​​Islander Bob Le Sueur recalled that many Spaniards ‘lived in hastily built camps in the Island, where wooden huts gave them sufficient shelter and facilities to make life tolerably comfortable. They were in no way prison camps, and indeed one was able to visit them and wander around freely.’ Some workers advertised in the ​Evening Post newspaper for assistance with laundry, food preparation and for interpreters.

​Jersey author Michael Ginns noted that camps were initially enclosed by nominal wire fences, and inmates could come and go as they pleased during off-duty hours, outside curfew. This apparently changed in August 1942 with the arrival of the enslaved Soviet workers, some of whom complained bitterly of the very cold and smoky conditions inside the barrack huts.

​Desperate for food, and often encouraged by their overseers, workers left the camps in large numbers to beg for and steal food in the countryside. Sometimes workers breaking into rural properties were apprehended by the owners and fights ensued, in some cases leading to fatalities on both sides. By the summer of 1943, regular German notices threatened the population with severe punishment for sheltering escapees or giving or selling them food. Sections of the labour camps set aside for Soviet labourers were then surrounded by barbed wire.

​Mike Le Cornu, one of many Islanders who put themselves at grave risk to help Soviet workers in desperate need, recalled; ‘I’ve never forgotten the sound that came out of the huts there. I still get emotional. When people are starving, the pitch of their voices rises. The sound was like lots of birds in an aviary. As children, we used to go close to the camp fence and watch. Sometimes we pushed nuts and apples through the wire. The OT had big whips and would put yokes on the children to fetch water.’

​Maria Brock, a Belgian working as an OT interpreter in Jersey, confirmed that food stocks for the workers were delivered to the OT Central Supply Store at Beaumont, St Peter, from where they should have been sent to the labour camps. As confirmed by a Spaniard named José Vila, who held a clerical job within the OT in Jersey, OT staff stole rations to sell, whilst widespread theft occurred in the docks of France and Jersey.​