Site-Mémorial du Camp des Milles
This museum and memorial is France's only still-intact deportation camp, where 10,000 men, women, and children of 38 nationalities (2,000 of whom were eventually transferred to Auschwitz) were detained over three years, before the structure was repurposed as an armaments factory. Direct contact with internment areas, including sleeping and dining quarters and hiding places, makes for a rare immediacy. Traces of the many artists and intellectuals who were detained here, including Surrealist artists Max Ernst and Hans Bellmer and novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, can be found in the many artworks displayed (all made here), and the graffiti still vibrantly intact on the walls. At the conclusion of the visit, you retrace the deportees' path to a railroad wagon parked near the main building, a sobering reminder of a terrible chapter in French history.
