ABSTRACT
Tucked in the foothills of the Pyrenees, the site of Gurs detention camp is a little off Europe’s usual dark tourism itinerary (Figure 6.1). Built in great haste in the summer of 1939 to hold fl eeing refugees, Republicans and International Brigade volunteers from Spain, sited for its easy proximity to a railway station and a major road, over the next four years Gurs was to become the destination of no choice for many of Europe’s outcasts. After the Spanish came the German and Austrian women, mainly Jews, but also political refugees and a few actual Nazis, rounded up by the French government in May 1940 and interned as ‘undesirable’ enemy aliens (Figure 6.2). When the armistice was signed in June, the wise took advantage of the chaos and fl ed the camp, among them Hannah Arendt, who would eventually escape across the Spanish border. Those who stayed were less fortunate. After the establishment of Vichy, Gurs became a specialist internment camp for the Jews. Cold, mud and lack of basic hygiene facilities led to 800 deaths that fi rst winter; a further 1,200 would eventually die in the camp. In August 1942 the deportations east began. By the time the Resistance helped sabotage camp operations in 1943, over 12,000 people, mainly women, children and the elderly, had been deported, most of them to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The refugee camp had become a deportation-todeath camp.1
