Bread and Barracks: A History of Everyday Life at Gurs, 1940-1942 

   

  

by  

Lisa Hirschmann 

 

 
A thesis accepted and approved in partial fulfillment of the   

requirements for the degree of  

Master of Arts   

in History 

 

Thesis Committee:  

David Luebke, Chair  

Miriam Chorley-Schulz, Member  

Julie Hessler, Member  

 

 

University of Oregon  
 

Spring 2025 
 



 

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© 2025 Lisa Hirschmann  

This work is openly licensed via Creative Commons BY 4.0. 
  

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 

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THESIS ABSTRACT 
 
Lisa Hirschmann 
 
Master of Arts in History 
 
Title: Bread and Barracks: A History of Everyday Life at Gurs, 1940-1942 
 
 

This thesis studies the prisoner society at Gurs, an internment camp in southwestern 

France, between 1940 and 1942. It focuses on the everyday life of a German-Jewish group of 

internees, most of whom arrived following the German deportation of Jews from the Rhineland 

in late October 1940. During this two-year interval, German-Jewish prisoners comprised the 

critical mass of the prisoner society. This thesis contends that the Gurs prisoner society was not 

an offshoot of the Vichy state and presented myriad signs of internees’ impactful, though 

constrained, agency. It bore traces of internees’ particular trajectories and formed part of the 

history of western European Jewry. Its gendered division of labor reflected both middle-class 

European norms of behavior and the spatial separation of men and women in different sub-

sections in the camp. Internees also participated in the management of food resources and bore 

responsibility for their distribution and maldistribution within and among different sub-groups in 

the camp. The prisoner society also produced its own heterotopias in the camp cemetery and 

hospitals. These heterotopias were spaces of both crisis and comfort where prisoners confronted 

challenges like illness and death but also experienced positive emotions due to reunion with 

family members and the forging of new bonds. All in all, consideration of the double character of 

the prisoner society at Gurs permits the reinsertion of German-Jewish victims into French 

historical narratives about the Holocaust. It also enriches conversations about agency and 

atrocity during the Holocaust by broadening the social and demographic profiles of those who 



 

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qualify as historical actors and destabilizing binary modes of thought prevalent in the field of 

Holocaust studies. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 



 

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 
 

I wish to express sincere appreciation to Dr. David Luebke for his advising and 

mentoring as I completed this thesis during the last year. In addition, special thanks are due to 

Dr. Julie Hessler, for her advice and enthusiasm regarding this project and her dedication to the 

graduate students in the History Department at University of Oregon. I also thank Dr. Miriam 

Chorley-Schulz for her expert advice and mentoring and Dr. Julie Weise for her guidance and 

friendship. I am grateful to my graduate student colleagues in the History Department at 

University of Oregon, who read the chapters of this thesis and gave advice in our weekly writing 

workshop during the 2024-2025 academic year.  

I also owe thanks to the dedicated archivists who assisted me during my research visit to 

the Shapell Center at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in August 2024, 

particularly Elliott Wrenn and Ron Coleman. 

Finally, Esther Topaz Tichauer deserves thanks for participating in an oral history 

interview in May 2025 about her family history at Gurs. 

  



 

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DEDICATION 
 

 

I dedicate this thesis to my Mom and Dad, who generously helped support me while I 

completed this project. I also dedicate it to the memory of my grandfather, Ralph Franz 

Hirschmann, whose past as a refugee inspired me to write this thesis. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 

 

 



 

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TABLE OF CONTENTS 

 
 

Chapter Page 
 
 
I. INTRODUCTION   9 

II. THE SOCIAL FABRIC: LIVING SPACE, WORK, AND GENDER   23 

III. THE TIME OF TOPINAMBOUR: FOOD AND HUNGER   40 

IV. THE HOUSE OF THE LIVING: DEATH, ILLNESS, AND BURIAL   65 

V. CONCLUSION   84 

REFERENCES CITED   88 

  



 

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LIST OF FIGURES 

 
Figure Page 
 
  
1. Eva Liebhold. Women washing vegetables. 16 

 
2. Paul Ripp. Handmade Combination Fork and Spoon Used by a Jewish 27 

Man in an Internment Camp. 

