The theme of my research paper is the military-run "regroupement" camps in which hundreds of thousands of inhabitants in Kabilia -an important center of armed resistance against the colonial powers- were relocated during the Algerian war. 2, 350,000 inhabitants of rural villages were dislocated and displaced, as a result of a process that started in the beginning of the onset of the war in 1954, and reached its height in 1961. In my paper, I focus on one example: the village of Mansourah, situated in the district of Bordj Bou Arreridj, in which my own father spent his childhood. Using the testimony of my father and other relatives who live in Algiers, I explore the memories of violence. How violence was exerted, and conceived by the French colonial powers and the nationalist insurgents? And more relevantly, how is violence remembered? How have the practices of regrouping engendered, and made possible, a different set of social relations in the camps? And, how are these subsequent changes remembered and valued? The recollection of personal experiences which necessarily involves aspects of memory provides valuable information about the impact of events on the lives of ordinary people. Since oral history is based on memory, which is by definition fragile and selective, I raise the question about its reliability, and about memory itself. What do these subjective accounts tell us about memory and history? In short, what is present and absent in these testimonies? Drawing on Bourdieu's theory of practice, the enclosed space of the camp is approached as a field within which the French military and the Liberation National Front (FLN) were competing to impose their capital as the most legitimate claim to authority. Based on oral testimonies, I argue that the resettling of Algerians from diverse ethnic clans and the resorting to symbolic and physical violence by the French army and the FLN have accelerated the emergence of new identities in disarray. Drawing mainly on Michel Cornaton's pioneering research on regroupement camps in Algeria "Les regroupements de la décolonisation en Algérie" (L'Harmattan. Paris. 1967), and Pierre Bourdieu's study "Le déracinement": la crise de l'agriculture traditionnelle en Algérie" (Paris, Edition de Minuit, 1964), I explore the question of uprooting, as well as of destructuration and restructuring of social links in this peculiar context. I also use Foucault's theory to conceptualize the idea of power and the control exerted upon the population in regroupement camps.