This is a memorial site unlike any other. The only French internment and deportation camp still intact and accessible to the public. At Camp des Milles, a few kilometers from Aix-en-Provence (Bouches-du-Rhône), over 10,000 people were interned between 1939 and 1942 in extremely difficult conditions, including 2,000 men, women, and children who were Jewish and sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp.
In this moving place, behind the ochre walls of this former industrial building, Dominique Bluzet decided to move the Easter Festival for a unique day where memory, thought, creation, and commitment intertwined. “Because here, music does not soften History,” the festival’s executive director explained. “It confronts it, questions it, traverses it.” Despite deprivation and lack of resources, Camp des Milles paradoxically was a place of creation for many interned artists, whether painters, writers, or musicians. “In adversity, art has embodied resistance, and artists have transformed suffering into hope,” paid tribute Daniel Baal, president of CIC, founding partner of the Easter Festival.
An opportunity for Renaud Capuçon, a renowned violinist and artistic director of the festival, to honor their memory by interpreting the music from the Terezin camp. Stirring works born in the most radical distress at the heart of a sinister Nazi ghetto in memory of the Jews of Bohemia. In this extermination camp near Prague, under the falsely complacent authority of the SS, many intellectuals and artists organized an intense cultural life, revealing the power of creation as an act of resistance.
“Creating is resistance. Resisting is creating.”
Invited to discuss the theme, “what art transmits to democracy,” Bernard Foccroulle, a famous Belgian organist and composer, mentions the name of Hélène Berr, a brilliant Jewish student at the Sorbonne who started an intimate diary before being deported and dying at the hands of her torturers. “For me, she continues to live through the extraordinary testimony she left us.”
So why is she less known than Anne Frank, a young German Jewish girl whose book recounting her clandestine daily life until her arrest by the Nazis is one of the most read worldwide? “Because France has not done its work of mourning and responsibility,” regrets Jacques Attali, former advisor to François Mitterrand, also present at this round table.
By bringing together music and memory, this immersion at Camp des Milles reminds us how important it is to fight against all forms of extremism. “Creating is resistance. Resisting is creating,” argues Bernard Foccroulle, quoting the tirade of Stéphane Hessel. He mentions Rostropovitch playing in front of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “That day, music was called upon to support freedom,” widening the debate in a tense international climate. “We must resist. Many artists are in prison, they are often at the forefront of those targeted.” Faced with barbarism, the creative act has always been synonymous with resilience and dignity.