3. Lili Andrieux. Drawing of Women Washing Clothes in a Basin.  28 

 
4. Internment Camp Gurs: Old Woman Shaping. 29 

 
5. Purse made in Gurs Concentration Camp. Johanna Zwang Neumann.  36 

 
6. Members of Menorah. 37 

 
7. A young boy strolls down the street at Gurs. 53 

 
8. Eva Liebhold. The Whipping of the Marmalade. 55 

 
9. Three Women Toasting Bread on a Heating Stove. 57 

 
10. Internment Camp Gurs: Women waiting for food distribution. 59 

 
11. Kurt Löw and Karl Bodek. Man Cutting a Loaf of Bread. 60 

 
12. Handwritten Death Certificate for Lilly Weilheimer. 65 

 
13. Internment Camp Gurs: Nurse with patient in wheelchair. 75 

 
14. Photo of Gertrud Oppenheimer. 77 

 
15. Internment Camp Gurs: Cemetery. 82 

 
 
 
 



 

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INTRODUCTION 
 

This thesis focuses on the German-speaking Jewish prisoners of Gurs, the largest of 

Vichy France’s internment camps, located in one of southwestern France’s Basque regions, 

Béarn, at the foot of the Pyrenees. Though Gurs first opened in spring 1939, it did not become an 

internment center for German-speaking Jewish prisoners until fall 1940, a high point in a 

progression of legal measures mandating the internment of German-speakers that began during 

the Battle of France in May 1940. A few weeks after the German invasion of France, the military 

government of Paris rounded up 9,200 German-speaking women and confined them to the 

Vélodrome d’Hiver, a cycling stadium. About a week later, they were transported southward to 

Oloron, a town in southwestern France and waystation to Gurs. Their numbers began to grow in 

late June, when France signed an Armistice with Germany and was divided into a German-

occupied zone in the North that included France’s southwestern (Atlantic) coast, a small Italian 

zone along its southeastern coast, and an unoccupied zone in the South (called the Free Zone). 

Vichy France was born in early July 1940, when French deputies and senators met in the spa 

town of Vichy on the central highlands and voluntarily revised the French constitution. Marshal 

Philippe Pétain assumed the role of both Head of the French State (Chef de l’Etat Français) and 

Prime Minister (president du Conseil).1 Vichy would operate as an autonomous state influenced 

by its German occupiers. At the end of 1940, it had interned around 50,000 to 55,000 people in 

camps in the Free Zone. Around 70% of them were Jewish.2   

Gurs could hold as many as 18,000 internees at once. At the time of its founding in spring 

1939, its purpose had been the containment of Spanish refugees who had fled north following the 

 
1 Chris Millington, France in the Second World War: Collaboration, Resistance, Holocaust, Empire (London & New 
York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020), 25. 
2 Michael R. Marrus and Robert O. Paxton, Vichy France and the Jews (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 
2015), 41. 



 

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Republican defeat in late January 1939. Between 1939 and fall 1940, many of these Spanish 

refugees were incorporated into newly formed work battalions called the Foreign Labour Groups 

or Compagnies de Travailleurs Étrangers (CTEs) and deployed as workers on various 

infrastructural and defense-related projects within France. Others emigrated to the Americas or 

returned to Spain. Some were transferred to other camps in the Free Zone, such as Noé, 

Rivesaltes, Les Milles, Le Vernet, or Récébédou. By September 1940, then, fewer than 1,000 

Spanish refugees remained at Gurs, leaving most of its barracks available to hold Jewish 

prisoners of German, Belgian, or other origins. 

Though Vichy France ramped up its legal attack on the Jews leading up the 

implementation of the Statut des juifs (Jewish Statute) in October 1940, this thesis is centered on 

a German-Jewish group of internees whose journey to Gurs began in southwestern Germany that 

same month. On October 22, 1940, Robert Wagner, Gauleiter of Baden district, and Josef 

Bürckel, Gauleiter of the Westmark, deported more than 6,500 local Jews, two-thirds of whom 

were women, from the Rhineland, jettisoning them across the Franco-German border, where they 

would be transported by train to southern France. While the Wagner-Bürckel Aktion, as 

historians call it, had been in preparation since late September 1940, these deportees were given 

less than two hours warning about their deportation and limited to travelling with no more than 

100 Reichsmarks (RM) and luggage weighing no more than 50 kg per person (or 30 kg for 

children).3 Moreover, they were ordered to leave the keys to their homes in the doors before they 

departed. Unsurprisingly, then, many of them were already in shock when they reached southern 

France.  

