It is a memorial site like no other. The only French internment and deportation camp still intact and accessible to the public. At Camp des Milles, just 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 Jewish men, women, and children who were sent to the Auschwitz extermination camp.
In this moving place, behind the ochre walls of this former industrial building, Dominique Bluzet decided to relocate the Easter Festival, for a unique day where memory, thought, creation, and commitment intertwined. “Because here, the music does not come to soften History, it comes to confront it, question it, cross it,” the festival’s executive director specifies. Despite deprivation and lack of resources, Camp des Milles paradoxically became a place of creation for many interned artists, whether painters, writers, or musicians. “In adversity, art knew how to embody resistance, and artists knew how to transform suffering into hope,” pays tribute Daniel Baal, president of CIC, a 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 performing the music of the Terezin camp. Touching works born in the most radical distress in the heart of a sinister Nazi ghetto in Bohemia. In this extermination camp near Prague, under the falsely complaisant 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 resisting. Resisting is creating.”
Invited to discuss the theme, “what art conveys to democracy,” Bernard Foccroulle, a famous Belgian organist and composer, evokes the name of Hélène Berr, a brilliant Jewish student at the Sorbonne, who had started an intimate journal 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 in the world? “Because France has not done its work of mourning and responsibility,” regrets Jacques Attali, former adviser to François Mitterrand, also present at this roundtable.
By combining music with memory, this immersion at Camp des Milles reminds us of the importance of combating all forms of extremism. “Creating is resisting. Resisting is creating,” argues Bernard Foccroulle, quoting Stéphane Hessel’s tirade. He mentions Rostropovitch, playing in front of the Berlin Wall in 1989. “That day, music was summoned to support freedom,” expanding 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.
