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Cemetery at Berguent (‘Ain Benimatthar), Morocco

‘Ain Benimatthar, once known by its French name, Berguent, has a small Jewish cemetery. The cemetery is not far from a Vichy Camp where Jews were imprisoned during the Holocaust, near the abandoned railroad tracks of Ain Benimattar. 

Description

How to get there: Park near the abandoned train tracks of Ain Benimatthar, cross them, and walk toward a walled enclosure at the base of a barren mountain. The cemetery walls are made of dusty, tan bricks, in the process of crumbling into dustto the earth. Inside, only a few graves remain intact, while the rest are scattered about in the form of holes, broken tomb stones, interspersed with the remains of burned trash and abandoned clothing. One intact tombstone bears a French inscription dating from 1939 and another from the 1960s. The rest are so worn and decrepit that they are illegible. You may find children playing in the Jewish cemetery, in absence of a playground.

Internment Camps of WWII: During World War II, Germany, Italy, and Vichy France interned thousands of Jews in the territories they controlled in North Africa. As of 2006, the sites of 110 forced labor camps for Jews have been identified in Morocco (30), Algeria (37), Tunisia (37), and Libya(6). In eastern Morocco and western Algeria, the Vichy French government interned approximately 2,000 Jewish men, many of whom had been serving in the Foreign Legion or the French army, or were illegal residents of France. Many of these Jews had been deported from France to serve in harsh conditions as forced laborers on the construction of the Trans-Sahara railroad. Ain Benimattar, then known as Berguent, was an all-Jewish camp along the railroad.

‘Ain Benimatthar, Morocco

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