Mots de Gurs - De la Guerre d'Espagne a la Shoah

Through eyewitnesses testimonies, archival photos and drawings this documentary tells of the life of Spanish exiles in Gurs, a refugee camp of Pyrenees-Atlantic, under the regime of Vichy. The Gurs camp was one of the first and largest camps established in pre-war France. Originally it served as a detention camp for political refugees and members of the International Brigade fleeing Spain after the Spanish Civil War. Between June 1940 and August 1944, the Vichy regime interned in Gurs also French Communists and Jewish deportees from southwest Germany and Austria. Conditions in the Gurs camp were very primitive: crowding, constant shortage of water, food, and clothing, and flags like typhus and dysentery. Several thousands Jews were transferred to Drancy and from there to Auschwitz. A total of 1,187 detainees were buried in the Gurs cemetery; 20 of these were non-Jewish Spaniards and all the rest Jews. After the Allied liberation of France, French officials used Gurs to house German p