SUNDAY, JUNE 5, 2011. I must have known. Earlier in the year, as winter melted into spring and my plans for this journey coalesced into something solid, the thought must have taken root in my subconscious that eventually I would need to set aside my concerns for Alex and Helmut for a while, lest the burden become unbearable. As it happens, my highly solicitous subconscious advised my practical conscious mind to schedule three days in warm, painter-friendly Provence following our visit to Rivesaltes, days to be spent in self-indulgent relaxation amid the sunny surroundings that inspired the likes of Cezanne and Van Gogh, Daudet and Bizet. So on some level, I must have had an inkling of how shaken I would be on the last day of May. How I knew, I have no idea. But I accept the gift with joy.
Though I had made reservations in Provence for Thursday, Friday, and Saturday nights, I left Wednesday, June 1, open, again anticipating that events in Rivesaltes might dictate how we would spend that day. My shaken state of mind upon my arrival back at our tannery hotel in Prades after my short stretch in Barracks 21 moves Amy to declare Wednesday a day solely of pleasure and exploration. So in the morning, we decide to visit Spain, neither of us ever having been there before. We drive the thirty-five miles up a winding mountain road, curling through the green and rocky Pyrenees, until we reach the frontier, which, on this clear and sunny noon, affords us an unobstructed view deep into the storied land of Cervantes, Goya, Albeniz, Velasquez, Lorca, Segovia, Picasso, Domingo, and so many more celebrated writers, artists, and musicians. Using our best high-school Spanish, we order lunch at a restaurant just inside the border in Puigcerdà, a town that has occupied this mountain top for more than eight hundred years.
That evening, after floating down the switchbacks back to Prades, we drive to the tiny village of Eus, which clings to the sides of a steep hill partially visible from our tannery. Crowned by a church dedicated to Saint Vincent, Eus exhibits an enchanting mixture of cobblestoned present and ancient past. The ruins of a medieval castle lend their ancient stones to form some of the church’s walls and the walls of several adjacent private homes. On this crystal-clear evening, as the sun sets over the mountains, forming long shadows from the crumbling castle turrets, we wonder whether another sort of enchantment has been cast: we meet almost no other human beings and yet encounter literally dozens of cats as they stroll and take their leisure in the winding lanes and on narrow walls, stone staircases, tiled roofs, and enclosed patios. Perhaps, we whisper to each other, “Eus” is Catalan or Occitan for “meow.” Just to be safe, we order fish for dinner.
Thursday dawns cloudy. On our way back east and north, we pay a final visit to the desolation of Camp Rivesaltes, enabling me to show Amy the site of Barracks 21 and some of the other sad landmarks I learned about from Elodie. Neither of us has any desire to linger, so well before noon we are back on the wide expanse of the A9, retracing our route from the previous Sunday. This time, however, we drive past Béziers and Montpellier, not leaving the expressway until just the other side of Nîmes, where we catch a two lane road heading east into the heart of the legendary region of Provence.
Whole books have been written about Provence, its history, cuisine, natural beauty, and the writers, poets, and painters who have lived and been inspired there. It comprises a little more than twelve thousand square miles, making it roughly the size of our home state of Maryland, although its shape is decidedly more regular than the salamander oddity of “The Old Line State.” Provence was home to some of the earliest human life forms on earth; primitive stone tools from 1 million BC have been discovered on the Provençal coast. Nature-loving Celts from the Iron Age, believers in sacred woods and healing springs, took up residence in Provence, trading honey and cheese with their neighbors to the north. The great tides of civilization from Greece and Rome washed ashore in Provence, leaving behind as they receded the great city of Massalia—known to modernity as Marseille—as well as forums, arenas, and aqueducts that survive to dazzle us today. The medieval leaders of the Catholic Church so favored the land and climate of Provence that for more than one hundred years in the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, ten popes lived and ruled in Avignon. Provence was fought over and changed hands many times over the course of centuries, until it finally became a permanent part of France in 1481, following the death of the last Provençal ruler, Good King René, a patron and avid supporter of painters, troubadours, and tournaments.
Good King René’s influence has persisted through the subsequent centuries, as artists of all stripes have flocked to Provence to paint, write, compose, and cook. Colette, Alphonse Daudet, Edith Wharton, and F. Scott Fitzgerald have written there; Georges Bizet, Charles Gounod, and Darius Milhaud have composed there. The list of painters who have set up their easels in Provence only starts with Van Gogh, Cezanne, Renoir, Monet, Matisse, Georges Braque, and Edvard Munch. And no mention of the pleasures of Provence would be complete without a gastronomic catalog including such native delights as bouillabaisse, ratatouille, the Thirteen Desserts, and the region’s locally produced olives, olive oil, honey, cheese, peaches, berries, melons, and wine.
All this and Mediterranean sunshine, too, as I have been telling Amy for days, based in equal parts on research, general hearsay, and the personal testimony of my parents. My mother loved the sun. I recall her many enthusiastic tales of the times she and my father stayed in the town of Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, basking under what seemed, from her stories, to be permanently sunny skies. So I have booked three nights at a former grand château—now a hotel—just outside Saint-Rémy, anticipating abundant sunshine.
For all three days, it rarely stops raining.
However, we are not disappointed. The château’s rooms and its restaurant are luxurious, restful, and deeply satisfying, particularly after the stress and sadness of Rivesaltes. We take long naps and walk the grounds of the château. We spend much of Friday exploring Saint-Rémy, renowned as the birthplace of Nostradamus and the residence, for one prolific year, of Vincent van Gogh. While committed—by choice—to the asylum of St. Paul Hospital for twelve months beginning in May 1889, Vincent produced an astonishing one hundred forty-two paintings, including portraits of his cramped but cozy bedroom at the asylum, studies of the wheat fields and olive trees he could see from his window, and Starry Night, lit by his own inner fire. We peer upward during our stormy nights in Saint-Rémy, hoping in vain to catch a glimpse of his vision, but we are delighted to see the descendants of the very olive trees Vincent painted, their grey-green branches tossing in the gentle wind and rain of a soft afternoon. On Friday evening, in a Saint-Rémy brasserie, we witness seven Provençal cardsharps gathered around a green velvet-topped table, playing an enthusiastic game of poker, a scene Vincent would have loved.
Saturday morning offers a few breaks in the clouds, so we take a scenic spin along some picturesque back roads of Provence, venturing far enough east to catch a glimpse of Mont Sainte-Victoire, the mountain Paul Cezanne captured on canvas dozens of times. By noon we are back in the Alpilles mountain range near Saint-Rémy and rain has begun falling again. Not daunted, however, we drive into the village of Maussane-les-Alpilles, find a boulangerie and a fromagerie, and enjoy a romantic repast of fresh bread and cheese huddled on the steps under the stone awning of the village church. The pain, sorrow, and endless frustrations of 1941 seem long ago and far, far away.
But Sunday morning, announcing itself with the tuneful tolling of church bells from Saint-Rémy, heralds the end of our Provençal idyll and the resumption of our grim pursuit. Luckily, we do not have far to travel today, so we linger at breakfast and take our time leaving the château. It is noon when we finally drive away from Saint-Rémy, heading east on the D99. We enjoy the rural charms of Provence for another hour or so before we rejoin the faster pace of the everyday world and speed south and east, catching another autoroute in its rush toward Aix-en-Provence, the medieval capital of the region. Our route spins us south on a bypass, and from there we drive into the small, largely unattractive town of Les Milles. We struggle to make sense of our directions and eventually find our lodgings for the next two nights, a lovely little B&B called La Gracette, presided over by our more than gracious hosts, Dana and Raphaelle. As they usher us up to our room, which opens into a round, turret-shaped bathroom, we learn a bit about pigeons and class divisions.
