in his profession. He is the third of five siblings. His father was an engineer as well, and died of pneumonia at the age of 60. He was a quiet and good-natured person. His mother died of cancer at the age of 81. His eldest sister also died of cancer. H. V. has been married since 1939 and has an adopted son. His development in childhood was good and he was never seriously ill.

When the War broke out he was in Tomaszów Mazowiecki [in Central Poland]. He crossed Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, and got to France, where he joined the Polish Army and was employed in the Polish defence industry. When France capitulated he was in Brittany. He got across to the unoccupied territories and was demobilised in Toulouse. For a time he was in an internment camp in the South of France and in February 1941 crossed the Pyrenees into Spain. He and other Polish men were detained and arrested 30 km from Figueras. Next, he was held in prisons at Figueras, Cerbere, Zaragoza, and Barcelona, eventually ending up in the concentration camp at Miranda de Ebro. He was confined in Miranda de Ebro from mid-April 1941 to 21 March 1943.

From the time the War broke out he experienced a series of blows and setbacks, such as having to part with his family. When he had built up some confidence that the situation of the Poles who had fled to the West would stabilise, the next blow came: France surrendered, which he took very badly. All the time his financial situation was very difficult.

From the very outset of his time in Miranda de Ebro he took incarceration very badly. He had been used to freedom, an active life, and had had a lot of energy. For the whole time in the camp he had to combat his reaction of defiance and anger at the way prisoners were treated. He knew that you had to buckle under and be submissive if you wanted to survive, but sometimes he could not manage to do that.

What he found helpful in the first phase was a sense of responsibility for the fellow inmates he was arrested with. His sense of responsibility and the belief that he had to help them and serve as an example let him survive the initial period, which was the worst time. However, later, as time went on, he started to lose his strength and was exhausted by hunger and the reign of terror in the camp, and was less and less able to stand up to the situation. Nevertheless, he attended occupational courses organised by the prisoners, which helped to fight the monotony of life in the camp. At this time, and later when he was serving in the navy, he tried to be as active as he could. In his opinion, this is what helped him most of all to keep himself mentally balanced.

He had sustained a series of traumas when he was in prison. He was beaten up and treated badly. On several occasions in Figueras he was hit on the head. When he was working on a building site there were several incidents when his back was lashed with a bullwhip. The most painful violence used against him was when he was hit on the back with a rifle butt. It happened during the journey to Cerbere. He lost weight rapidly due to malnutrition. From the very start he felt bitter that the Polish diplomatic authorities were not doing much to help the Poles held in detention. At the critical time he found that he had gone down from 80 kg before his incarceration to just 48 kg. On two occasions, each lasting a week, he was seriously ill with bloody diarrhoea, which left him weak and debilitated for a long time afterwards. He also went through scurvy with bleeding from the gums. He estimated that he lost seventeen teeth within a short time. He continued to have trouble with the aftereffects of scurvy for some time after his arrival in England.

Every incident of being beaten up or humiliated in front of other prisoners hurt him very deeply. He remembers being hit on the head with a small chain and a belt. His ear was cut and he still has the scar. He was constantly scared of the sergeants, who beat up prisoners for no reason.

In the initial period he was thinking of escaping, but it would not have been an easy matter due to the camp’s location. For two months he gave his bread ration to another prisoner who had registered as a “Canadian.” The deal was that in return for the bread H.V. would be released earlier, posing as the “Canadian.” When the other man did not keep the deal, H.V. broke down. He became hypersensitive, overexcitable and got into rows with other prisoners.

The camp was congested and his confinement dragged on endlessly. There were quarrels over who was to be released first. Time and again there were individual or even group hunger strikes. In February 1943 he went on hunger strike in protest. The doctor diagnosed him with inanition and recommended he should stop the hunger strike.

On his release he spent a month in Madrid. He felt completely exhausted and ravenously hungry. He could not control this voracity and was gluttonous. Later, when he was on a ship which had its own bakery on board, he ate huge quantities of bread and hoarded extra bread in his locker. Soon he had amassed 8 kg of bread!

