Internment at the Saint-Cyprien camp

The camp at Saint-Cyprien, established on the beach of the Pyrénées-Orientales for retreating Spanish republicans, received foreign Jews rounded up after the armistice and some of those expelled from the Reich. Conditions there were so dire — sand, absence of drinking water, epidemics — that an autumn storm rendered the site unusable, and the internees were transferred to Gurs and then to Rivesaltes. The camp lasted only a few months, yet it inaugurated the chain of internment that would lead, two years later, thousands of people from the Catalan coast to the deportation convoys.