In medieval days, pigeons were so highly prized that only the nobility were allowed to keep them. Many a grand château boasted a separate structure, its distinctive circular shape announcing to all who beheld it that here was a dovecote, or pigeon house, a special home for those highly valued birds that only the wellborn could possess. When the revolutions of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries tore down some of the walls separating the upper and lower classes, one of the first perquisites claimed by the new bourgeois was the right to keep pigeons. Many homes built in the following decades proudly included a rounded wing or tower to declare the owner upwardly mobile enough to possess pigeons, whether or not birds actually lived there. Our round bathroom is proof that the original owners of La Gracette had made the grade.
As evening approaches, mindful of our appointment tomorrow morning and of last Monday morning’s confusion, I am determined to learn the exact location of Camp des Milles. With Raphaelle’s detailed directions to guide us, in only ten minutes we are looking over a barred gate at the outlines of an immense factory, the site of the former camp. Satisfied that we’ll be able to find our way back in the morning, we look for a place to have dinner. Nothing is open in the little town on this Sunday evening, so we drive toward the outskirts of Aix, confident that we’ll find something. But perhaps this corner of France is subject to blue laws of which we have no knowledge; not a single open restaurant do we find. Finally, faint with hunger, we admit defeat and dine on Big Macs and fries at a McDonald’s. Sacrilege though it seems at the time to consume fast food in France, we devour our dinner with relish, as well as ketchup and mustard: little packets of savory Dijon mustard at that. Far from home, we offer up silent thanks for good old American standardization.
Back at La Gracette, we speak briefly with Dana and Raphaelle, telling them about my unhappy connection with their town. They listen quietly and respectfully, their faces reflecting sincere sympathy. But I find myself soon growing weary of Raphaelle’s story of her mother’s utter ignorance of what went on at the factory by the railroad tracks. Fearing that I might begin to ask pointed questions I will come to regret, we make our excuses and retire upstairs to our little bedroom adjoining the pigeon house. Soon enough, I know, we will again be transported from our comfortable present into the painful past.
DECADES BEFORE CEZANNE, Van Gogh, and their fellow painters made their pilgrimages to Provence, the factory in Les Milles produced bricks and the distinctive terra-cotta tiles that adorn the roofs of many Provençal houses. But the factory had fallen into disuse by the late summer of 1939, its 160,000-square-foot, four-story structure sitting silently within its dusty seventeen-acre grounds. Within a fortnight of the beginning of the war in early September, the facilities returned to life as an internment camp for thousands of “undesirable foreigners,” mostly German and Austrian refugees fleeing from the plague of Hitlerism that had infected their homelands, but also exiles from other countries who lacked the proper transit papers for legal immigration, a number of political dissidents, and former members of the International Brigades who had fought on the Republican side during the Spanish Civil War. Having come to France seeking respite from persecution in their home countries, these mostly Jewish fugitives found themselves ensnared once again.
Some were released in the early spring of 1940, but after the German army invaded and overran France in May and June, about two thousand men, again mostly refugees from German-speaking lands, were either brought to Les Milles or ordered to turn themselves in. A fact that remains a source of shame for France is that the three-year history of Camp des Milles is a uniquely French tale. No Nazi directive played a part in its initial organization or in how business was conducted there. Camp des Milles was strictly a product of the Vichy regime. The camp guards were all recruited from the local population of farmers and merchants, mostly humble apolitical people anxious only to make a little extra money by following the orders of the camp commandant, who in turn received his orders from Pierre Laval, the French minister of state. As was the case in Rivesaltes, the guards at Camp des Milles inflicted few overt acts of malice on the prisoners. The writer Lion Feuchtwanger, in his memoir, The Devil in France, recalled that during his time at Camp des Milles, he did not “experience or witness anything that could be described as cruelty or even as mistreatment. There was never a case of beating, of punching, of verbal abuse. The Devil in France was a friendly, polite Devil. The devilishness in his character showed itself solely in his genteel indifference to the sufferings of others.”
Upward of ten thousand internees of Camp des Milles suffered from the overcrowded conditions, the lack of hygiene and decent food, and most of all from the crushing inactivity. They had no reason to get up every morning to greet another day of mindless, dull routine mixed with a constant low-level fear of what the far-off authorities in Paris had in store for them.
Within the fenced and barbed-wire enclosure of the camp, prisoners had two options: they could be either inside or outside the immense factory building that dominated the space; neither option was particularly pleasant. Out in the dusty open, there was no shade to block the blazing Provençal sun or protection from rain or the frequent winds that whipped the dust into miniature cyclones. Inside the factory was near total darkness and, depending on the season, a clammy cold or an oppressive heat. There were no windows on the ground floor, the site of the kilns where the bricks had been formed. On the bright side, since brick making requires straw, there was a generous supply of the soft fiber on hand for use as bedding material. But the straw was the only amenity offered by the camp; there were no bunks, cots, or even mattresses, just clumps of straw and the occasional blanket that a fortunate internee had either brought from home or purchased on the camp’s thriving black market. The ground floor of the factory was eventually filled with the delicately negotiated and often fiercely defended sleeping quarters of hundreds of men who lay head to foot from one wall to the other. Brick dust lay everywhere and polluted the air that everyone breathed.
Detainees walked up a rickety flight of wooden steps to reach the factory’s second floor. This space was more commodious, and one wall was almost entirely made of windows, which promised more light. But that promise was broken because of the authorities’ fear of air raids; some of the windows were boarded up and the rest were painted dark blue to inhibit detection of any interior light. The result was perpetual twilight during the day and pitch darkness during the interminable nights. A few feeble electric light bulbs and the occasional candle provided light, but candles were used sparingly in the presence of all that straw. There were no chairs, no tables, and no benches provided, only piles and piles of old bricks. The inmates would often attempt to use the bricks to construct furniture, but without mortar it invariably collapsed. The second floor, like the first, soon became crowded with men huddling in their own small nests of straw.
Each morning the camp resounded with a bugler playing a wakeup reveille at 5:30. Twenty minutes later, the prisoners received the day’s meager ration of bread, along with a tin cup of weak coffee. Around 11 a.m., the midday meal was served, consisting usually of soup made of lentils or beans, sometimes with some stringy meat of indeterminate origin. The evening meal, served at 5 p.m., was generally less robust than lunch, with a bit of cheese accompanied by the occasional sausage or sardine. Once a week, typically on Saturday or Sunday, the fare would be augmented by eggs and wine from local farms and vineyards. At 9 p.m., the bugle would sound again, directing everyone outside to return to the factory’s interior. The large iron doors would slam shut behind the last man, and everyone shuffled to his wretched bed of straw. Thirty minutes later all lights were extinguished, and the prisoners faced another night in which their proximity to each other made sleep fitful at best. Inmate Harry Alexander recalled in an interview conducted by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “I cried a lot, we all cried a lot, thirteen-year-old boys, old men, all of us huddling on our piles of straw in the utter darkness.”
The courtyard of Camp des Milles, with the former brick factory in the background, circa 1941.
