This Monday, January 27, 2025, is celebrated the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Bikernau concentration camp. In Tarn, internment and concentration camps were used to detain political opponents and Jews, with those at Saint-Sulpice-la-Pointe and Brens being the most important.
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“On this place extended the internment camp of Saint-Sulpice, at a place called Les Pescayres”, describes Pascal-Henri, retiree and local historian of the town.
Today, part of the camp still stands; it has been transformed into a detention center. But between 1940 and 1944, what we called undesirables, people who could harm the security of the Vichy regime, were interned here.
Among them, thieves, beggars, but above all communists, anarchists and trade unionists. In total, 4,600 men were held here, including Jews, rounded up in the Tarn.
On August 26, 1942, at 5:30 a.m., the big roundup took place in the Tarn department, where 226 Jews were arrested. They arrived at the Saint-Sulpice camp on September 2 before leaving for the Auschwitz camp.
Pascal-Henri, retiree and historian in Saint-Sulpice-La-Pointe
Henri Steiner here in August 2000, one of the survivors of the Saint-Sulpice-La-Pointe camp and Auschwitz.
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© France 3 Occitanie
Henri Steiner, whom a France 3 Occitanie team met in August 2000, was one of the Jews arrested in Tarn in 1942. He was just 10 years old when he was interned in this Saint-Sulpice camp, before to be sent to Auschwitz.
What struck me the most was precisely the deportation of the children. The youngest deported from Saint-Sulpice was 3 years old, so anyone who has a little imagination knows that this child had no chance of survival.
Henri Steiner, rescued from Auschwitz
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In July 1944, just before the liberation of the camp, the last 623 inmates were deported to Buchenwald, more than half of whom died there.
Further north in the Tarn, a viewpoint with a cistern above, visible from the Gaillac bridge, is one of the last vestiges of the Brens camp. Built in 1939 to accommodate foreign refugees, it became a concentration camp for women in 1942. There was no terror there. Coming from around fifteen nationalities, there are a thousand of them living here.
Women interned at the Brens camp.
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© FTV
“They focus, I would say, on shared knowledge. They give each other language lessons, history lessons, philosophy lessons, all their skills. For example, Madame Samson, Véronique's mother, she taught typing, because that was her job”, summarizes Rémi Demonsant, president of the association for the memory of the internees of Brens.
In March 1994, we met two survivors of the Brens camp. Angelitta Bettini spent 2 years in one of his barracks.
“It was divided into boxes, boxes with one or two beds.” She testifies what she suffered the most from : “of hunger and cold.
A few years later during an exhibition dedicated to the camp, she spoke about the life that reigned there.
There are photos of parties that we organized, of shows, with the means that we had. It was also a form of resistance
Angelitta Bettini, survivor of the Brens camp
On August 26, 1942, during the big roundup in the free zone, 60 Jewish women were interned here for a while. Before joining Auschwitz. “The Jewish internees were gathered in a barrack, and the others came to meet the police, says Rémi Demonsant. They fought physically with the police, with the GMR. Of course, they didn't succeed in preventing the deportation, they delayed it.”
The camp was closed on June 4, 1944, 2 days before the Normandy landings.