 
3 Gerhard J. Teschner, Die Deportation der Badischen und Saarpfälzischen Juden am 22. Oktober 1940: 
Vorgeschichte und Durchführung der Deportation und das weitere Schicksal der Deportierten bis zum Kriegsende 
im Kontext der Deutschen und französischen Judenpolitik, vol. 930, Geschichte und ihre Hilfswissenschaften 3 
(Frankfurt am Main und Berlin: Peter Lang: Europäischer Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2002), 24. 



 

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One of the arguments of this thesis is that the history of the Gurs prisoner society is part 

of the broader history of western European Jewry. Prisoners drew on their experiences during the 

inter-war and National Socialist eras to make sense of their surroundings and shape their living 

conditions in the camp. As Marion Kaplan and, more recently, Guy Miron, have shown, German 

Jews living under National Socialism relied on an array of psychological and practical tactics to 

cope with persecution and the reduction of their living space.4 Similarly, as they got their 

bearings in a new space in October and November 1940, German-Jewish prisoners adjusted to a 

new space and their separation between men’s and women’s sub-camps at Gurs.  

At the same time, internment at Gurs was a transnational event. Also in October 1940, 

French authorities transferred nearly four thousand Jewish men to Gurs from the nearby camp 

Saint-Cyprien (Pyrénées-Orientales). Among them was Rabbi Leo Ansbacher and his brother, 

Max Ansbacher, who would both work with French Jewish members of the Camp Commission 

in Toulouse, a collective of French Jewish organizations that had not yet been integrated into the 

Vichy bureaucratic apparatus, to improve the lives of prisoners between late 1940 and 1941. In 

addition, around three thousand other prisoners remained in the camp in October 1940, a mix of 

French political prisoners, “undesirable” foreigners (such as natives of German-occupied 

territories like Poland and Danzig), and around two hundred Spanish Civil War refugees.5 

This thesis argues that the social space that emerged in the camp during the winter of 

1940 to 1941 was not a direct creation of the Spanish Civil War refugees, the Vichy state, camp 

administration, or international aid organizations. Rather, German-speaking Jewish internees 

 
4 Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
1998); Guy Miron, Space and Time under Persecution: The German-Jewish Experience in the Third Reich, trans. 
Haim Watzman (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2023). 
5 Claude Laharie, Le Camp de Gurs, 1939-1945: Un Aspect Méconnu de l’histoire de Vichy, J&D Editions (Biarritz, 
1993), 167-68. 



 

12 

acted to produce it, and they engendered and negotiated the boundaries of the prisoner society 

from below in collaboration with these groups. Prisoners worked with the camp administration 

and aid organizations to reinforce preexistent economic practices within the camp as well as to 

produce new ones that encompassed many varieties of informal work. They assumed the roles 

assigned to them by the non-Jewish and Jewish administrations and crew, but they also 

independently self-managed tasks critical to the operation of the camp. Healthy and able-bodied 

prisoners marshalled, organized, and distributed limited resources and occupied themselves with 

subsistence and administration of their living space. They faced strict limits on their ability to 

alter their material conditions in the camp, but they did so with decorum and despondency, or, as 

Marion Kaplan has put it, with “dignity and despair”.6 

This thesis also describes the challenges that former members of the Central European 

middle classes faced as they adjusted to life in the camp. While Gurs was not an instrument of a 

totalitarian state, the psychological and material effects of imprisonment were far from benign. 

Many prisoner memoirists and diarists documented the unsuitability of the barracks in poor 

weather conditions, inadequate food and medical supplies, presence of lice and rats, and 

outbreaks of disease. Internees complained constantly of cold during the late fall, winter, and 

early spring months. According to a report issued in fall 1941 by the International Committee of 

the Red Cross and the Comité de Nîmes, a collection of aid organizations, internees in French 

camps only consumed between 950 and 1,188 calories daily.7 During November and December 

1940 at Gurs, waves of dysentery and typhoid, combined with poor nutrition, killed 470 people, 

 
6 Marion A. Kaplan, Between Dignity and Despair: Jewish Life in Nazi Germany (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 
1998). 
7 Laurie Drake, “Feeding France’s Outcasts: Vichy’s Internment Camps, 1940-1944” (Ph.D. Diss., History, 
University of Toronto, 2020), 207, ProQuest (28090295). 



