In May 1939, Grothendieck was put on a train in Hamburg for France. Shortly afterwards his father was interned in Le Vernet. He and his mother were then interned in various camps from 1940 to 1942 as "undesirable dangerous foreigners". The first was the Rieucros Camp, where his mother contracted the tuberculosis which eventually caused her death and where Alexander managed to attend the local school, at Mende. Once Alexander managed to escape from the camp, intending to assassinate Hitler. Later, his mother Hanka was transferred to the Gurs internment camp for the remainder of World War II. Alexander was permitted to live, separated from his mother, in the village of Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, sheltered and hidden in local boarding houses or pensions, though he occasionally had to seek refuge in the woods during Nazis raids, surviving at times without food or water for several days. His father was arrested under the Vichy anti-Jewish legislation, and sent to the Drancy, and then handed over by the French Vichy government to the Germans to be sent to be murdered at the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1942. In Chambon, Grothendieck attended the Collège Cévenol (now known as the Le Collège-Lycée Cévenol International), a unique secondary school founded in 1938 by local Protestant pacifists and anti-war activists. Many of the refugee children hidden in Chambon attended Cévenol, and it was at this school that Grothendieck apparently first became fascinated with mathematics.