Memorial, Rivesaltes

Today we visited the new museum at Camp Joffre near Rivesaltes, officially inaugurated in October after a decade or so of work by people dedicated to preserving this shameful piece of French history.

The camp started life as a military base but was swiftly pressed into service in early 1940 to house thousands of fleeing Spanish refugees, in deplorable conditions. The camp is on a desolate plain offering no shelter from the wind off the mountains, bone-chilling in winter, arid and baking hot in summer. The huts are flimsy shelters, not much better than cowsheds, and sewerage and plumbing were conspicuous by their absence. Disease, malnutrition and starvation were rife. 

Post-Vichy, the camp was a handy place to detain "undesirables", guilty of no crime other than being communists, gipsies, or Jews. In  1942, eager to fill a quota of Jews to deport, the Vichy regime used Joffre as a collection point, going so far as to recall children from the children's homes they had been sent to, "in order to reunite families" -- so that the entire family could then be shipped east for extermination.

And finally, in 1962, taken by surprise by the entirely predictable fact that after a bitter war of independence in Algeria, Algerians who'd worked for the hated colonial power would flee to France, fearing for their lives, the French government once more opened up the increasingly dilapidated site, initially housing the refugees in tents.

The museum is superb, the best I've been to for a long time. It's housed in a vast, dimly lit underground hall reached via a long, narrow corridor; the sober, rectilinear architecture (by Rudi Ricciotti) provides a perfect context. We tend to think of museums as repositories of objects, but there are very few objects here. Six large screens on the walls project images of the various conflicts that brought people here. Below them, tablets on little stands allow visitors to choose from dozens of brief video interviews with survivors of the camp. At one end, video maps with commentary place them in the context of refugee movements throughout the world since the beginning of the 20th century. And the centre of the hall has a long display presenting a more conventional timeline of events at the camp, illustrated with photos and a few artefacts -- like these tiny chairs, made with feathers and scraps of cloth, or the banal horror of typed and annotated lists of Jews to be deported.

It's not a massive museum, but when we came out we discovered that over three hours had passed without our noticing, and we could have spent longer there. Browsing the bookstall, I bought a copy of Swiss nurse Friedel Bohny-Reiter's journal. She worked for the Swiss Red Cross, and along with a number of other charities did the best she could to make life in the camp more bearable for the inmates. One of the exhibits was a slideshow of her photo album, which I found very moving -- recording not just grimness but happy moments where young children were roused to smiles through play, or adults engaged in craft workshops and gardening to relieve boredom and despair. One of the interviewees I listened to said, "However bad it was, we were Spanish, so we sang and danced."

There's a small Flickr album here. The museum has previously been visited by TickyTocky, and there's more information here. There's also some coverage of it in Rosemary Bailey's book Love and War in the Pyrenees.