 

13 

an average of eight per day.8 Life in the camp was particularly difficult during the winter of 1940 

to 1941, which is why this thesis also traces an arc in time from late October 1940, when the 

Jewry of Baden and the Saar Palatinate arrived at the camp, to early spring 1941, when Jewish 

self-help committees consolidated. During this period, prisoners developed and adapted myriad 

forms of “making do” but also organized and pressured administrators and acquaintances or 

contacts outside the camp to improve their living conditions, bringing some desired changes to 

fruition.9 

This “making do” was possible because Gurs differed in important ways from camps in 

central and eastern Europe during the Second World War. Although it held Jewish prisoners, it 

was neither a forced labor camp nor a death camp. It presented a porousness often absent from 

camps in eastern Europe. Gurs prisoners could request permission to leave the camp to do 

errands, visit family or friends, or purchase food in nearby towns. Though prisoners were legally 

required to return to the camp within a specified amount of time, usually no more than twenty-

four hours to a few days, and the number of departures was strictly controlled, this freedom of 

movement opened the door to internees at Gurs in both a material and social sense. Another 

significant difference between the camps of Vichy France and those of German-occupied 

territories was the presence of humanitarian aid organizations in the French camps. When the 

Spanish Republican government definitively collapsed in January 1939, members of the British 

Society of Friends (Quakers) accompanied Republican refugees fleeing northern Spain during 

the “Retirada” (“Retreat”) of February 1939. The Quakers assisted these refugees in obtaining 

permission from the French government to build camps at Gurs and other locations in southern 

 
8 Laharie, 228. 
9 I borrow the concept of “making do” from Michel de Certeau’s The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau 
conceptualizes acts of “making do” as “transverse tactics that do not obey the law of the place, for they are not 
defined or identified by it” (29). 



 

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France beginning in the spring of 1939. Beginning in spring 1941, the Vichy French government 

permitted representatives of additional international aid organizations, such as the American 

Society of Friends (AFSC), International Red Cross, Oeuvre de Secour Enfants (OSE), Joint 

Distribution Committee (JDC), and Unitarian Universalist Service Committee (UUSC), to enter 

Gurs to provide internees with material assistance, usually in the form of food, medicine, or 

clothing. The contributions of these aid organizations to internee well-being were significant and, 

for good reason, attract growing attention from young scholars.10 Finally, Gurs internees could 

send and receive remittances, mail, and parcels, which allowed them to benefit from material 

resources from abroad and communicate with contacts overseas by post.11 In sum, these 

freedoms were important sources of internee connection to the outside world and distinguished 

Gurs prisoner experiences from those of prisoners in forced labor and death camps in eastern 

Europe.  

Readers might be forgiven, then, for wondering what importance a “porous” camp like 

Gurs could have in the story of the murder of two-thirds of European Jewry in places like 

Auschwitz and Treblinka. After all, wasn’t “making do” also a form of compliance, a “making 

things work” often practiced by prisoner functionaries and collaborators? Without a doubt, the 

story of prisoner agency at Gurs is not representative of the experience of Jews at large during 

the Holocaust in Europe, but it is not a story of complicity, either. Camp life altered traditional 

 
10 Stephanie Corazza, “The Routine of Rescue: Child Welfare Workers and the Holocaust in France” (Department of 
History, University of Toronto, 2017); Laurie Drake, “Feeding France’s Outcasts: Vichy’s Internment Camps, 1940-
1944” (History, Toronto, University of Toronto, 2020); M. E. R. Riley, “A sword trembles overhead: American 
humanitarian relief in the concentration camps of Unoccupied France, 1939-1942” (Department of History, 
University of Indiana, 2027). 
11 Ongoing postal service served an important function for the camp administration and Vichy regime, as well, 
because it allowed them to easily surveil prisoners. Prisoners’ outbound letters and postcards were regularly 
censored (redacted) by officials who found they contained information about life in the camp that should not be 
made public. Prisoners were aware of this censorship and thus used opaque language to veil intended meanings. 
They often referred to visits from “Uncle Raaf”, a euphemism for hunger, instead of describing the problem of food 
scarcity and theft directly. Laharie, 311. 



