Rivesaltes Camp, France

The Rivesaltes camp witnessed three major conflicts that France, Europe, and North Africa experienced in just three decades: the Spanish Civil War, World War II and the Algerian War. Originally designed as a military training center, the camp served as, among other things, an internment camp for unwanted foreigners, a deportation camp to Auschwitz via Drancy, a prisoner-of-war depot for Axis forces, and a transit camp for the Harkis and their families.

Divided into 16 blocks, the Rivesaltes camp covers 612 hectares. Some of the workers involved in its construction were selected from among the Spanish Republicans interned in camps in the Pyrénées-Orientales area (Argelès, Saint-Cyprien and Le Barcarès). By the end of 1940, the Ministry of War transferred 9 blocks to the Ministry of the Interior. The first convoys arrived in January 1941. The camp quickly became a suction pump, admitting over 10,000 people in six months, including foreign Jews, mostly from Eastern Europe, Spaniards who arrived during the Retirada in February 1939, and French Roma/Sinti.

Thousands of foreign Jews were sent to Rivesaltes in 1942 when it became the inter-regional collection camp for Jews. Of the approximately 5,000 Jews interned at Rivesaltes between August and November 1942, 2,289 men, women and children left in nine convoys headed to the Drancy camp, with Auschwitz as final destination. In less than two years, 17,500 people were interned at Rivesaltes. The camp closed in November 1942 following the arrival of German troops in the south of France. After the Liberation, Rivesaltes became a supervised residence center for individuals suspected of collaboration and a prisoner-of-war depot for Axis forces.

In September 1962, the Rivesaltes camp became a massive transit and reclassification center for the Harkis, Algereians who had served in the French army, and their families. It officially closed in December 1964 after hosting nearly 21,000 Harkis. Until March 1966, the camp barracks were used to accommodate Guinean military personnel. The camp then returned to its original purpose. It experienced another historical episode when, between 1986 and 2007, it housed an administrative detention center for expellable foreigners. It took nearly twenty years for a Memorial to emerge in this inhospitable landscape of dilapidated barracks subjected to extreme weather conditions. The architect Rudy Ricciotti envisioned a building that occupies the only open space on the site and is below ground level so that it does not obstruct the view of the remaining buildings.

Inaugurated in October 2015, the Memorial of the Rivesaltes Camp - https://www.memorialcamprivesaltes.eu/en - is a public institution, supported by the Occitanie Region and the Département of Pyrénées-Orientales. The permanent collection aims to transmit the history of the Rivesaltes Camp, a site that bore witness to the upheavals of the 20th century. It also reflects on the topics that make up the history of this camp in Southern France, such as the forced displacement of population groups—which still occur today—, racism, antisemitism and xenophobia.