(©ECPAD—Collections La documentation française–Raymond Brajou)
Out in the yard, there were four latrines on one end of the enclosure and three on the other. They were essentially little outhouses made of wood, each with a single hole in a plank situated only a few yards above a foul morass of human waste, which was visited constantly by swarms of flies. At all hours of the day, lines of almost a hundred men stretched from each latrine into the center of the enclosure. At night, the prisoners were restricted to four indoor latrines that were declared off-limits during the day. A prisoner’s nocturnal trips to relieve himself were hindered by the darkness and the challenge of navigating among the thousands of men stretched out on the floor and then finding his way back to his own pile of straw. Thus, when the doors of the factory swung open each morning at 5:30, men would awkwardly race each other across the yard for the privilege of being first in line.
But the three meager meals and the lines to use the latrines were welcome islands in a daily ocean of boredom. There was little to do. The guards would occasionally order groups to transport a pile of bricks from one corner to another or even to dig holes and then fill them up again, but for the most part—in keeping with the overall lack of cruelty or mistreatment—there was little interaction between guards and prisoners. So men filled their idle hours in conversation, often speculating about the unknown future, and in irregular dealings with what became a bustling black market.
A prisoner needed hard currency to make transactions in the market, but if he had the money, nearly everything was for sale. Such items as clothing and blankets were available, as well as food supplies and newspapers obtained from outside the gates. A farmer came once a week to collect camp garbage such as potato peelings for his pigs, and he brought little portions of cooked pork wrapped in newspaper that he sold when the guards’ backs were turned. But prisoners could also buy or sell the camp’s own rations or cigarettes or a precious place in the latrine lines. Through these acts of getting and spending, the men of Camp des Milles not only improved their lot, but also managed to get through another day, twenty-four hours closer, they all hoped, to a resolution of their fates.
For everyone who made his nightly manger bed of straw in the brick factory was in some sense a member of the elite—a small, favored slice of Europe’s Jewish population that was desperate to emigrate elsewhere, to escape the increasingly tangible menace threatened daily by the advance of Germany and National Socialism. In March 1941, HICEM—an international organization dedicated to helping European Jews emigrate to safety—set up an office at Camp des Milles, thus granting it the unique status of a transit camp. Camp des Milles was considered a gateway, populated only by those for whom others had spoken and obtained the necessary papers; affidavits had been signed abroad and emigration was an assumed conclusion once the final step—a visa—had been obtained. So every day passed in the crowded brickyard was, in the hopeful minds of the incarcerated, another step on the uncertain but deeply desired road to freedom.
That road led to Marseille, the bustling Mediterranean seaport town only about thirty kilometers to the south. Most journeys abroad would likely leave from Marseille, and the city was also home to many foreign consulates. So, although Camp des Milles was a detainment camp, the authorities allowed for the occasional journey to Marseille if official business was to be transacted. In order to make the trip, a prisoner had to leave the camp precisely when the factory doors opened at 5:30 a.m. and to be on the Les Milles-to-Marseille streetcar by 6:00; according to the aforementioned Harry Alexander, Jews were not allowed to board the streetcar after six o’clock. Another former prisoner, Rudolf Adler, told a Holocaust Museum interviewer that he made several trips into Marseille to visit the Chinese consulate (he and his family successfully emigrated to Shanghai) but never attempted to escape, always returning to the camp at the end of spending a long day with Chinese officials. A well-brought-up German, he put his trust in what he believed was a well-ordered system and simply waited for the wheels of justice to grind slowly in his favor.
Another aspect of life at Camp des Milles that made it markedly different from more severe work or concentration camps was the singular collection of artists and intellectuals who were housed there and their attempts to introduce a high level of artistic performance and scholarly pursuits to their fellow inmates. Among those imprisoned at the former brick factory were such figures as the surrealist painter Max Ernst, the historian Golo Mann (the son of novelist Thomas Mann), the Nobel Prize–winning physician Otto Fritz Meyerhof, composer Franz Waxman (best known in later years for writing the scores for such Hollywood films as Sunset Boulevard and Rear Window), sculptor Peter Lipman-Wulf, and writer Lion Feuchtwanger, whose memoir, The Devil in France, remains the most arresting account of daily life in the camp.
These and other enterprising inmates converted the factory’s main brick oven, a tunnel stretching more than a hundred yards, into a cabaret that they christened Die Katakombe, or The Catacombs, borrowing the name from a political nightclub in 1920s Berlin. Shrouded by the literal darkness of the stone oven and the figurative gloom of their uncertain incarceration, and lit only by guttering candles and their esthetic determination, the prisoners staged plays and operas, offered lectures on topics both whimsical and practical, and sang and danced their way through many an endless night. Max Ernst gave informal talks about painting and also offered demonstrations of his unusual technique. A former dancer with the Monte Carlo ballet, Theodor Schlicker, was a transvestite who performed in The Catacombs as Thea. Scholars and teachers lectured on Shakespeare and Tolstoy and offered courses ranging from home repair to bookbinding.
Peter Lipman-Wulf wrote about his memories of those artistic and intellectual offerings: “The scenario in the flickering light, casting mysterious shadows of our bundled-up comrades, was highly dramatic, but also romantic and timeless. Every eye was hanging on the lips of the speakers and, in our enclave-like meeting grounds, one truly believed oneself to be transported back to the time of the Catacombs of ancient Rome.”
But as welcome as these diversions were and as vital to the prisoners’ morale, the plays, lectures, and song recitals could only do so much to alleviate the overwhelming tedium of daily life in the camp. Feuchtwanger concluded, “What I found most difficult about the camp was the fact that one could never be alone, that constantly, day and night, every act, every physical function, eating, sleeping, voiding, was performed in the presence of hundreds of men, men who were talking, shouting, moaning, weeping, laughing, feeding, smacking their lips, wiping their mouths, sweating, smelling, snoring. We did everything in the most public view, and my greatest desire was to be rid of all that throng.”
MY GRANDFATHER AND UNCLE were delivered into that throng in July 1941, thanks to the affidavits obtained by Max Markreich and to the fact that my father and mother had established residency in the United States. Like their fellow detainees, Alex and Helmut hoped that their stay in Camp des Milles would be brief and that they would soon be on a boat to join Günther and Rosemarie in America. But those hopes were quickly dimmed. The U.S. Immigration Act of 1924 was restrictive from the beginning, and after war broke out in Europe in 1939, the law’s annual quotas for German and Austrian citizens were no longer met. There may have been several figures in the American government who contributed to this slowdown, but history has identified the chief culprit as Breckinridge Long, a longtime friend of President Roosevelt, who in January 1940 was appointed assistant secretary of state. He became convinced that Nazi agents were attempting to infiltrate the ranks of legitimate immigrants, so he began a policy of requiring longer and longer forms to be filled out both by those hoping to come to America and by those who hoped to welcome them here. In a memo circulated to other members of the State Department in June 1940, Long wrote, “We can delay and effectively stop for a temporary period of indefinite length the number of immigrants into the United States. We could do this by simply advising our consuls to put every obstacle in the way and to require additional evidence and to resort to various administrative devises which would postpone and postpone and postpone the granting of visas.”
The factory, now a well-funded memorial museum, as seen from the railroad siding a quarter mile away.
In July 1941, just as Alex and Helmut arrived in Camp des Milles, the number of refugees allowed to immigrate to the United States was cut to about 25 percent of the quotas established by the 1924 law. Contributing to this decline was something called the Relatives Rule, a State Department regulation that required any applicant with a parent, spouse, child, or sibling remaining in Germany, Italy, or Russia to pass an extremely strict security test to obtain a visa. Also in July, the State Department began requiring a security review of all immigration applications by committees representing a number of governmental agencies, among them the State Department’s Visa Division, the Immigration and Naturalization Service, the FBI, and Army and Navy Intelligence. Once that review process had been completed, the State Department sent out “advisory approvals” to its consuls abroad, who were then allowed to issue their precious visas. But by then, Long’s policy of “postpone and postpone and postpone” had had its dire effect.