 

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understandings of work and the forms of sociability associated with it, yet it did not do so by 

compelling prisoners to collaborate in their own destruction. In camp barracks and compounds at 

Gurs, female prisoners no longer exclusively cooked, washed, and queued on behalf of family 

members. Rather, they did so with and for their fellow prisoners. This shift is apparent in a 

graphic memoir made by a young internee at Gurs, Eva Liebhold of Mannheim. Liebhold 

produced a series of drawings documenting the daily activities of prisoners in the women’s camp 

at Gurs. Most represent women performing them in pairs or groups. In addition to digging 

trenches around the barracks to assist with the drainage of water, these activities included 

transporting barrels of coffee, washing vegetables, laundering clothes and hanging them to dry, 

cooking in the îlot kitchen, queuing at a canteen, visiting the “Ticketschalter” (ticket counter) to 

collect meal tickets, beating marmalade outside the barracks, showering and bathing in the 

washroom, and retrieving bread rations.12 Liebhold’s images show that a group-oriented 

dimension now characterized tasks that had once been performed privately or in the company of 

hired help.  

 
12 Eva Liebhold, Erinnerungen aus Camp de Gurs., 1943 1940, Picture Book, 1940-1943, USHMM. 



 

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Figure 1.  Eva Liebhold. “Women washing vegetables.” (“Gemüseputzfrauen.”) Page from the Memoirs 
of Camp de Gurs Illustrated by Eva Liebhold, October 1940-1943. USHMM. 

 

Female prisoners experienced collective work in the camp as both frighteningly difficult 

and satisfying. It was difficult because the division of living space in the camp did not diminish 

the total amount of work demanded of women. Many woman prisoners had to assume 

responsibility for preparing supplementary, non-rationed meals for family members, which 

required additional time and energy. Male family members sent their dirty linens into the 

women’s camp for laundering and drying. The scarcity of food and poor material conditions in 

the barracks added to the arduousness of simple tasks. But female prisoners also developed 

tactics that circumvented rules and regulations. For example, Rabbi Dr. Ernst Steckelmacher 

recalled that after cooking meals “in empty tins on wood fires,” women prisoners devised 

creative ways of delivering them into the men’s camp for their male family members.13 Women 

kept their family units and groups of kin afloat materially and made the production and 

 
13 Ernst Steckelmacher. “Eyewitness Account by Rabbi Dr. Ernst Steckelmacher of His Experiences in Germany and 
France between 1933-45,” 1955. Wiener Holocaust Library.  



 

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transmission of culture and inherited moral values in the camp possible through the efficient 

organization and management of everyday life.  

  My project takes up the contradictory behaviors and actions of Gurs prisoners as its 

object of study. It contains three chapters. The first focuses on the forms of activity in which 

internees engaged to maintain and improve their living space. I argue that gender informed both 

the division of labor and its modulation within the prisoner society over time. The second chapter 

is centered on tactics and practices related to procuring, preparing, and eating food. Though the 

state’s rationing policy, camp administrators, and foreign relief agencies played a part in food 

distribution, prisoners also determined who secured enough to eat and who did not. This implies 

that they, too, exercised agency in ways that impacted overall mortality rates within the prisoner 

society. Finally, in Chapter Three, my contention is that the camp hospitals and cemetery 

functioned as heterotopias – spaces outside the norm – for prisoners. Due to the logics that 

ordered daily life, these were spaces where prisoners encountered both suffering and 

gratification. 

This thesis strives to reconcile the relatively non-representative character of this agency 

in the story of the Holocaust in Europe at large with the problematic erasure of German-Jewish 

agency in Vichy camps from (French) Holocaust narratives. I do not want to imply that the 

agency of prisoners in places like Gurs reflects the benignity of the Vichy regime. Rather, I 

contend that the erasure of their agency reflects French historiography’s continued reluctance to 

recognize the humanity of German Jewry and the habit of consigning its stories to a dustbin. The 

study of prisoner agency at Gurs poses a challenge to Holocaust narratives in France, whose 

authors have chosen to pay little attention to the fate of German-speaking Jews without French 

citizenship, instead focusing on resistance fighters, the actions of French-speaking Jews, and the 



 

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noble rescue of Jewry by French villagers and civilians.14 At the same time, without making 

claims to representativity, this thesis aims to highlight the value of non-French memories of the 

Holocaust in France for the field of Holocaust studies. Is it fair that all prisoner actions that 

cannot be classified as “resistance” be relegated to the category of “complicity”? Should we not 

consider that prisoners in the camps and ghettos thought of their own actions and lives in terms 

other than these? This project also entails an effort, then, to think outside inherited binaries that 

often suggest that some spaces and stories, particularly those of women, the elderly, and the 

bourgeoisie, are morally impure or irrelevant to the big picture of Holocaust experience. 