He started avoiding company, keeping himself to himself and preferring to be on his own. He felt the same way when he was serving in the navy. He did not like leaving the ship and preferred to stay on board, so as not to come into contact with people, and avoid busy activity and unnecessary noise. He does not like company or hustle and bustle.

He returned to Poland in 1946, apparently in good health. But, starting from 1953, a variety of his ailments, especially heart trouble and a general feeling of sickness, emerged and intensified. During a random medical check-up at a sanatorium he was found to have the beginnings of diabetes. Since that time he has been receiving treatment continually for a number of different diseases and disorders, which have changed over the years. Since 1969 he has been suffering from intermittent claudication and in recent years he has occasionally had haematuria due to tiny kidney stones in the urinary tract. He used to be a heavy smoker, drawing on up to a hundred cigarettes a day. He stopped smoking five years ago [viz. five years before this examination].

In spite of all these ailments, he engaged in a variety of projects, both professionally and on a voluntary basis, and became growingly committed to them. So he did not have much time to mull over his past.

He noticed that as time went by he needed to look into himself to an increasing extent and collect accounts relating to his life. One of the things he did was to draw up a chart of his activity and he observed that the peak of his vitality came in the 1950s.

Over the past four to five years he had returned to retrospection of his memories of the concentration camp. He spoke more and more about his experiences there as if Miranda de Ebro had revived in him. He noticed that episodes from his concentration camp experience were suddenly coming back to him and that there was something compelling him to think and talk about the camp. He started looking for his former colleagues from the camp, collecting their addresses and any souvenirs of the camp he came by. He cannot explain the motives of this interest. Miranda de Ebro also started to appear in his dreams. Usually, they would be nightmares, e.g. of queuing up for soup, episodes from life in the camp, fellow prisoners, episodes from the journey to Barcelona etc. Whereas earlier he had slept well, in recent years he has been sleeping for a shorter time, waking up in the small hours and sometimes just past midnight.

He has also noticed certain changes in his disposition. He is not as self-confident as he used to be, and making decisions is becoming harder and harder; he dithers and cannot make up his mind. His memories of the camp, which seem to come on whether he likes it or not, annoy him and put him in a pessimistic mood, evoking a feeling of defiance, rebellion, and anger at the Spanish, who he thinks are to blame for establishing the prisoner-of-war camps and treating the inmates inhumanely. He has a strong sense of outrage for having had so many years of his life wasted. He also has frequent spells of anger at the people who forced them to be idle at an important time for Poland and condemned them to physical and mental debilitation.

The same things are still at the top of his hierarchy of values: activity, work, and conscientiousness, but he is finding it harder and harder to live up to these ideals. He has also become more sensitive morally, especially as regards treating other people.

The need, or even compulsion to keep returning to his wartime and concentration camp experiences evoke negative emotions in him: a sense of outrage and protest about those lost years, as well as dislike and hostility towards the Spanish, who were the perpetrators of his gruelling experiences in the camp.

The time he spent in France and England left him with good experiences and habits, such as responsibility, discipline, clarity and a facility for decision-making; while his confinement in Miranda de Ebro had the opposite effect, leaving him with a sense of degradation and dependence on others, a feeling of enslavement, the impossibility of living life to the full, a need to avoid large groups of people, and a bothersome preoccupation with his wartime and concentration camp experiences (the psychological tests were conducted by Dr Elżbieta Leśniak).

We observed the following somatic symptoms: blood pressure 160/100 mmHg, a high bilateral tendon reflex level, and dermatographic urticaria. No symptoms of focal brain injury were observed in H.V.’s neurological examination

H.V.’s EEG gave a low-voltage reading with dispersed low-voltage theta waves (test carried out by Dr Julian Gątarski, M.D.).

We diagnosed several chronic and progressive multi-organ diseases and disorders in this subject. The main disorder in his somatic condition are symptoms of a vascular disease, and in his mental and psychological condition the principal problem is an incipient psycho‑organic syndrome with mixed traits. In addition, we observed profound asthenic personality changes. The dynamics, content, and above all the psychopathological picture of these disorders indicate that they are connected with the effects of the traumas the subject experienced in Miranda de Ebro concentration camp.

