Sonia Steinsapir (1912-1980), born in Russia during the Tsarist era, lived in Crimea, Berlin, and Moscow before emigrating to Paris in 1936. She became a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and set her sights on a career as an artist. A victim of anti-Semitism during the Occupation, she was deported to the camps at Mérignac and Poitiers, where she met internees known as Nomads, Manouches, Gypsies, Roma, and Travellers, and produced one of the rare graphic accounts of anti-Gypsy persecution in France during the Second World War.