Within the Confines of Legality

The Œuvre de secours aux enfants (the “Society for Children’s Aid”, or OSE) was one of several humanitarian organizations working within the confines of the Rivesaltes transit camp in southern France during the Second World War. The OSE, a Jewish humanitarian aid organization, was particularly concerned with Jewish child prisoners in transit and internment camps like Rivesaltes. Members of the OSE entered Rivesaltes camp on a daily basis throughout the war in order to distribute food and offer supplementary educational opportunities to the young children interred there. Its primary objective, however, was to oversee the safe removal of as many Jewish children as possible from Rivesaltes. To do this, the OSE relied on its established children’s homes throughout the country, as well as new ones that were instituted during the war, to petition the Vichy government for the liberation of Jewish children from Rivesaltes. These procedures were expensive, bureaucratic, and lengthy; however, they allowed the OSE to secure the release of many Jewish children from Rivesaltes and other camps. Throughout the course of the Second World War, the OSE—operating legally and transparently—succeeded in liberating hundreds of Rivesaltes’s youngest prisoners. lthough the Nazi regime established many of its concentration and extermination camps in eastern Europe, the victims of these camps came from countries across Europe—Belgium, France, and the Netherlands, for example—and arrived via a system of transit camps to extermination camps. One such transit camp, Rivesaltes, was located in the department of PyrénéesOrientales in southern France near the village of Perpignan. Rivesaltes operated as an internment (or “transit”) camp between 1940 and 1944, serving as a holding facility and transit point for Jews, Roma peoples, illegal Spanish immigrants, and German and French political prisoners to camps in the east. Because of the high concentration of children and families incarcerated at Rivesaltes, it was sometimes referred to as a “family camp.” Relief organizations, such as 1 Sabine Zeitoun, L’œuvre de Secours aux Enfants (O.S.E) sous l’Occupation en France (Paris: Éditions L’Harmattan, 1990). Hillel J. Kieval, “Legality and the Secours Suisse aux enfants (“Swiss Children’s Aid,” a division of the Swiss Red Cross), the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC), and the Œuvre de secours aux enfants (the “Society for Children’s Aid,” or the OSE), were legally allowed to provide aid within the camp and even to arrange transfers of children held at Rivesaltes to children’s homes throughout France. Little research has been conducted on the OSE’s work in Rivesaltes. In fact, while primary source material—including published memoirs, photographs, and oral interviews—documenting the organization’s efforts within the system of transit camps is incredibly rich, historiography on the specific convergence of the OSE and Rivesaltes is sparse. Secondary literature about Rivesaltes tends to mention the OSE Resistance in Vichy France: The Rescue of Jewish Children” in Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (October 10, 1980): 339-366. A