Discussion

The abbreviated medical histories of five Miranda de Ebro survivors I have presented give a general idea of what happened to inmates during their confinement in the camp and the long-term aftereffects. Although these are individual case studies, they give an outline of the conditions prevalent in the camp, the way inmates were treated, and the traumas and types of stress they were exposed to.

In many respects Miranda de Ebro was similar to the Nazi German concentration camps. However, it was not an extermination camp like Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka, or other German concentration camps on the territory of Poland and other European countries. In this respect Miranda de Ebro was different—its inmates were neither at risk of death themselves nor watched the death of their fellow prisoners on such a massive scale. This difference was reflected both in their mental and psychological experiences in the camp as well as in the picture of their long-term aftereffects.

The interviews we obtained from the survivors of Miranda de Ebro we examined show that alongside the physical and climatic factors, what they found most troublesome were the psychological traumas: isolation, being a long way from home, having to stay with prisoners of various nationalities, many of whom were aggressive and antisocial, degrading treatment, violence and harassment, and humiliation. Their long-term deprivation of external stimuli soon brought on apathetic-depressive reactions in them, and their psychomotor activity stopped. Many of the prisoners kept themselves to themselves and lived in an imaginary world of dreams and fantasy. Psychiatric disorders requiring hospitalisation seem to have occurred quite often. Hunger and the dreadful conditions of hygiene in the camp brought about diseases of the alimentary system, a progressive rate of inanition, and a decline in prisoners’ general resilience and immunity. The effects of these conditions persisted for many years in survivors, and today they are still troubling the five men we examined.

The principal features in the clinical picture of the five Miranda de Ebro survivors we observed are symptoms of organic damage of the central nervous system, namely psycho-organic syndromes taking the form of torpor or characteropathy, depressive‑anxiety states, personality changes, and a profoundly disturbed ability to adjust to normal life.

We observed signs of brain damage not only in the psychological tests we conducted with these five subjects, but also in their psychiatric examinations and EEGs. Their depressive states are recurrent and chronic; they are based on the subjects’ feeling that their life has been wasted and that they have failed to achieve their life’s ambitions, their professional aspirations, and objectives in family life. They feel unwanted and that their life has no sense. The anxieties that beset them both during waking hours and in nightmares are associated with their experiences in the concentration camp.

All five examined subjects say that they have never recovered their former health prior to imprisonment in the camp and that they have not managed to adjust to normal life. Their problems with adjustment are a major feature of their current situation. They feel lonely, cut off from ordinary life, estranged, alienated, and not understood by people who have not been held in a concentration camp. They feel they are unable to establish close emotional relationships, unfit for family life, and incapable of providing others with a sense of security, which is what they are in need of themselves and expect others to give them.

Alongside a depressed mood, other prominent traits in the personalities of these five subjects are a high level of neuroticism, mood changes, hypersensitivity and overexcitability, pedantry and punctiliousness, and low frustration tolerance. They have a sense of wrong for the lost years of their youth which they patriotically dedicated to their country, but the state authorities have failed to adequately appreciate or recompense their sacrifice. Another aspect of their adaptive problems are their unhappy marriages, divorces, and inability to engage in social or collective activities.

The qualities at the top of their hierarchy of values are still patriotism, responsibility, conscientiousness, hard work, and activity. However, they are finding it harder and harder to put these ideals into practice. The confrontation of these virtues with present-day reality makes them feel frustrated and gives rise to adaptive problems. A characteristic feature for Miranda de Ebro survivors is their “uprooted complex” and the “complex of those who have returned from the West.” For these subjects, the peak of these complexes came in the 1950s, when their sense of having been wronged and treated unfairly in return for their patriotic merit and sacrifice intensified and became permanent.

