Typewriter seized at the French border

Tens of thousands of people had fled to Catalonia from other parts of Spain to escape from the Francoist troops. Following the Battle of the Ebro in November 1939, when it became clear that the rebel troops would soon occupy Catalonia, they, along with Catalan intellectuals, journalists, doctors, judges, and officials of the Catalan, Basque, and Republican governments, among many others, headed for France. French authorities did not open the border until the night of 27-28 January, and then only to women and children. They allowed wounded people to cross three days later, and to male civilians and soldiers on 5 February. They were all disarmed and all sorts of items they were carrying: typewriters, pens, rings, were confiscated. It is estimated that some 470,000 people crossed into France, most from Catalonia and some 70,000 from Irún. An incomplete census done by the Generalitat in February 1939 produced a figure of more than 100,000.

Although they had been warned about the wave of refugees that was to come, the French authorities were overwhelmed. They had not prepared any facilities for them, nor had they anticipated their food, medical or hygiene needs. Concerned above all about preserving order, they created improvised concentration camps, called “internment camps”, in a number of departements, first in the Pyrenées Orientales and later in Brittany, Loire-Atlantique, Pyrenées Atlantiques, Ariège and Tarn-et-Garone.  

In camps surrounded by barbed wire in the Cerdaña, and above all on the beaches of Roussillon where the natural barrier of the sea accompanied the manmade barrrier of barbed wire, intense cold, hunger, disease, and the absence of proper housing, toilets and drinking water made survival very difficult.  The beaches of Argelès, Le Barcarés and Saint Cyprien became camps watched over by French, Senegalese and North African soldiers. More than one thousand peopledied of typhus in Saint Cyprien in July 1939. In Barcarés, where barracks had been built, at the end of June 1939, there 60,000 people in a camp designed to hold 31,500.

The only way to get out of these camps was by deciding to return to Spain or by being taken in by a French family or proving that one had found a job. Around 21,000 managed to leave on one of the ships bound for South America that the government of the Republic had chartered with the help of the American Friends Service Committee. A few were able to reach other destinations, such as the United Kingdom or the Soviet Union.