December 2009 – Research Expedition to Forgotten Holocaust Sites in Eastern Morocco
Train Tracks to Vichy Camp at Berguent, Morocco
(Photo courtesy of Alma Rachel Heckman)
The Holocaust’s long reach extended into the Sahara Desert, as the remains of a series of forced labor camps in Eastern Morocco attest. Established by France’s Vichy regime in the early 1940s and connected by rail, the camps held North African and European Jews, as well as non-Jewish political prisoners. Though the camps were closed over 65 years ago, remnants still stand decades later.
Alma Rachel Heckman, a Wellesley alumna and Fulbright Scholar doing research for Diarna, trekked to the remote eastern sector of Morocco, along the Algerian border, to document these rarely seen sites. She visited camps at Berguent (now ‘Ain Beni Matthar), Tendrara, and ‘Ain el-Ourak near the town of Bou Arfa. In Berguent, an old camp building is now a middle school. In ‘Ain el-Ourak, located in a desert oasis at the foothills of a mountain, the camp’s abandoned remains crumble in the desert heat.
“These buildings stand,” writes Alma, “the wind whipping around them, with traces of paint, graffiti, scattered tiles and scattered memories. The Holocaust was a reality in Morocco, and this history has been neglected for far too long.”
Install the Google Earth plug-in so you can visit the camps Alma documented below. Double-click on each place-marker to see a photo of the site, and then close the photo box to see the site in context with a landscape view. After visiting a site, zoom out for a regional view and then double-click on the next site. A more detailed exhibit of these camps is in production.
