CHAPTER ONE

Undesirables

ALTHOUGH SEVERAL THOUSAND desperate people reached Martinique in 1940 and 1941, as Pierre-Charles Toureille’s figures make clear, the vast majority of those endangered remained in France. Many met tragic ends. Some did find alternative paths to safety in the Americas, Africa, or Asia, via Spain or Portugal; others reached Switzerland; a great many survived the war in mainland France, protected by valorous local guardians. Before delving into the Martinique escape route itself in Chapter 2, it therefore seems fitting first to review the situation in mainland France between 1938 and 1942, the fate of migrants stranded in the limbo of the so-called unoccupied zone, and the handful of other emigration options available to them. Indeed, most refugees placed Martinique on a short list of possible departure avenues that included Lisbon and North Africa. Rankings and opportunities on those lists changed as circumstances shifted over the course of 1941.

The Camps

Even before the German invasion of France in May 1940, in November 12, 1938, a decree of the French republic had specifically mandated that “undesirable foreigners” be interned in “specialized centers” and subjected to “close surveillance.”1 Internment camps sprang up around France. They were soon bursting at the seams with foreigners deemed “undesirable.” By 1938 they were full of Spanish Republicans who had fled across the Pyrenees as Francisco Franco’s forces gained the upper hand. Then, as France prepared for war in September 1939, a slew of new measures called for the internment of the “stateless,” as well as German and Austrian nationals, and of foreigners considered “suspicious, dangerous or undesirable.”2 A law dated November 18, 1939, granted French prefects the right to intern anyone suspected of posing a threat to national defense.
A great many of those targeted were leftists and other dissidents who had sought refuge in France, as well as Jews fleeing the Nazis. A blend of xenophobia heightened by the economic crisis, of anti-Semitism, and of mounting concern for a possible fifth column, be it German, Italian, or Spanish speaking, accounts in no small part for this backlash against refugees. And yet, paradoxically, the backlash occurred in a country that had been statistically “the foremost land of asylum in the world” over the course of the 1930s.3 Indeed, in 1933, while the League of Nations, and individual countries, dragged their heels on plans to establish quotas for an equitable division of Jewish refugees in particular, France’s doors remained relatively open, despite a surging anti-immigrant tide. Laurent Joly estimates that France admitted two hundred thousand Jewish immigrants between 1900 and 1940.4 Despite an undeniable backlash that took shape between 1933 and 1939, France had also opened its doors to tens of thousands of Russian, Armenian, and Italian refugees between the two world wars.5
France’s collapse at the hands of Germany in June 1940, and the chaos that ensued, further exacerbated the refugee crisis. France was unevenly carved in two, with an unoccupied zone (sometimes called the free zone) controlled by Vichy to the south, and a German-occupied zone to the north.
The camp archipelago that stretched across the unoccupied zone after July 1940 was certainly a legacy of the French Third Republic,6 a republic that committed suicide in Vichy’s casino on July 10, 1940, by handing full powers to octogenarian would-be savior figure Philippe Pétain. In the realm of camps, as in many others, the new regime inherited the republic’s infrastructure. Some of the makeshift camp buildings, such as the former tile factory in the case of Les Milles, had served as repositories for so-called enemy nationals since 1939. Others, such as Gurs and Saint-Cyprien in southwestern France, had been constructed in haste to house Spanish Republicans that same year. In fact, the inmates themselves built the camp of Saint-Cyprien. Sometimes, waves of different refugees rolled into the camps in rapid succession. In May 1940, as Adolf Hitler’s forces penetrated French defenses at Sedan, roughly ten thousand female refugees were tossed into the confines of Gurs, where they joined the 3,500 Spanish Republicans and 1,329 French Communists, as well as other “suspects” already present. Soon Gurs became one of the main internment centers for foreign Jews in the unoccupied zone. By the fall of 1940, some forty-five thousand individuals, approximately thirty-five thousand of them foreigners, were interned in Vichy camps in the unoccupied zone alone.7
Historians continue to debate to what extent Vichy marked a rupture from or represented continuity with the republic that preceded it, including in its treatment of foreign refugees.8 Certainly, Vichy utilized preexisting camps, personnel, and decrees to further its ends, although none of the laws passed before 1940 had been explicitly anti-Semitic.9 And, admittedly, the notion of refugees as a burden at best and dangerous undesirables at worst was nothing new in 1940, either. Yet the point remains that, until 1940, most refugees on French soil were not in mortal danger in the way they suddenly collectively became after the fall of France.
Concretely, the June 1940 armistice that Pétain sought and obtained from Germany, and the Vichy regime born from it, changed the refugee crisis on several counts. For one thing, thousands of refugees fled the German-controlled north for southern France. For another, the armistice’s article 19 stipulated that Vichy would have to “surrender on demand” any German or Austrian national wanted by the Nazis. Up until the Germans invaded the unoccupied zone in November 1942, the number of such handovers proved relatively and mercifully limited (only twenty-one in total at that point, thanks in part to heel dragging on the part of some Vichy officials; however, as we will see, Vichy also aimed to satisfy German demands by bypassing the armistice commission altogether).10 Yet it remained both a haunting menace for German exiles and a marker of Vichy’s dishonor and subservience. Additionally, in the wake of the armistice, Vichy transferred the network of camps from the purview of the Ministry of War to that of the Ministry of the Interior. This led to a drive to consolidate camps, and to numerous transfers of already exhausted refugees.11 Then too, to quote Anne Grynberg, Vichy “swept away the last barriers to arbitrary confinement” that had existed until that point, with an October 4, 1940, law that granted prefects considerable latitude to intern “foreigners of Jewish race” into camps.12 Moreover, material conditions in the camps deteriorated significantly after France’s defeat.