When they walked through the gates of Camp des Milles in July, Alex was sixty-two years old and Helmut was two months short of his twentieth birthday. They found spaces to sleep amid the straw-strewn comforts of the brick factory’s second floor and within a short time became habituated to the routine of daily life at the camp. Alex found work in the camp’s kitchen to earn money for such necessities as blankets and shoes, and Helmut eagerly partook of the camp’s intellectual offerings.
On September 22, the day after Helmut turned twenty (and the day of Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year), Alex wrote to his older son and daughter-in-law. How luxurious Günther and Rosemarie’s lives in far-off New York City must have seemed to the unwilling captives of Camp des Milles. “Dear Children,” the letter began.
I hope you haven’t been worried about us because you haven’t heard from us for some time now. But I work all day long cleaning vegetables in the kitchen and in the evening I’m dead tired and Helmut’s time is completely occupied with various courses. There is a meager amount of pay for the work we do; weekly it amounts to perhaps ¾ of the cost of shoe soles and heels, and in addition to that you get a second helping of food at noon and in the evening. If one gets up every morning at 6:00, by noon one isn’t in the mood for writing. On this New Year’s morning I’m sitting on my bed of straw, using my blanket as a desk.
Thank you for everything that you’ve already done for us. Above all, for your assiduous efforts with the National Refugee Service. Surely it is the present circumstances that are responsible for everything taking so long, and unfortunately I have recently become very skeptical about anything working out in this regard. Here in Les Milles no visas have been handed out since the introduction of the recent American immigration regulations. There are about 1,300 people here, most of whom want to go to the U.S. There are repeated delaying tactics, and the moment the U.S. enters the war everything will come to a stop.
You can imagine that we are facing our third winter in France with quite a bit of horror. The food here is probably better than it was in Rivesaltes, but it’s very unbalanced and contains little fat. Nevertheless, we have gained some weight. Helmut’s weight, which went from 127 pounds down to 94 pounds in Rivesaltes, is now at 113 pounds, and my weight, which went from 136 to 104 pounds, is now at 112.
I think the worst of the horror is still to come, unless quite unexpected things were to happen. One must not think about it, and so work is the best medicine. I am deeply worried, though, in case we don’t get away from here before winter begins, about where we will get underwear and socks. CAR [the French committee on refugees] gave us a suit made of army material, which is warm, but no overcoats or underwear. I know that you and Uncle Max Markreich are doing everything possible to get us over there. Might personal appearances in Washington be possible?
We went to Marseille on Helmut’s birthday to ask the Quakers to look into the baggage we checked at the time in Martigny-les-Bains. But probably it will all be in vain. We saw many well-dressed people on our little outing, and in honor of the day we went to eat in a simple decent restaurant. I gave Helmut some French stamps as a present. He would be very grateful to you for any stamps you can collect for him.
I hope to hear from you shortly. Many good wishes and love, Yours, Father
On the following day, September 23, Helmut wrote to his brother and sister-in-law.
Dear Rosemarie, dear Günther,
Many thanks for your perfectly beautiful and dear letters! We’re already waiting for your next one. You don’t know how thankful you should be to be on the other shore!! We’re so glad to have you over there because it’s the only way we can have a somewhat better prospect of getting there too. The bad thing is, however, that because of the new regulations no one here has received his visa. Indeed, even those who had been promised a visa by a certain date before the new decrees went into effect are still waiting for further confirmation. In addition, we’re afraid that open war will be declared between the U.S. and Germany—perhaps even as soon as today—and our last chance will become invalid. In spite of all your efforts we shall probably have to put up, for better or worse, with a third—and I hope our last—wartime winter.
For a month now I have been taking a three-times-a-week book-binding course here in Les Milles, which gives me much pleasure now and may prove useful later. Please save all postage stamps you can get for me, from all countries, used as well as new ones, worthless as well as valuable ones. I had to start collecting all over again, so I need practically everything.
I think of you often and wish you all the best, especially of course that you’ll be hired by an orchestra soon. That’s it for today. Love, yours, Helmut
By the way, practically all the letters that arrive here have been examined by Wehrmacht Headquarters.
As it happened, Günther and Rosemarie (by now George and Rosemary) were hired by an orchestra, though not one anybody would recognize. Since arriving in the New World in June, they’d managed to scrape together a meager living, my mother as a domestic and my father as a worker in a factory that polished and reconditioned old zippers. Between them, they earned twenty-six dollars a week, enough to enable them to rent their own apartment on 103rd Street near Columbus Avenue in New York City. But they continued to practice their instruments in their free time, and toward the end of the summer, they learned about a Chicago-based traveling orchestra that was looking for new recruits. The ensemble’s founder and conductor, a Czech-born musician named Bohumir Kryl, was to hold auditions in New York for a tour of the Midwest and South that was scheduled to last from mid-September until shortly before Christmas.
George and Rosemary eagerly made appointments to audition for Mr. Kryl in his hotel room. They were both hired, with a combined salary of forty-five dollars a week, and on September 15, 1941, just days before Alex and Helmut wrote their letters from Camp des Milles, my father and mother went out on the road in the Kryl Orchestra’s rattletrap school bus. For the next twelve weeks, they gave concerts in such towns as Springfield, Ohio; Springfield, Illinois; and Springfield, Missouri; Terre Haute and Evansville, Indiana; Knoxville and Nashville, Tennessee; Little Rock and Jonesboro, Arkansas; Monroe and Shreveport, Louisiana; and Lubbock, Amarillo, Austin, San Antonio, and Galveston, Texas. They were always on the move and, understandably from their youthful point of view, found next to no time either to write to Alex and Helmut or to write letters and fill out immigration forms on their behalf.
But Alex’s brother-in-law Max Markreich continued his tireless efforts to alert any authorities he could find to the plight of these two souls caught in the snares of Camp des Milles. In the autumn of 1941, as George and Rosemary were touring with the Kryl Orchestra, Uncle Max wrote to the International Relief Association, Inc. (IRA) and to the Refugee and Immigration Division of Agudath Israel Youth Council in Brooklyn. The answers were disheartening.
From the IRA came this response: “As much as we would like to help in cases like yours we are unable to do so, firstly because we are still trying to raise sufficient funds to be able to pay for those refugees for whom we have obtained visas, and secondly our committee is pledged to help only active anti-fascist non-Communist refugees who are especially endangered.”
Then, on November 3, 1941, Uncle Max heard from Agudath Israel. “Dear Mr. Markreich,” the letter began:
Due to the recent decision of the Department of State in Washington, we regret to advise that all immigration work and any problems pertinent to it have come to a total standstill. Until further notice from the State Department as to the new procedures in the immigration situation we will be unable to render any additional advice and help. With Torah greetings, Harry Sherer, Refugee and Immigration Division.
As they had feared, Alex and Helmut were forced to endure a third winter in French captivity. On January 1, 1942, Alex observed his sixty-third birthday within the confines of Camp des Milles. On the following day, he penned an angry letter to the son from whom he had heard nothing all autumn, the son in whom he had invested so much hope and trust.