Underlying this effort is my belief that labor that can be quantified or destroyed by the State is 

not the only value-producing force in human societies.   

This effort is particularly necessary because, in demographic terms, the deportees of 

Baden and the Saar Palatinate possessed specific characteristics that inflected their everyday life 

in significant ways. Out of 6,500 deportees from southwest Germany, two-thirds were female. 

One can seek explanations for this in pre-existent demographic characteristics of the Jewish 

population in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. By 1933, there were already 

1,093 Jewish women per 1,000 Jewish men in Germany, which reflected both “the proportion of 

older persons in the Jewish group”, namely aging generations that had lived through the First 

World War, and “the lack of children” (which reduced the number of women’s deaths during 

childbirth), also stemming from the loss of a generation of young men between 1914 and 1918.15 

It is also possible that the predominance of the female gender among the Rhineland deportees 

 
14 As Julian Jackson explains in the introduction to France: The Dark Years, 1940-1944 (2001), the first wave of 
French historical works (produced between 1945 and 1965) focused on the resistance during the Second World War. 
A second wave of studies, beginning in the 1980s, focused on French society. This second wave included studies of 
rescuers in villages like Le Chambon-sur-Lignon and actors in French Jewish groups and organizations like the 
UGIF (Union Générale des Israélites de France or General Union of French Israelites). 
15 Erich Rosenthal, “Trends of the Jewish Population in Germany, 1910-39,” Jewish Social Studies 6, no. 3 (1944): 
233–74, 243. 



 

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related to imbalances rooted in Jewish migratory patterns under National Socialism. Between 

1933 and 1939, Jewish men were slightly more likely to emigrate abroad than Jewish women.16 

Men found work more easily, and women often assumed the roles of caretakers of children or 

aging parents.  

The gender imbalance is important to emphasize because the voices of Jewish women 

have remained absent from historiography on Gurs. Claude Laharie, the French historian whose 

work Le Camp de Gurs, 1939-1945: Un Aspect Méconnu de l’histoire de Vichy was published in 

1993 and is still widely held to be the authoritative work on the camp, included no memoirs or 

testimonies produced by Jewish woman prisoners among his sources, though he included several 

produced by German-speaking Protestants (Maria Krehbiel-Darmstädter and Martha and Else 

Liefmann), socialists (Hanna Schramm), and Jewish aid workers who spoke French, such as 

Nina Gourfinkel. This same body of sources was relied on by Anne Grynberg in her work Les 

Camps de la Honte. Les Internés Juifs des Camps Français (1939-1944), published in 1999.17 

The result has been an incomplete picture of who internees were and what suffering and agency 

looked like in the camp during the years 1940 to 1942.  

A second demographic particularity of the internees from Baden and the Saar Palatinate 

was their advanced age. The deportees remarked on it in their letters and testimonies. One 

recently-arrived prisoner wrote to friends on October 30, 1940, “But keep in mind that perhaps 

half of our people are over 60. The oldest man in my barracks turned 85 today. In our train car 

were Moritz Steiner and his wife Betty, she 85, he 99! Despite his age, he wasn't allowed to live 

 
16 Hagit Hadassa Lavsky, The Creation of the German-Jewish Diaspora: Interwar German-Jewish Immigration to 
Palestine, the USA, and England (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter GmbH, 2017), 69. 
17 Anne Grynberg, Les Camps de La Honte. Les Internés Juifs Des Camps Français (1939-1944) (Paris: La 
Découverte/Poche, 1999). 



 

20 

out the rest of his life in his old homeland!”18 According to Gerhard Teschner, as of January 

1941, they included 2,430 people over age sixty. Because the deportees included patients in the 

Jewish hospitals and asylums, moreover, many were already ailing when they arrived in the 

camp.19 The advanced age and poor health of the Jewish internee population would shape the 

experience of the prisoners of Baden and the Saar Palatinate. For example, as I explain in 

Chapter One, which focuses on living and work in the camp, attending to the elderly and sick in 

separate barracks comprised one of the many ways that younger prisoners obtained extra food. 