Returning now to Antoni Kępiński and his spell in Miranda de Ebro, we may add the “complex of non-participation” he described. This complex consists of a sense of guilt for not participating in the most important events in the history of one’s country, which in the case of Poland means the Second World War and wartime occupation, and hence the struggle for national survival and preservation of the national identity. For many, the decision to return home after the War was difficult, and in many cases was the outcome of ambivalent attitudes. Attitudes taken by Polish authorities and ordinary Polish people to those who returned home, including ex-internees and concentration camp survivors, were not always favourable and sympathetic. This must have aroused reactions of injustice and frustration in many of those who repatriated. Evidently, the intensity of these traumas must have been great enough to persist in survivors’ mental and psychological makeup down to the present time.

By the end of their imprisonment in Miranda de Ebro Poles made up the largest group of foreign nationals. After their liberation most went to Britain and joined the Polish Armed Forces; some served in the RAF and took part in the defence of the British Isles. After the War many dispersed to different parts of the world, and some returned home, to Poland.

In the 1980s we compiled a list of Miranda de Ebro survivors living in Poland, which we present in the annex below, though we think our list is incomplete.

ANNEX

List of Miranda de Ebro survivors living in Poland in 1987*

Stefan Bartolewski (Gliwice);
*Betlejewski;
Kazimierz Dębski (Kraków);
Władysław Dulniak (Warszawa);
Gustaw Friedeisen (Warszawa);
Tadeusz Gąska (Kraków);
Wiktor Garczorz (Żywiec);
Stanisław Grudniewicz (Cieszyn);
Jan Goralik (Kraków);
*Adam Hawryluk;
*Jacewicz (Kraków);
Franciszek Kocurkiewicz (Opole);
Father Antoni Liedtke (Pelplin);
Józef Łysakowski (Warszawa);
*Mandziuk;
Feliks Masłowiec (Kraków);
Adam Okoński (Kraków);
Alfred Pactwa (Kraków);
*Piwowar (Warszawa);
Maciej Radzicki (Pabianice);
Olgierd Romeyko (Poznań);
*Roniarski (Grudziądz);
Adam Rybak (Zielona Góra);
Wacław Sękul (Warszawa);
Stanisław Romanek (Warszawa);
Alojzy Smosz (Surzec near Pszczyna);
Tadeusz Supronowicz (Warszawa);
*Szpetycki;
Kazimierz Szydłowski (Poznań);
*Edmund Szymiec;
*Śmigaj (Poznań);
Henryk Vogt (Warszawa);
Tadeusz Wiśniewski (Kraków).
* An asterisk means that we were not able to identify the survivor’s first name and/or place of residence.

Translated from the original article: Ryn Z. J. KZ‑syndrom u więźniów obozu koncentracyjnego Miranda de Ebro. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim, 1987.

Notes:

a. WSW stands for Wojskowa Służba Wewnętrzna, Military Internal Service in the People’s Republic of Poland, viz. Poland under Communist rule.
b. This may mean that he was refused admission on political grounds because of his past in the West.

References

1. Kępiński, A. Tzw. KZ-syndrom. Próba syntezy. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1970: 18–23.
2. Masłowski, J. Człowiek. In Jakubik, A., and Masłowski. J., Antoni Kępiński – człowiek i dzieło. Warszawa: PZWL; 1981: 65–75.
3. Ryn, Z. Przez Pireneje do Mirandy. Z listów Antoniego Kępińskiego. Wierchy Vol. 46. Kraków: PWN; 1978: 271–274.
4. Ryn, Z. Antoni Kępiński w Miranda de Ebro. Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1978: 95–115.
5. Ryn, Z. Antoni Kępiński internowany na Węgrzech (1939–1940). Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1979: 85–95.
6. Ryn, Z. Antoni Kępiński w Polskim Wydziale Lekarskim w Edynburgu (1945–1946). Przegląd Lekarski – Oświęcim. 1979: 95–114.
7. Szymiec, E. Miranda de Ebro. Perspektywy. 1982; 2: 30.
8. Wysocki, B. A. Nad rzeką Ebro. Wrocław: Ossolineum; 1979.

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