On August 10th 1940 the Interior Minister put the Joffre military camp at the disposition of the prefect of the Eastern Pyrenees. It had been set up on the communes of Salses and Rivesaltes in 1938. On the 14th January the groupment camp for refugees opened. It was called the “camp of family groupment” of Rivesaltes. The camp extended over 13 hectares and was made up of 16 sectors, made up of 150 huts made of fibrocement and brick, and was said to have a capacity of 17 to 18,000 people. It was situated about fifteen kilometers from Perpignan in a dry valley that was open to strong wind that swept the region. As a result of such climatic conditions, the camp did not have the necessary structures for housing its internees in acceptable conditions, even from its construction. The camp was already referred to as “the Sahara of the Midi” by the local population in December 1940 and lacked not only vegetation but sanitary facilities, food and human resources.
An incompetent administration
The camp administration was indeed inadequate. The CICR report of 1941 recorded “a terrible impression of a lack of overall leadership” which left subordinates with too much freedom in their powers. The supervision personnel seem to have been largely inept and the heads of sector stood out only for their brutality and amorality. There was rampant anti-Semitism amongst the guards who did not hesitate to deprive Jews “of the same rights as the Aryan internees” states the CICR report. The camp administration moved Jews to sector K on the pretext that kosher food would be served for the “Jewish Easter”. Living conditions in sector K were even worse than in the rest of the camp, and vermin swarmed in the dilapidated huts, where there was no electricity. Later sector F3 would house the Jews rounded up on August 26th 1942. The extent of the mediocrity of the camp administration took a greater dimension when a worrying food supply situation rapidly began to develop. The internees were among the French government’s lowest priority as far as the general food supply of the country was concerned. In order of priority, army supplies came top, followed by hospitals and the civilian population. These already difficult conditions only worsened when the camp administration opted to lower the 11.50 francs allocated daily for food by the government for each internee, by a fifth. The International Committee of the Red Cross reported that “there is a genuine famine in certain camps and we have seen children at Rivesaltes in a state of malnourishment and athrepsia that has not been seen in Europe for many years.”
To remedy the situation many aid organizations set up bases in the camp and although their powers to act were extremely limited by the authorities at the site, the support they provided to the refugees was far from a luxury. Each sector had an infirmary which was attached to a doctor from the interned population and two or three nurses. In sector K there were health services, the Secours Suisse, the Quakers, the OSE, the SSE, the ORT and the YMCA. Sector J housed the headquarters of the health services (hut 65) and there were also specialist doctors in hut 56. Sector Q housed the management of all the transport and postal services.
Group of children at Rivesaltes receiving shoes from the Secours Suisse USHMM/Bohny-Reitel
Appalling living conditions.
Infants were most affected by the lack of care and the poverty in the camp. In sector B alone, whose huts were described as actual cattle cages; thirty people died between March and July 1941. 31% of this morbidity consisted of infants who in their majority were younger than one year old and who were affected by an epidemic of contagious gastroenteritis.
In. Les camps de la honte, A. Grynberg.
The mosquitoes that infested the camp were also responsible for an epidemic of paludism.
Eva Lang, who was 10 years old when she arrived at Rivesaltes with all her family describes the atmosphere at the camp: “There was less and less food. We were terribly hungry, and all around there were rows of barbed wire and guard towers a few meters away. Everything was grey, dismal and dirty. There was the constant noise of the wind blowing between the huts, the muddiness of the stony ground during the rainy days and then a torrid, dry heat because it was still summer. People coughed, wandered, died. I have a scar on the top of my leg from an enormous pus-filled inflammation I suffered from at Rivesaltes. I was 10 years old and I went on my own to the infirmary to queue so that someone could clean my wound with alcohol. Still, my mother and my big sister did everything they could to keep things as clean as possible.” The lack of water and its mediocre quality heightened the appalling sanitary conditions, and this encouraged the spread of other epidemics such as dysentery. Apart from the people suffering from cachexy and the internees working outside the camp, the rest of the camp had nonetheless been vaccinated against typhoid fever, but the mortality rate remained high, particularly amongst children. The CICR report concluded that it was “deplorable to have gathered more than 2,000 children in the same camp as this could only encourage epidemics.” Indeed in Rivesaltes plans had already been made to create “a children’s colony” which doctor Limousin was to have managed. The project aimed to separate children and adults, to provide them with suitable nutrition, special medical care and the children were to have had the chance to continue their education in the camp. Living conditions were so terrible that the administration came to fear that the adults would try to steal food from the malnourished children.
The death rate increased dramatically as the camp continued to fill up. In January 1941, 1,500 people arrived from the Agde camp and on February 28th another 793 internees were transferred from Brens and 1226 from Gurs. Amongst the latter there were another 570 children aged less than 16. On March 26th another 1,160 “nomads” from French internment camps were interned in Rivesaltes. These were Jewish families who had been interned in application of the law of October 4th 1940 as well as Tziganes and Spaniards.
Drancy/Rivesaltes
Six weeks after the roundup of Veld’Hiv in Paris, the roundups of the Southern Zone were organized by Vichy and in the words of Serge Klarsfeld; Rivesaltes became the “Drancy of the Southern Zone”. More than 2,300 rounded-up Jews passed through before being sent to Drancy. “The final period of Rivesaltes is significant in reflecting the changes embarked upon in the Vichy internment system. From August 4th until the closure of the camp at the end of November of the same year, two sectors of the former “family groupment camp” were used as a “national sorting centre” for the southern zone and a central departure camp for convoys to Drancy and the German camps.”
In: Internment in all its forms: an overview of the internment system in the Vichy zone. Christian Eggers.
This is the period during which the Spiras – Herzel, Rosa, Toni and Felix, were interned in Rivesaltes after their arrest by the Salleles d’Aude constabulary on August 26th. They left Rivesaltes on September 3rd and arrived at Drancy on the 5th.
The French constabulary guarding a convoy at Rivesaltes
USHMM
Identity card
Department and territory: Eastern Pyrenees (66) in the communes of Salses and Rivesaltes.
Date of activities: beginning of construction on December 10th 1940, opening on January 14th 1941, closure on November 21st 1942.
Size: 600 hectares.
Capacity: 15 to 18,000 people.
Category: military transit camp for Spanish refugees and brigadiers. Subsequently becomes a guarded housing centre and then a family groupment centre, becoming the regional groupment centre for Jews from August 1942.
Populations: Spanish refugees, foreign Jews, poverty-stricken nomads, Jews and French political opponents.
Hypothrepsia: Weak state due to malnourishment of an infant, of which the last stage, athrepsia, results in death.
Toni Spira Card in the Rivesaltes FilePhotography Dorot Source AD 66