Dear Günther,
The day before yesterday I, at last, received your long-awaited letter. Thank you for your good wishes for my 63rd birthday; I send them back to you as 1942 New Year’s wishes. I am very glad that you are doing well, above all that after all your strenuous exertions you were in good health, and I hope that you still are today. I would have written you long ago, that is after the 7th of November when my last letter was mailed, if only I had received a single line from you since the 5th of September. About 4 weeks ago I thought it was ridiculous, as I told Helmut that I probably would not hear from you until my birthday. Unfortunately, however, it turned out I was right.
Look, dear Günther, you write us at best one page saying that you understand our lot and implore us not to despair. If after 2½ years of internment we would indeed be on the point of despairing, which is in itself quite possible after all this disheartening, bleak time, then your nice words would change nothing. I see nothing but words, nice words, suitable for a magazine that thinks it’s giving its readers encouragement. They are the same words I heard when I came home on furlough, spoken by those who had not heard the whistle of bullets during the First World War. But that you believe you have to give us that kind of lecture really appalled me, so after thinking about it for hours the last two nights I came to the conclusion that you haven’t the slightest inkling of our situation.
In June, the last month we were in Rivesaltes, after we each had lost about ⅓ of our weight, we were at a point where I thought we would not live to see the winter. Then, just in the nick of time, the affidavit from Uncle Max Markreich arrived and resulted in our transfer to Les Milles. For 4 months I worked from early until late at night as an assistant in or outside the kitchen, mostly in the broiling sun, the oldest among 25 people, until I got an infection in my right hand that lasted 6 weeks. It was not only painful but handicapped me considerably. Since the work is still done outside—and the temperature has been between 10 and 20 degrees F in the mornings—and with the meager pay of 45 fr a week, for which one can’t even buy one loaf of bread, I decided not to go back to work there after my hand healed.
Recently, although the food here has become wretched, I have recuperated so that I now weigh 120 pounds, still 15–20 pounds less than in the old days. Helmut also has regained a good part of the weight he lost, but unfortunately since we left Germany he has had 10 throat infections, the last one 14 days ago. And sometime this week his tonsils are supposed to be surgically removed in neighboring Aix-en-Provence; then he will presumably be less prone to infection. We wouldn’t have decided to do this if the newly arrived doctor had not recommended it as absolutely imperative. The worst thing is that we haven’t any underwear or coats. When our underwear is being washed, we actually have to go to bed since we don’t have a change of underwear. What was previously called de-lousing is very problematical since the disinfection cars are so old; they probably date back to World War I, so the young breed of vermin isn’t even killed.
We live from one mail delivery to the next; the mail is distributed at 2:00 PM and if you receive nothing one day then you hope for something the next day. So when I realized you hadn’t sent us any news between September 9th and November 30th, you can understand why I was very sad about that. And your birthday letter could have been written by any stranger since there is no personal information about you in it except for telling me what states you played in! Helmut is just as sad about all this as I am. It is the first very serious disappointment I have experienced in one of my children.
Well. Yesterday morning Helmut, who is still my best comrade as he has been from the start, gave me half a day’s ration—c. 110 grams—of bread, an orange, and a fountain pen bought with the pay he received for work he performed in the spring in Rivesaltes as a medical assistant. The pen is very simple, no golden penpoint, but it will last a few years. He was very dear and made the day really festive. On January 1st, 1941, we slept on wooden cots without straw in Agde; in 1940, in Sionne, with the temperature 10 below zero F, we slept in a large room on stones and litter; this year we sleep in a room of an old brick factory. Still, it’s better than the two previous years!
For today, with love, yours, Father
One week later, on January 8, two days after Rosemary’s twenty-fifth birthday, Helmut added his words of reproach to his father’s indictment. “Dear Günther,” he wrote,
I don’t really know how to go about writing this. That is to say, would it be better to write candidly or should I hold back my thoughts and feelings? But since I assume you’re still the same person you used to be, I won’t force myself to hold anything back. I am so glad that you two have already hit it off so well in social and artistic matters as well as in material things. Of course I know that your touring was enormously strenuous and I know, too, that on the material side, even though you are earning good money, it’s not enough to put anything aside. But your letter, well, it wasn’t an appropriate New Year’s and birthday letter for your Father and Brother! You don’t write anything about what must have been very satisfying experiences for you—nothing about your work, nothing about the country and people and the many impressions that you formed in the New World. No, you don’t seem to realize how a prisoner waits for letters from those close to him! I don’t wish to complain, for I know that at this time there are millions of people who would be grateful to have an existence like the one we have here for the duration of the war. In addition, our situation has improved. We are less hungry and more optimistic. But being called martyrs of trampled justice without having done anything to build up a new justice because one is merely a passive victim is little consolation, because we want to live—to live in the full meaning of the word. That kind of “hero-ization” seems terribly ironic to us, just as it would seem a mockery to a soldier who receives a gleaming Knight’s Cross for having his legs frozen off.
After a quarter year in which you made us wait in vain for mail, we are very disappointed with your letter. It contained almost nothing except excuses, even though we did not complain to you about anything. In spite of your being so overworked, it is almost unnatural that you found no time to write us. I hope you understand this letter in its proper sense and that perhaps by now you will already have found the time and peace and quiet to let us participate differently in your life. After all, right after your arrival in New York along with Max Markreich you demonstrated that where there is a will there is a way!
I do hope that it is not now too late. It seems that cases that have already been approved in Washington now have to be checked over if the visa has not yet been issued. Even the consulate here in Marseille doesn’t know what they require now. I’m afraid that because of the new regulations immigration for us has in effect been blocked. So for the moment I believe more in a European miracle than an American one. Of course, as always, I hope that we will soon see each other again—for many reasons! But at the moment, I don’t believe it will happen.
There isn’t much news to report about us. Ever since the war began I have had 8–12 more or less serious sore throats, and so I am going to have a tonsil operation next week. I will be glad to be freed at last from these constant infections. Rosemarie, I thought of you on your birthday and I send you many good wishes. I hope your own personal wishes as well as ours will be fulfilled! All the best! Best regards to both of you.
Yours, Helmut
Write to us, don’t keep us waiting!! And don’t forget to put interesting stamps on your letters!
By this time, my father and mother were back in New York City, their tour with Bohumir Kryl having ended precipitously a month earlier. On December 7, 1941, as the Kryl bus was approaching Brownsville, Texas, on U.S. Highway 77, federal police ordered it to halt and demanded that the passengers identify themselves. George and Rosemary still had their German passports with them, documents that prominently displayed the sign of the swastika. The two were immediately taken into custody, and the police phoned Washington to determine whether they had just nabbed a couple of German spies posing as musicians. Not until the following morning did the Immigration Office cable Brownsville and clear their names.
That night, Mr. Kryl announced that he had run out of money and the rest of the tour was canceled. Furthermore, he said, the bus was staying with him and the musicians were all responsible for finding their own way home. George and Rosemary, not wanting to spend their modest recent savings on transportation, decided to hitchhike. With their instruments under their arms and their thumbs in the air, thanks to the kindness of strangers they covered the two thousand miles between south Texas and New York City in time to return to their little apartment on 103rd Street a few days before Christmas.
A few weeks later, they received those searing letters from Les Milles. It is true that their peripatetic existence of the previous months must have made regular correspondence difficult, but his father and brother’s accusations of indifference and selfishness must have caused my father to feel the deepest wounds of guilt, sorrow, and remorse. Spurred into action, he, too, was able to procure an affidavit on behalf of Alex and Helmut. He sent that welcome news, along with the sum of twenty-five dollars, to Camp des Milles. On March 21, 1942, Alex wrote a grateful and hopeful letter back.