Last but not least, refugees, who up until then had been labeled “parasites” by xenophobic elements in France, now found themselves scapegoats for the defeat of 1940. In the perverse logic of the day, France’s collapse had not been military.13 Instead, France had fallen because of decay and rot; the Germans had simply toppled an already crumbling edifice. To many, the stateless, the anti-Nazi exiles, the Spanish Republicans, and especially the Jews were the source of the rot; or, at the very least, they needed to be cast aside as France regenerated.14 The question then became how to get rid of them; the answer would change over time, according to circumstance. In April 1941, Vichy’s first commissioner of Jewish affairs, Xavier Vallat, declared in the press that the “veritable legions” of foreign Jews who had caused “misery” to France would “likely be sent back” (refoulés).15
As Vicki Caron has shown, until July 1942, emigration remained Vichy’s tool of preference to resolve the refugee crisis, “preferably … emigration abroad, but as a last resort colonial options were to be considered as well.”16 In the Bouches-du-Rhône department, of which Marseille is the capital, the Vichy regime elaborated a clear mechanism to deal with refugees seeking asylum abroad. Already on October 10, 1940, the Ministry of the Interior had contacted prefectures about ways of ridding France of foreign refugees considered a burden to the nation (étrangers en surnombre). In a November 20, 1940, letter, the Ministry of the Interior instructed the prefect of the Bouches-du-Rhône to place refugees “awaiting emigration,” or in the process of obtaining visas for countries outside Europe, in the camp of Les Milles, outside Aix-en-Provence. The letter explicitly mentioned that Les Milles had been chosen for this purpose because of its proximity to the Spanish and Portuguese consulates in Marseille, consulates rightly considered the most likely to provide transit visas.17 Indeed, by March 1941, Les Milles even had its own designated emigration officer, Louis Gaude, who tried to tap into a wide range of departure channels.18
Like most camps, Les Milles’ function changed over time. First, in 1939, it was a camp to hold “undesirable foreigners”; then, by October–November 1940, it became a “transit” center for emigrants;19 and finally, by August 1942, it turned into an antechamber to Drancy, outside Paris, then to Auschwitz. Les Milles reflected the regime’s successive impulses first to isolate and marginalize, then to be rid of, and finally to deport refugees desperate to escape Hitler’s clutches.
Conditions in Vichy’s camps varied considerably but were on average very grim. Already in September 1940, the Red Cross reported that at the camp in Saint-Cyprien, young guards relentlessly kicked some of the elderly refugees ousted from Belgium.20 Local inhabitants sometimes proved no more charitable to the migrants. For instance, some of the Jewish refugees who reached the same camp in 1940 were greeted to cries of “Death to the German spies!”21 To make matters worse, lice, fleas, and flies tormented the inmates.22 Access to latrines was on average poor.23 By November 1942, the Red Cross reported that “undernourishment” in the camps was rampant. It estimated that one-third of all interned foreigners in the Vichy zone no longer had the strength to stand for more than ten minutes. Dysentery, tuberculosis, meningitis, and typhoid fever were also raging in some camps.24 A medic at Gurs observed that in addition to malnutrition, inmates suffered from the elements, as well as a lack of light and space.25 Crowded, unsanitary spaces were taking a heavy toll.
Before the first wave of deportations in 1942, refugees nevertheless managed to create a lively cultural and intellectual universe at Les Milles, trying their best to overcome the camp’s “soul-deadening” atmosphere.26 They organized an orchestra and book-binding, photography, language, and history workshops; assembled a library; even put on a drag show; and practiced sports.27
Yet escape remained their enduring obsession, reflected in their art. Already in 1939, German inmate Max Ernst had drawn two haunting figures representing “stateless” refugees in the camp, companions of his whom he reduced to metal files, so overwhelming was their will to decamp (figure 1).28
In the guards’ refectory at Les Milles, in 1941 an anonymous artist, most likely Karl Bodek, painted a curious mural detail, depicting sardines in the foreground and in the background a vessel that might spirit them away (figure 2). To the right, three stereotyped black “natives”—one bearing a spear—frolic in and around a pineapple. The scene, featuring a ship in the shape of a ham, likely evokes dual refugee fantasies: the dream of oceanic escape to some tropical haven (with the black characters in the pineapple as visual cues), together with culinary abundance. The ham may be of significance in its own right, considering both Jewish nutritional restrictions and the drawing’s location in the guard’s refectory. Bodek was a Jewish artist who had spent the interwar years in Vienna, before fleeing to Belgium. Like many expelled from Belgium during the German advance in 1940, he found himself interned at Gurs, before being transferred to Les Milles in April 1941. He was deported...