U.S. & Worldwide Stamps & Postal History

e 1941 (9 Dec) cover sent by Stefan Bartolewski, Polish internee captured on his way to Gibraltar and placed in a military hospital in Pamplona, Navarra (penciled note "letter sent by me from a penal military hospital, I had a broken arm"), with Spanish franking and San Sebastian censor markings, opened by Germans on arrival in Tomaszow Mazowiecki, District Radom. A rare usage from a Spanish military hospital (when the War broke, the sender was in Tomaszow Mazowiecki. He crossed Hungary, Yugoslavia, Italy, and got to France, where he joined the Polish Army and was employed in the French defense industry. When France capitulated he was in Brittany. He got across to the unoccupied territories and was demobilized 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 (wound up in the hospital trying to escape), Cerbere, Zaragoza, and Barcelona, eventually ending up in the Concentration Camp at Miranda de Ebro, where he was confined until 1943)