Dear Günther and dear Rosemarie, thank you for doing as much as you could to get that affidavit. I hope that the documents are now complete and have arrived at the State Department in Washington. The main thing now is that the visas be granted; they say the first visa since December was granted yesterday in Marseille. If the State Department will actually send us the visas or notify the Consul, I would ask to be telegraphically informed so that I can get the necessary ship bookings. It would be a deliverance for us.
We two are well although we have had to suffer through a severe winter, without coats, without being able to change or wash our underwear which is in rags. Helmut had several episodes of sore throat again and was supposed to go to a hospital in Aix-en-Provence in the middle of January to have his tonsils removed. After 4 days of observation in the hospital, he was sent back and the operation was postponed to a warmer season. Otherwise our lives follow their accustomed path; in addition to the constant worry about our loved ones, we now have to concentrate on keeping ourselves healthy. Besides its poor quality the food here is absolutely insufficient in quantity, so that if you couldn’t get some extra food you’d go downhill fast. For months, both at noon and in the evening, there was only soup, white beets or red beets or Jerusalem artichokes or sweet potatoes, and each variety was served by itself for a very long time. In the final analysis, if we had not been able to occasionally get some additional food thanks to our meager earnings we would not have survived this period of internment which by now has lasted more than 30 months—unfortunately many others did not.
Today, except for the early morning hours, we are having a hot Sunday. I am writing this letter outdoors. On the whole the climate here is good, whereas in Rivesaltes in the Pyrenees there were storms; the Mistral virtually saps your strength. I will bless the day that brings us freedom again. At my age, every month spent under the current conditions shortens one’s life, and it is time that the portals to freedom be opened for us, so that we’re not all used up before it finally comes to pass. Therefore, do everything you can to get us out.
For today then, with love and in the hope that we’ll be seeing each other again soon, Yours, Father.
Helmut added some lines of his own to his father’s letter:
The emigration problem looked dismal until a few days ago: not a single person under the German quota has received a visa since the middle of December. Now in the last few days the reports that have come from over there, much like yours, sound more favorable. And today they said that as of yesterday visas for the German quota were again being issued in Marseille. I hope that in the meantime our second affidavit has reached Washington and has been approved. If so, then it no longer seems completely impossible for us to be able to get to America. Perhaps you’re right, and a miracle will happen when one least expects it. That would be wonderful! If only we knew that Mother is safe and if only we could be certain that one day, in the not-too-distant future, we would be reunited with her. Because Eva is working, she and Eva seem to be somewhat protected from deportation; whereas she thinks that unfortunately the danger to your mother, dear Rosemarie, is greater.
The most unpleasant aspect of our present existence is the fact that primitive things like eating, washing, etc., turn into problems that must be solved repeatedly and that therefore take much more time than one would wish. And yet I try to make as much use of the time of my “imprisonment” which would otherwise be lost. So I am taking part in various courses, language courses (Spanish among others), an electro course. In addition I work in the camp’s primitive book bindery and attend various lectures—one about the development of European Intellectual History “From Homer to Goethe,” one about U.S. History, etc. I am very sad that you have not received the letter we sent in early November; in it were detailed reports about the cultural events in the camp such as concerts, lectures, performances, etc. At the moment I’m reading Shakespeare plays. After having read Othello and Macbeth I am now reading King Lear, and with growing admiration Tolstoy’s War & Peace.
Warmly, yours, Helmut
In the early spring of 1942, my parents were employed for the first time in the United States as legitimate professional musicians when they were hired by the Southern Symphony Orchestra of Columbia, South Carolina. The engagement was for several weeks in May and June, when the orchestra gave outdoor concerts in a festival setting. They wrote excitedly of their plans to Alex and Helmut, but when they took the train from New York to Columbia, they did not get off in Washington to knock on the doors of congressional offices on Capitol Hill, where fateful decisions about visas were being made every day. Instead, when they arrived in Columbia, they sent the captives fifty dollars. In the middle of May, they received a letter from Helmut that hinted at all the bureaucratic obstacles he and his father faced as they worked at their release.
Dear Günther, dear Rosemarie, many thanks for your kind and interesting letter. I’m sure you want to know right away what our current emigration prospects are, and so I will begin with that. The authorizations received from Washington, even for those under the German quota, are slowly increasing in number. Thus one day we might also be among them. In any case, we are obtaining the necessary documents so that in case of a “Convocation” we don’t lose any time. We have already received the police certificates of good conduct from Martigny-les-Bains and Montauban, but we are still waiting for the extract from the police records for which we have already paid the Vichy fees. ‘Wait!’ continues to be our slogan.
When we received your letter I was lying in the infirmary, silent as a fish. A very capable young specialist from here removed my tonsils on April 24th. For a couple of days I was not allowed to speak or eat anything except ice. But in the meantime I’ve recovered quite well, which I owe in large part to the Quakers, who saw to it that I had canned milk and sugar. I am glad that it’s finally been done!
I can understand why you are happy to have made such a good start with the Southern Symphony Orchestra, but I am also very curious to hear about your other activities. The things you write about Negroes in the southern states is very interesting. I can well understand that it would seem strange. Here in southern France one also sees quite a few Negroes who seem to enjoy equal rights socially. Besides the many altogether smart-looking black soldiers, one sees various colored people with fine facial features and hands who often seem to be involved in a variety of intellectual professions. As for my personal attitude toward Negroes and other colored people, I have always tried to see primarily the human being in every homo sapiens. I must admit that it has always been especially unpleasant for me when, as a ‘captive,’ I had to obey a black guard. But perhaps that is also a natural reminder of an ever-present national consciousness.
However things stand, we have to be thankful at least to be here, where to be sure we’re not safe and where we are concentrated in camps, but without being subjected to anti-Semitism or persecution. What a lot we’ll have to tell one another once we’re all sitting around the same table again!! How much longer? Sometimes I think it will all be over sooner than we generally suppose, at least in Europe. But I can’t understand why you spent two days in Philadelphia at the invitation of a former colleague, whereas you didn’t even take two hours to see the beautiful city of Washington! We hear again and again that something can actually be accomplished there through the personal intervention of relatives. Possibly those involved had ways and means you don’t have. But the chance that you could have interested someone in our case was surely not so remote that a stay of more than two hours would not have been worthwhile. You have to admit this is true and you must understand that we were very disappointed!
There’s still a lot I could write you, to say nothing about the things one can only say face to face! I don’t want us to have to go through another winter under these conditions, especially when I think of Father, but there have been frequent periods when he had even less resistance than he has now. Please let us hear from you regularly. We wait so anxiously for word from you, and the days when we receive good news are always the most beautiful! Love, yours, Helmut
In early June, George and Rosemary returned to New York. Almost immediately, George wrote to Washington, requesting a meeting with an immigration official to discuss the case of his relatives in France. Within ten days, he received a reply, informing him that an appointment had been arranged for the second week in November. On June 7, Max Markreich again petitioned the Refugee and Immigration Division of Agudath Israel. In filling out yet another lengthy form, he wrote on the line marked “Destination in United States and Purpose of Entrance”: “New York, later Middle West. Beginning of a new life.”
A few days later, my father received another envelope from Les Milles that contained letters from both Alex and Helmut, dated June 9, 1942.
