This is a long one.
In the United States, we have very set narratives about the world as it has existed since 1776. Whether angling for it or not, America is a mythos and an ethos on top of being a country. Everyone at least knows the brilliant and fiction-perfect story of the early 20th century in America, with it’s sudden economic disintegration being almost immediately solved by an earth-shattering and emotional war that produced the Greatest Generation and some of the most fertile storytelling grounds since the Trojan War.
Let’s be honest: for us, for Americans, World War Two was a good thing. We love it. We love to watch movies about it and read about it and talk about it. It made us a world power and nation of heroes. It’s such a fitting narrative, of a former underdog coming to the rescue of the poor and huddled masses of Jews, each GI and commander acting in the same good faith as Captain America himself.
I think the most important reason we love WW2 so much is because it’s the only genocide of the twentieth century that the United States government did not either have a direct hand in or implicitly allowed through passivity. Unlike Rwanda or Turkey or Pol Pot, it’s impressively clear cut. The protagonists and antagonists are so obvious that people my age now play video games fictionalizing the war and using Nazi soldiers as nameless baddies. (I feel I should include that the video game I am thinking of also casts the Nazis as zombies on the moon.)
We love it.
~
There is a small village called Les Milles about ten minutes outside of Aix. It’s quiet and low to the ground. Like most French villages, there is a little park with a statue in the middle listing the names of the village’s sons who died in World War One. A bus runs through every half hour or so to take people back and forth through the provence, but it’s mostly empty. The houses and shops are made from clay and red tile, and line charming small streets. I didn’t hear or see another person as I stepped off the bus. Not a single person on the sidewalk or looking out a window or driving a car. This makes sense; it was Market Day in Aix, and everyone was probably there.
The bus pulled away and I started walking. I made two turns before seeing the taller of the two smokestacks.
The blocks surrounding the building itself were completely empty, as though the town itself wanted distance between it and the former brick factory. It was pretty intimidating, anyway, and totally different from the rest of the village. It was easily the biggest structure for miles.
This was Camp de Milles. It’s where France put her Jews.
They called it the camp of artists, because before France fell to the Axis powers it was where German citizens living in France were imprisoned, and a lot of those people were artists. Violinists, satirists, playwrights, painters. During their handful of months in the camp’s holding block (the inside of massive abandoned brick-making kilns), they produced plays for each other, wrote poems and novels, painted on the walls by lantern light. I saw the charcoal flowers they used to cover banisters. I saw the elaborate paintings they made of each other in the walls. They absolutely covered the walls. They didn’t have much access to paper, you see. They put it up all around them.
Germany owned France by the summer of 1940. Anti-German sentiments morphed overnight to traditionalist anti-modernism and increasingly anti-Semitic posturing, as media became tightly regulated and the camp emptied of Germans. The headquarters of the French government moved to Vichy. Before the year was up, the camp was repopulated, this time entirely by people who were born, and whose parents were born, and whose parent’s parents were born, in France. The camp filled up with French Jews.
At first, it was on orders from Berlin. This was the way it had to be done: gather up your Jews and send them to us. Find your Jews and count them out and put them on trains. Send the trains to us. We won’t interfere at all.
Comparatively, it wasn’t a massive operation. Only about ten thousand Jews moved through Camp de Milles by the time the war ended. Those in charge kept very good records, and the writings of the imprisoned Jews were helpful to corroborate the notes of the dead later on. For instance, a day in which ten suicide attempts were recorded by prisoners is proven by gendarmes notes with the same information. That day, the prisoners had been notified that random selection would start in the afternoon for who would board the train to Auschwitz.
There’s walkable platforms on the highest level of the main building, with signs pointing to where people slept and gathered. It’s big and dark and similar to the top part of a barn, with slats of sunlight peeking through the high wooden ceiling and the echoes of pigeons. On one wall is carved a massive swastika, left there by a Jewish prisoner. On another, very low to the ground, right where a child would likely get bored enough to take a bit of charcoal and make their own fun, are drawings of ponies and little men, seashells and hearts. At the end of one platform I found an open window covered by a fishing net. It was big enough to easily fit myself through if I tried, and low enough that my thighs touched the ledge. The sign to my left informed me that it was through this window that most people jumped, as it was the highest. The most notable instance was on a day when the trains arrived to begin transport, and a young mother took her two children in her arms and threw them all to the ground.
There’s a word in French that does not exist in English which means to kill oneself by jumping from a window. Funnily, they didn’t use that word on the sign. I thought that this would have been a great moment for it.
I have yet to refer to this place as a concentration camp. It was not, strictly speaking, a concentration camp at all. It was an internment camp. This means that it was a midway point for Jews, a stop before finishing at a real concentration camp. Nobody was burned or gassed here. Plenty died, but not the way they almost all would later on. Every Jew that boarded a train out of Camp de Milles ended up in Auschwitz. Every one.
The lowest layer of the museum which now occupies this building is dedicated to a thorough examination of what led France to allow such awful things to happen to their own people. It’s a huge exhibit, with scale models and interactive posters and such. The conclusion that the museum drew is that the French people were people. Not cowards, not turncoats, not Nazis and not even racists. It turns out that people can get used to just about anything. Anybody can convince themselves that anything they do is forgivable. If everyone around you is doing it, and your boss is doing it, and doing it keeps you employed and your family fed, could it really be that bad?
The path of the exhibit leads you into this lull of passivity before jarring you back to horror with a small detail about the internment: Nazi Germany didn’t outright order Vichy France to assemble their Jews. At least, not at first. Gendarmes and mayors had already been sending people to Camp de Milles before orders came down the line. The worst is this: Berlin said that all Jewish children under the age of two could be left alone. Vichy offered them up anyway, as a token of goodwill.
I went there with a friend on a Saturday morning. Apart from us and the man who checked our bags, there was not another soul on the property. We wandered through the cold and moist underground kilns, up and around the women and children’s level (where the wind was worst), and out to the courtyard where people lined up to be counted.
The last level was titled Reflection. It featured three floor-to-ceiling screens that depicted comparisons of the Holocaust to the Rwandan and Armenian genocides, and begged the viewer to not fall prey to ideology and fearmongering that turns humans into parasites and good people into executioners.
This is what the French learned: we, each of us, are capable of mass murder. It was our passivity that created this nightmare. World War Two was not a battle between good guys and Nazis. The people who did those horrible things were made of the same stuff as the people they killed and the people they fought against. Above all, this can happen again, and has already happened since. It isn’t over.
France learned a different story than what we learned. They have no heroes from the war, no comic book supers. I’m not sure our lesson has produced any positive results. In what do we now grow complicit? Who is ostracized? Who profits from this, and why, and how? Who is the next target? Who have we now decided is less human than us? It seems as though, because we don’t know what it collectively feels like to be part of genocide, we’re willing to continue down a road that ends in it. But then again, is France doing much better than us? Who among today’s Allied powers has a clean slate?
~
There is a maze at the end of the museum. You can choose to not go through it and head straight for the gift shop. The maze walls are covered from top to bottom in names and photos, when photos could be found. Above the names, by section, are towns, like Nice, Marseille, Paris. This explains from where the names originate. Where the names were born. All the names in the maze died before they grew up, mostly in death camps. All the names used to belong to Jewish French children. You’re meant to get lost.
Cordialement,
Allison
P.S.: I haven’t said all I want to here, only just all I thought I could get out. Be sure to subscribe for more fun and quirky updates from this college student’s trip to France.
Flan in France 