Gurs Internment Camp / Camp d’internement de Gurs

Overview

Association of the Friends of the Gurs Camp

The 382 wooden huts of the Gurs camp, 25 miles from Pau, at the foot of the Pyrenees, were built in 42 days on a clay heath of 168 acres to accommodate for one season the Spanish Republican refugees fleeing Franco. That temporary installation would last five years. Following France’s defeat by the Reich, the camp’s 13 barbed-wire-enclosed compounds received 18.185 German Jews from the Saar, the Palatinate, and Baden: up to 80 people got crammed into each hut, made to sleep on trampled straw, before 3.907 of them got transferred via Drancy to Auschwitz and death. After the Reich’s defeat, German prisoners and collaborators took their place. The remains of the camp were eventually used as firewood and a forest was planted over the grim site: a token of hope and rebirth—or a mode of oblivion?