Dear Günther and Rosemarie,
Your description of the city of Columbia, its landscape and people, interested me very much. It reminded me somewhat of the novel “Gone With the Wind,” which of course takes place for the most part in and around Atlanta (Georgia). Fortunately, I can report to you that we are both well. Helmut has recovered from his tonsil operation and has recuperated. For about 4 weeks now he has been working 5 days a week in the Quaker kitchen which was recently set up for about ⅓ of the camp inmates. His bonus, on top of the basic portion of food, benefits me too. For about the same time I have been on barrack room duty for about 60 people living in our room, for which I get a small payment with which I can buy about 1 kilogram of dried peas a week. I pick up and distribute meals and bread (more than 38 stops) and receive a food bonus, although in many cases it’s scarcely worthwhile but still does make a difference. After having been so worn down at the beginning of spring, I now feel better and weigh, dressed, about 120 pounds. That’s still far too little but I hope to be able to catch up again. If I can’t gain more weight, I don’t think I will be able to live through a fourth winter.
About 8 days ago we received 2,150 Francs through the Quaker office in Marseille, without any indication of who the sender was. Since I assume you are responsible, I thank you very, very much. With the money we bought, because it was urgently necessary, a suitcase, a pair of used shoes for Helmut, and a hat for me—for I haven’t had one for two years.
Dear Günther, I don’t wish to sound ungrateful for this gift, but it occurs to me again that if you really knew our situation you would have helped us even more long ago. You had decent engagements for months, and if you had put away 50 cents for us every day during that time it would have helped us immensely. You surely want us to come over; but if I am no longer able to support Mother and myself because of ill health and lack of strength, then I don’t want to become a burden to my children. You have seen to it that we received another affidavit, for which we are grateful. But if you had personally gone to the State Department Immigration Office on your way through Washington in May, we would probably have had our visas long ago and perhaps we’d be in the same position as others on whose behalf personal efforts were made.
I have described our situation for you several times. This will be the last time. If you don’t move heaven and earth to help us, that’s up to you, but it will be on your conscience. It won’t be long before Helmut, who is still growing, will no longer be able to exist under the present conditions without permanent damage—this is a fact, and no words need be wasted on it. I find it very touching: often he has literally divided his last piece of bread with me. I have been very frank today, and I would regret it if you were angry with me, but an honest word can also be binding rather than divisive.
In the last few days we have had hot weather here; the vermin plague, in particular fleas and bedbugs, has become very severe. Helmut, undaunted, continues to work at the big cooking kettles in spite of the heat. Today he had a day off and slept almost all afternoon after going to his book-binding course in the morning. It has been reliably reported that those over 60 will be released if 9,000 francs are deposited for their livelihood. But I want to stay with Helmut in the hope that the hour of freedom will ring for us in the not-too-distant future. For today, many loving regards and good wishes. Yours, Father
On the back of the first sheet of Alex’s letter were these lines from Helmut:
Dear Rosemarie and dear Günther,
Since Father has already reported to you in detail, I just want to add my warm regards and good wishes. I’m sure we’ll get a letter from you in the next few days; we’re eagerly waiting for it! Perhaps we shall receive the long-awaited Visa! Father is counting on it. Oh, what stories we could tell you then!! I’m sure I don’t have to emphasize that Father and I help each other out wherever we can and on the whole we are good friends.
That’s all for today. Next time I’ll write more! Yours, Helmut
If everything suddenly works out, we could arrive at your place a few weeks after this letter reaches you!
It would be the last letter from his father and brother that my father would receive.
For some months, French Minister of State Pierre Laval had made no secret of his distaste for the so-called “undesirables,” the foreign refugees, most of them Jews, who had made their way into France since the persecutions in Germany and Austria in 1938 and the massive German defeat of the Low Countries in 1940. In a memo sent to French diplomats, Laval declared that “the population of Hebrew stock has reached an excessive proportion”; they “form a manifestly dangerous element” who “engage in the black market and in Gaullist and communist propaganda, constituting for us a source of trouble to which we must put an end.” “The only way to conjure away this danger,” Laval concluded, was “to repatriate these individuals to Eastern Europe, their country of origin.”
The French conjuring began on Jeudi noir, Black Thursday, July 16, 1942. On that day and the next, the police in Paris rounded up more than thirteen thousand Jewish men, women, and children who were not yet French citizens and took them to a number of assembly points. These included police stations, gymnasiums, schools, and—most infamously—the indoor bicycle track called the Winter Velodrome, Vélodrome d’Hiver, or the Vél d’Hiv. From there, these undesirables, each allowed no more than two suitcases, were sent off on packed trains to the East.
Within a few weeks, it became apparent that all the hopes marshaled for months by the inmates of the camps within what was still referred to as Unoccupied France had been hanging on the thinnest of threads, and that the thread was now to be severed. In early August, Joseph Schwartz of the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee cabled to the Joint headquarters in New York from his post in Lisbon the ominous news that all exit visas for Jews had been suspended. On August 6, James Bernstein, the European director of HIAS, the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society of America, sent the following cable to New York:
FOREIGN OFFICE ORDERED ALL VISAS PREVIOUSLY GRANTED CANCELLED STOP NEW APPLICATIONS MUST GO THROUGH FOREIGN OFFICE NOT PREFECTURE AS FORMERLY STOP SITUATION REFUGEES UNOCCUPIED FRANCE TRAGIC STOP
The Vichy government had begun the process of delivering about ten thousand foreign Jews into the hands of the Nazis, most of them from the Centres National de Rassemblement des Israélites, the National Centers for the Gathering of Jews. Two of these centres were Rivesaltes and Les Milles. On August 5, René Bousquet, the secretary general of the French police and the man whose friendship with Emil Poult had brought Alex and Helmut to Montauban two years earlier, sent a confidential memo to all local authorities in the Unoccupied Zone in which he outlined detailed instructions for the operation. The dispatch forbade the deportation of Jews of more than sixty years of age.
Nevertheless, on the afternoon of Monday, August 10, both Alex and Helmut were among more than 270 Jews—those whose last names began with the letters A through G—who were ordered to assemble under the hot sun in the courtyard of Camp des Milles. They were then marched about a quarter mile to a railroad siding and loaded into boxcars. An eyewitness reported, “They were cattle cars, strewn with bunches of straw. In each car, a jug of water and a bucket to serve as a toilet.” Another witness, Pastor Henri Manen, wrote in his journal, “All around me the police are ghostly pale. One of them will say to me the next day, ‘I have been in the colonies, I have been in China, I have seen massacres, war, famines. I have seen nothing as horrible as this.’”
The cars’ doors were sealed tight, with so many men in each car that it was impossible to do anything but stand packed together. The train stayed motionless all night in the stifling August heat. The next morning, August 11, the train rolled north to—in the words of author and Holocaust historian Susan Zuccotti—“a camp in a town on the outskirts of Paris that was soon to become a familiar and dreaded word in Jewish households: Drancy.”
MONDAY, JUNE 6, 2011. The Provençal sun, so elusive during our days of rest in Saint-Rémy, shines brightly this morning out of a deep blue sky. At 10:00 a.m., we drive up to the gates of Camp des Milles and, after giving our names to a guard, are waved through to a parking area adjacent to a bustling building site. Like Rivesaltes, Camp des Milles is being transformed into a memorial museum; unlike Rivesaltes, it enjoys substantial government and corporate support, with a glossy brochure boasting words of encouragement from Elie Wiesel. Last week, Rivesaltes was a vast, empty, lonely expanse; today at Camp des Milles, it is hard to avoid workers in hard hats and bright yellow vests as they swarm through the courtyard and the interior of the old brick factory.