A third particularity worth noting is the class and professional background of the 

Rhineland prisoners. In the prewar era, German Jews belonged predominantly to the middle 

classes of German society. Seventy percent of Jews in Germany lived in cities with populations 

over 100,000, and one third of them lived in Berlin.20 The urban and middle-class background of 

German Jews had as its correlate the embrace of bourgeois values and gender norms as early as 

the Imperial era (1871-1918). Early in the National Socialist period (1933-1945), however, many 

Jews lost their jobs in the trades and liberal profession or faced the closure of their businesses.21 

Employment opportunities for Jews in the areas in which they had trained became scarce, and 

they saw their class position change dramatically. By 1939, 56% of Jews in Germany were 

manual workers. Life at Gurs thus presented a degree of continuity – the contraction of Jewish 

living space – for the Rhineland Jews. It also presented a degree of rupture, since in the camp 

these changes materialized more visibly than before. 

 
18 “Letters Written by Inmates of Gurs Concentration Camp,” 1940, 1656/3/8/627, Wiener Holocaust Library, 3. 
19 Teschner, Die Deportation, 29. 
20 M. Kaplan, 11. 
21 M. Kaplan, 24. According to Kaplan, “Of the approximately 50,000 Jewish small business operating at the end of 
1932, only 9,000 still existed by July 1938.” 



 

21 

Some historians would rather dismiss the experiences of outliers, when we might learn 

something from them. In methodological and conceptual terms, this project takes its cues from 

the work of the Czech-Jewish historian Anna Hájková, who remapped the study of everyday life 

in camps and ghettos during the Holocaust in her 2020 book on Theresienstadt, another 

“exceptional” case in the broader schema of Holocaust camps and ghettos.22 It is largely by using 

the work of Hájková as a template that I was able to approach the study of everyday life at Gurs 

without passing moral judgment on my subjects or relying on concepts like Lawrence Langer’s 

“choiceless choice” and Primo Levi’s “grey zone”, both touchstones for studies of life in camps 

and ghettos since their initial appearance in the 1980s.23 In a similar vein, I have tried to avoid 

mythologizing prisoner behaviors by describing them as forms of “survival” or “resistance”, 

terms that have come to function as catch-alls for a wide range of victim experiences and 

behaviors in Holocaust studies.  

Following Hájková, I have also tried to consider the actions and behaviors of prisoners at 

Gurs in separation from their fates following departure from the camp. Nonetheless, a note about 

the chronology adopted in this thesis is in order. I have chosen to focus on the years 1940 to 

1942 because during this period German-Jewish prisoners from the Rhineland and Belgium 

formed a critical mass at Gurs and greatly influenced the prisoner society’s norms and rules. As 

Vichy France was completely occupied by Germany between fall 1942 and spring 1943, nearly 

four thousand of the prisoners I study here were deported to Drancy and then to the East. Most of 

them died at Auschwitz. I have chosen not to mention the ultimate destinations of individual 

prisoners at Gurs in my discussion of their everyday life in the camp to avoid interpreting their 

 
22 Anna Hájková, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 
23 Primo Levi, ‘The Grey Zone’, in Id., The Drowned and the Saved, translated from the Italian by Raymond 
Rosenthal, London: Abacus, 22-51; Lawrence Langer, “Auschwitz: The Death of Choice” (Albany, New York: State 
University of New York Press, 1982), 67–128. 



 

22 

lives through the filter of their deaths or, by the same token, through the lens of their survival or 

escape prior to deportation. This strategy has allowed me to distill the ways in which the prisoner 

society at Gurs presented elements of both crisis and character. 

 

 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 



 

23 

THE SOCIAL FABRIC: LIVING SPACE, WORK, AND GENDER 

Arrival at Camp de Gurs was a traumatic experience. In addition to significantly reducing 

the size and diminishing the quality of Jewish living space, it separated family members. Gurs 

was organized into subdivisions, called îlots. 24 Each subdivision was surrounded by barbed wire 

and contained twenty-five barracks and two latrines. All îlots were segregated by sex. Of the 

twelve îlots in existence in October 1940, four were reserved for women prisoners and three for 

male prisoners from Baden and the Saar Palatinate.25 Upon arrival at the camp, the Rhineland 

deportees were divided between men’s and women’s îlots. Each barracks had the capacity to 

hold between fifty and sixty people but, in late October 1940, most lacked beds, mattresses, and 

furniture. After a journey of between three and five days on crowded trains, the new prisoners 

spent their first days in the camp sleeping on straw sacks or the floor.  

