New play tells tale of obscure wartime camp and shameful chapter in France’s history

What would you do if you discovered a family member — someone you barely knew about —had been imprisoned in the early years of the Second World War? And to add to that, the incarceration was in a place you’d never heard of?

For many people, that might have been a story consigned to dust. But for writer and playwright Julia Pascal, the very mystery set her on a detective trail nearly 10 years ago. The result will be unveiled tonight (8 October) as her play, The Banality of Evil, Hannah Arendt, France 1940, opens at London’s Arcola Theatre.

Julia’s work will be familiar to Jewish News readers: since her early production, Far Above Rubies, in 1983, she has dipped in and out of Jewish and feminist themes, exploring issues which have resonated with the community. Her plays often have a multi-media format with song and dance on stage.

She is, she would agree, innately curious. She traces the beginnings of this new play to a conversation with her cousin David Daube on holiday in France in 2017. “My mother’s sister married a German Jew, Albert Daube,” she told me over Zoom. “One day, my cousin David, Albert’s son, said to me: ‘My grandmother and my aunt were in France in 1940, they were imprisoned in Gurs.’”

Julia did not know about Gurs, what it was or even where it was. But she knew there was a story there.

So she went to see what remains of Camp Gurs, built in 1939 and dismantled in 1946, and also to visit archives in the city of Pau. Gurs is in south-west France, close to the Spanish border. It was originally built by the French government to intern Spanish citizens fleeing Franco’s regime.

In her research, Julia discovered that Hannah Arendt, who coined the famous phrase “the banality of evil” in her reporting of the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem, had also been in Gurs and had written about it. She survived the Holocaust and became an important political writer and philosopher in America.

Julia notes: “Before Gurs, Arendt was in the Paris Vélodrome, where foreigners were mandated to report or face arrest. But when I researched in Paris, I was told by archivists: ‘The arrests that happened in the Vélodrome were in 1942, not 1940’.

“I knew that this denial masked the earlier arrests of 1940. That the Germans had been responsible for the 1942 round up of Jews in Paris was undeniable, and could shift the responsibility for the round-up to the invader. But the 1940 round-up in the Vélodrome [known as the Vel d’Hiv] was under the order of the French Republic. This was an embarrassing historical fact.”

Another important historical figure who was sent to Gurs was the artist Charlotte Salomon, from a troubled Berlin Jewish family, many of whose members committed suicide. Charlotte survived Gurs but died in Auschwitz in 1943.

And Julia decided to amalgamate the characters of David Daube’s cousin Eva, a 16-year-old Communist schoolgirl when she was arrested, with information from the life of Eva’s elder sister Trude, who disappeared in 1933 and whose fate remains a mystery.

The reason for the arrests of the three women — among nearly 15,000 individuals, around 4,000 of whom were German Jews — was a decision by Edouard Daladier’s government to intern those foreign refugees who had previously sought asylum in France. The authorities cast their net wide — one woman, Julia says, was on her way to her wedding when she was captured.

Julia’s own family came from Romania and Lithuania, so for her this was a novel engagement with the liberal and often secular culture of German Jews.

She says it was very hard to find evidence of the 1940 arrests, described in French history as the internment of “The Undesirables”. Eventually she tracked down just one book where there is an account of what happened in 1940 Paris and then at Gurs. “It’s a shameful part of French history,” she says.

Unlike what happened later on in the war, the situation at Gurs       sounds chaotic — and in the confusion between the fall of France in May and June 1940 and the beginning of the Vichy government in July of that year, a number of Gurs captives escaped. They included Hannah Arendt and Eva Daube, who eventually made it to America.

Charlotte Salomon, sadly, had no-one abroad to vouch for her, and so remained living with her grandfather in Nice until 1942, when she is said to have poisoned him with a veronal omelette. She and her husband were captured by the Nazis in 1943 and transported to Auschwitz.

The confusion at Gurs was exacerbated by when the camp commandant set fire to the place — Julia says this meant the destruction of many records, which could have helped paint a clearer picture of what was taking place.

So Julia had her three vital protagonists in Hannah Arendt, Eva Daube and Charlotte Salomon. With a six-person cast — sometimes “playing thousands of women” — she has put together a production of music, narrative and song. She says: “I’ve used mime, cabaret, pictoral images, Jewish irony and Jewish humour. At times it’s almost like a prison drama, but it’s a fractured line, because it’s telling a story of exile and displacement.”

The stories woven through the Arcola production have a resonance for today, Julia believes. She adds wryly that “a major arts centre in Camden” had originally said it would consider taking the show, but then unaccountably found it was “booked for the foreseeable future” So she is grateful to the Arcola team for agreeing to stage the show, in what she terms “a whole atmosphere of antisemitism” in current British theatre.

The Banality of Evil: Hanna Arendt, France 1940 runs at the Arcola Theatre from 8 October 8 to 7 November. Tickets at arcolatheatre.com