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| - Members of France's Roma community are stepping up their campaign for compensation over wagons, horses and other belongings seized when they were sent to prison camps in World War II. Although France set up a reparations committee in 1999 for victims of anti-Semitic seizures and damage, "nothing was put in place for the travellers", said Olivier Le Mailloux, a lawyer for the group. He told a hearing at France's top administrative court that Roma victims should be officially included in the commission's remit. A decree issued on April 6, 1940 -- just weeks before the German invasion of France -- ordered the arrest of so-called nomads and their placement in some 30 camps across the country. The government rounded up roughly between 6,000 and 6,500 people and seized their belongings. Henriette Theodore, an 88-year-old who attended the hearing in Paris, said she was eight years old when her parents, grandparents and a brother and sister were sent to the squalid camps from 1941 to 1945. "At the first camp it was okay, we had milk... the worst was at Montreuil-Bellay, we were treated like beasts," she told AFP, referring to a camp in the Loire Valley of western France. "When we got out, we no longer had anything, they took everything from us," she said, calling the legal challenge "a symbolic campaign, to remember". "It's for our descendants, so that it never happens again," she said. Le Mailloux estimated fewer than 1,000 Roma detained during the war were still alive. "She [Theodore] is one of the most determined. The others don't want to talk about it anymore," said Milo Delage of the France Liberte Voyage association, a Roma advocacy group. The court's rapporteur, however, argued against the compensation request despite citing former president Francois Hollande's acceptance of France's responsibility for the internment. "The republic recognises the suffering of the nomads who were detained and admits that its responsibility for this tragedy is great," he said in October 2016. A ruling is expected in the coming weeks. ctx/js/jxb
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