Vichy Forced Labor Camp at Abadla, Algeria

“My people do not exist
Banished from memory at the gates of the camps.” 

This is a quote from a poem written by Henriette Asseo, a woman of Salonican descent living in Paris. It is pertinent because it speaks to the broad tendency to forget or be unaware of the plights of non-Ashkenazi Jews during WWII--the other side of the Holocaust. It is true that the Jews of Europe experienced the horrors of the Holocaust in ways that cannot be compared. However, the Jews of Arab lands also experienced the Holocaust in a very real way that deserves commemoration and meditation.

Algeria was an official part of France at the impetus of WWII. This status meant that as France was conquered by German forces, so were Algeria. Morocco and Tunisia, French protectorates, also affected by the German victory. This reality was experienced differently in the different regions of North Africa, however (1). With the German takeover, Vichy, in southern France, became an antisemitic governing zone under General Philippe Pétain (2). The Vichy government, somewhat directed by German forces, went far beyond the anti-semitic laws required by the Germans, passing the “Statut des Juifs” in 1940, and creating a terrible reality for the Jews of France and French protectorates (3). French Jews were stripped of employment, and often property, banned from social and public institutions, limited in mobility and education, and many were placed into internment camps in France (4).

The Vichy government greatly affected the Maghreb as well. Again, it is not prudent to attempt to compare suffering. However, potentially nowhere in the Maghreb was betrayal felt more deeply than in Algeria, where Jews were stripped of their rights as French citizens--rights they had enjoyed for 70 years, as a result of the Cremiux Decree in 1870 (5).

One immediate effect of the Vichy government was the creation of forced labor camps throughout France and within the Maghreb. In fact, the Vichy government, “opened up so many camps that it became a full economic sector.” One such work camp was at Abadla, a town in the western region of Algeria and the capital of the Bechar Province (6). A major reason for the forced labor, aside from anti-semitism, was the creation of a trans-Saharan railroad to be used to transport the coal mined in North Africa (7). These camps were not the death camps of Europe, but they were places of slavery, torture, death, and atrocity; and they forever shaped the way Algerian Jews felt about their native land. Roughly 2,000 Algerian Jews were placed into forced labor and concentration camps within Algeria (8).

One survivor described his camp as "a French Buchenwald."  Another testified, "We never knew really what hell was but when we got into that camp and stayed there a while, we really found out what hell was.  There were many ways to die...You had dysentery.  You had malaria.  A lack of food.  A lack of water. Bitten by scorpions.  Bitten by vipers...and you're dead in an hour.  And that didn't include the torture."  As one camp commander told new arrivals, "You all came here to die." (9)

These camps were shut down with the Allied invasion in 1942, but many Algerian Jews were not released immediately and did not have their French citizenship reinstated until 1943 (10).