I pause as I get out of the car and gaze silently for a long minute at this hulking building, essentially unchanged from when Alex wrote his last letter to my father almost sixty-nine years ago. He existed here as a prisoner for thirteen hellish months. I have come here at my leisure. Yet again, I find the contrast to be nearly unbearable.
A pretty young woman on the staff of the Fondation du Camp Des Milles, Katell Gouin, comes out to greet us, followed soon after by Odette Boyer, the director of the memorial project. They will take us on a tour of the factory and the proposed museum. As a prelude, they hand each of us a hard hat and a fluorescent vest like those worn by the construction workers and ask us to select a pair of steel-tipped boots to wear as we make our way through the rubble-strewn site. Katell carries a flashlight. Properly outfitted, we walk across the courtyard and into the dark interior of the brick factory.
We pause to allow our eyes, so recently splashed with sun, to become adjusted to the gloom. I use that time to once again try to transport myself into the past, to experience this place as my relatives did when it both sheltered and confined them seven decades ago. We set off single file down a corridor until Katell shines her flashlight above our heads to an archway on which we can make out Greek-style masks of tragedy and comedy flanking the words Die Katakombe. These decorations are what remain of the little theater devised by the internees in the factory’s main brick oven. Katell tells us that there were additional designs on the theater’s interior walls, probably some paintings by Max Ernst, but that they were destroyed when The Catacombs was reconverted to a brick oven after the war.
We walk another few yards to the workshop where bricks were once molded, a high-ceilinged space where the camp’s courses and lectures were offered. Here, I reflect, Uncle Helmut studied bookbinding, learned about Homer and Goethe, and discussed Macbeth, for whom in his agony life became “but a walking shadow,” an image that must have held particular resonance for Helmut in this twilit world of flickering candles. Katell directs our attention to four smaller ovens, which served as sleeping quarters for some of the camp’s inmates, and I find myself thinking about the awful irony of these poor unfortunates coming to an early familiarity with ovens. We then climb the wooden stairs to the factory’s second floor, where hundreds of men—Alex and Helmut among them—made their humble beds of straw night after endless night. Which corner was theirs, I wonder, what little portion of this dim dusty expanse did they claim as their refuge when they returned after a day working in the kitchen or wandering the courtyard to lie on their backs and gaze at the blue painted windows as they hoped against hope for their liberation? I lean wearily against a concrete pillar and gratefully feel Amy’s comforting hand in mine.
Katell again leads the way as we clump back downstairs and emerge, blinking, into the brilliant sunshine. We trade in our work boots for our own shoes, return our vests and hard hats, and follow Katell into a separate building that once served as the guards’ dining room and today is known as the Room of Murals, a reminder both humorous and poignant of the notable array of artists who were imprisoned here. Each of the room’s four walls displays colorful frescos rendered lovingly and in great detail, the subject of which is food, bounteous food.
The Banquet of Nations, one of the remarkable frescos painted by one of Camp des Milles’s inmates more than seventy years ago, now on display in the museum’s Room of Murals.
One painting depicts a procession of blue-skinned figures bearing plates that groan under the weight of immense sausages, cheeses, artichokes, and succulent fish, while others carry overflowing barrels of wine. Another wall features the words “Si vos assiettes ne sont pas très garnies, puissant nos dessins vous calmer l’appétit,” or “If your plates are not very full, may our drawings calm your appetite.” The most imposing painting, called The Banquet of Nations, offers a droll echo of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper, with men representing many nationalities dining on dishes from their various homelands: an Italian with a forkful of spaghetti, a Chinese man eating rice with chopsticks, an Inuit consuming blubber, an Indian in a turban swallowing fire, an Englishman in the guise of Henry the Eighth about to enjoy a plate of roast beef. The Banquet’s painter was soon to be murdered in Auschwitz.
At this point, Katell concludes our tour by leading Amy and me out of the gates of Camp des Milles and along a roughly quarter-mile path to a railroad siding containing a single boxcar from a 1940s-era train. I am intensely aware that at this moment, for all my figurative travels these past weeks in the footsteps of Alex and Helmut, I am quite literally walking the same Via Dolorosa they followed on August 10, 1942. Did they know their fate, I ask myself numbly. As if reading my mind, Katell points back to the factory and tells us that during those terrible days in August and September when about two thousand people were shipped to Drancy, dozens of inmates, who could clearly see the teeming siding from their vantage point, chose to jump to their deaths from the factory’s top floor rather than join the majority.
The single boxcar that stands at the railway siding at the museum, representing the trains that transported roughly two thousand prisoners to Drancy in the summer and fall of 1942.
Katell swings open the door to the boxcar and we step inside. It’s a bright warm day, but probably no more than seventy-five degrees. Even so, it is stiflingly hot within the car, and we are only three. I try to imagine what it would feel like to be among more than a hundred people jammed together with the door sealed shut, the boxcar standing still all night before beginning its journey northward. And my grandfather and uncle among the damned.
Fearing that I might sink to my knees and start to weep, I stumble out the door and back onto the safety of the siding. My mind suddenly rings with those words of warning and remonstrance sent by Alex and Helmut to my father in the New World: “I think the worst of the horror is still to come.” “It is almost unnatural that you found no time to write us.” “Do everything you can to get us out.” “I can’t understand why you spent two days in Philadelphia but couldn’t spend two hours in Washington.” “If you don’t move heaven and earth to help us, that’s up to you, but it will be on your conscience.”
Those words resound like curses, and I clasp my head in my hands and stagger down the siding to a low iron fence, trying to squeeze them from my memory. I am suddenly furious with my father for his inattention and neglect, and then a moment later, awash in pity for the unbearable guilt he must have carried to his dying breath. Trying to think of anything else, I recall Helmut’s repeated requests for stamps . . . and then remember how my father helped me start my own stamp collection when I was a boy, how he would often come home from work with little clear plastic packages of commemorative stamps from faraway lands like New Zealand, Egypt, or Togo. Was he trying, in a feeble way, to redeem himself?
At that moment, in that terrible place, I feel my father’s guilt bore into me. It hurts like a shard of jagged glass rasped against my flesh. But excruciating as it is, I realize to my shock that it is also painfully familiar. I know this feeling, I tell myself, as well as I know my reflection in any mirror. And I have known this feeling for as long as I can remember. It has brought me here, far too late for me to do any good. My father failed to save his father and his brother. I have failed to save my grandfather and my uncle. This is my inheritance: failure, sorrow, and guilt.
Amy is once more at my side, and hand in hand we begin a measured walk back to the old brick factory. But our steps only heighten my grief, as I reflect that Alex and Helmut were not afforded the choice of walking this path away from the boxcar. I am reminded of the passage in Catcher in the Rye when Holden Caulfield recalls his brother Allie’s funeral and then savagely says that it began to rain and all the mourners hurried off “someplace swanky for lunch,” leaving Allie alone in his grave. I tell myself that there is nothing I can do to alter this unspeakable history and that it will do no one any good if I rend my garments or sleep every night on a bed of nails out in the rain. But I feel such helplessness and exhaustion in the face of so much cruelty, ugliness, and depravity. All I can do, I conclude, is to resume the journey, to keep on following my relatives until the end. And then to tell their story.
We bid farewell to Katell and wish her well, along with her colleagues, and return to the Meriva. I avert my eyes from those of Alex and Helmut as they gaze accusingly at me from their place above the rearview mirror, and we drive slowly away.
On September 10, 2012, exactly seventy years after the last train left Les Milles bound for Drancy, the memorial museum was dedicated and officially opened by French Prime Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault.
