It will run through the beginning of the Capetian dynasty to nowadays and will focus on everything related to France and its history.
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Camp des Milles
The Camp des Milles was a French internment camp, opened in September 1939, in a former tile factory near the village of Les Milles, part of the commune of Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône)
The camp was first used to intern Germans and ex-Austrians living in the Marseille area, and by June 1940, some 3,500 artists and intellectuals were detained there. Inmates included men of letters such as Fritz Brugel, Leon Feuchtwanger, William Herzog, Alfred Kantorowicz, Golo Mann, Walter Hasenclever, scientists such as Nobel Prize laureate Otto Fritz Meyerhof, as well as musicians and painters such as Erich Itor Kahn, Hans Bellmer, Max Ernst, Hermann Henry Gowa, Gustave Herlich, Max Lingner, Ferdinand Springer, Franz Meyer, Jan Meyerowitz, Franz Waxman, François Willi Wendt and Robert Liebknecht.
Between 1941 and 1942 Le Camp des Milles was used as a transit camp for Jews, mainly men. Women were at the Centre Bompard in Marseille, while they waited for their visas and anthorisation to emigrate. As emigration became impossible, Les Milles became one of the centres de rassemblement before deportation. About 2,000 of the inmates were shipped off to theDrancy internment camp on the way to Auschwitz. After the war, the site was briefly re-opened in 1946 as a factory.
La rafle du Vel’ D’Hiv, Document tiré de la référence Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver, fichier Tulard .
The Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup (French: Rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver, commonly called the Rafle du Vel’ d’Hiv: “Vel’ d’Hiv Police Roundup / Raid”), was a Nazi decreed raid and mass arrest in Paris by the French police on 16 and 17 July 1942, code named Opération Vent printanier (“Operation Spring Breeze”). The name for the event is derived from the nickname of the Vélodrome d’Hiver (“Winter Velodrome”), a bicycle velodrome and stadium where many of the victims were temporarily confined. The roundup was one of several aimed at reducing the Jewish population in occupied France. According to records of the Préfecture de Police, 13,152 victims were arrested and held at the Vélodrome d’Hiver and the Drancy internment camp nearby, then shipped by railway transports to Auschwitz for extermination.
Les enfants devant la fontaine d’Izieu, été 1943. Cette photographie fut probablement prise avant ou après une représentation théâtrale. © Maison d’Izieu/Succession Sabine Zlatin
Izieu was the site of a Jewish orphanage during the Second World War. Most of the children were however only separated from their parents or sent purposely in the Savoy mountains which was then under Italian rule. Italy was less oppressive in that time. On 6 April 1944, three vehicles pulled up in front of the orphanage. The Gestapo, under the direction of the ‘Butcher of Lyon’ Klaus Barbie, entered the orphanage and forcibly removed the forty-four children and their seven supervisors, throwing the crying and terrified children on to the trucks.
As a witness later recalled: ‘I was on my way down the stairs when my sister shouted to me: It’s the Germans, run away! I jumped out the window. I hid myself in a bush in the garden. I heard the cries of the children that were being kidnapped and I heard the shouts of the Nazis who were carrying them away.’
Following the raid on their home in Izieu, the children were shipped directly to the “collection center” in Drancy, then put on the first available train towards the concentration camps in the East.
Forty-two children and five adults were gassed in the concentration camp of Auschwitz. Two of the oldest children and Miron Zlatin, the superintendent, ended up in Tallinn, Estonia, and were killed by a firing squad.
The orphanage director Sabine Zlatin survived the Gestapo raid, being away collecting funds for the institution. Some 40 years later she testified against Barbie at his trial. Towards the end of her life, she convinced the president François Mitterrand to turn the orphanage premises into a memorial.
Vue générale du camp d’internement des israélites étrangers à Pithiviers
Pithiviers camp was an internment camp for ‘Foreign Jews’ (those who didn’t have the French nationality, either they weren’t naturalised, either Vichy simply deprived them of their citizenship because they arrived in France too ‘recently’), children, elderly people included.
After being arrested, Jews were sent and hold in camps such as Pithiviers before being deported to Auschwitz.
Jewish deportees in the Drancy transit camp near Paris, France, in 1942, on their last stop before the German concentration camps. (AFP/Getty Images)