The experience of arrival was particularly shocking for middle-aged and older women, 

accustomed to structuring their daily activities around the family and home. “At the sight of our 

desolate housing I broke down for the first time and lost my nerve. It was October 25th - my 

wedding anniversary,” wrote Rosa Meyer-Murr, a widower from Kehl in Baden who was in her 

sixties in late October 1940, when she arrived at Gurs. “The first night was dreadful. As there 

was no straw left for me, I lay on the naked, cold, filthy floor. I could hardly stand up straight.”26 

Though it may have taken her a few days to come to terms with her surroundings, Meyer-Murr’s 

memoir shows that her attention soon shifted to pressing concerns like the procurement and 

distribution of food in her barracks, where she became an assistant supervisor responsible for 

 
24 The word “îlot” means “island” in French and is used to refer to city blocks in urban, working-class 
neighborhoods in large cities like Paris, but in this context it refers to a compound of twenty-five barracks 
surrounded by barbed wire. The population of the Gurs camp varied over time but between 1940 and 1942 consisted 
of between eleven and thirteen îlots. 
25 Eugen Neter, “Camp de Gurs,” 1943, Leo Baeck Institute, 5. 
26 Rosa Mayer-Murr, “My Camp Diary,” 1944, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 3. 



 

24 

doling out the morning coffee and cutting bread, as well as tasks like picking up stamps and 

making purchases at the canteen.27 Before she knew it, she was too busy to ruminate about her 

predicament.  

Much of the work performed by Jewish internees at Gurs has been overlooked by 

historians, who have focused on the construction and upkeep of the camp by the refugees of the 

Spanish Civil War in the 182nd labor battalion of the CTE.28 However, Jewish prisoners engaged 

in less easily recognizable forms of activity. Young male Jewish prisoners in good health 

participated in maintenance work alongside the members of the 182nd labor battalion. In the 

barracks and îlots, Jewish prisoners of both genders contributed to the maintenance and care of 

fellow internees by performing daily tasks like cleaning, cooking, and caring for the aged and 

sick in the infirmaries. Prisoners participated in new and old forms of sociability that 

rearticulated gender roles. They also participated in an informal economy by engaging in 

commercial activities in exchange for food or money. By spring 1941, both men and women also 

participated in initiatives sponsored by the Comité Central de Assistance (CCA), a Jewish self-

help committee that won the support of the Camps Commission in Toulouse, an aggregate of 

French Jewish organizations. Despite its limited means, the CCA focused its attention on 

ameliorating the precarious situation of prisoners in the women’s camp and achieved significant, 

but gradual and limited, improvements of prisoners’ living conditions and morale. 

 
27 Mayer-Murr, 4. 
28 Laharie is the principal culprit here, attributing sole responsibility for operation of the camp to Spanish Civil War 
refugees. He wrote that “The 200 members of the company (or group) of workers carry out all the work: restoration 
of huts, cleaning of ditches, leveling of the ground, installation of barbed wire, stoning of paths, incineration of 
waste. The operation of several services is their total responsibility: driving and repairing motor vehicles, monitoring 
the Dognen pumping station, maintaining the firefighting service in working order, manufacturing coffins and 
cleaning the cemetery. In return, the workers of the C.T.E. enjoy appreciable advantages: they are housed in a 
special îlot (îlot F until the fall of 1940, îlot A thereafter), receive additional food, and receive an output bonus. 
Without them, the camp would not be able to operate normally.” Claude Laharie, Le Camp de Gurs, 1939-1945: Un 
Aspect méconnu de l’histoire de Vichy, J&D Editions (Biarritz, 1993), 50.  



 

25 

 

WORK AND THE INFORMAL ECONOMY 

Even though Gurs was not a labor camp, prisoners performed work necessary to operate 

the camp and maintain the internee population and the barracks. At Gurs “everybody had some 

duty to perform, such as cleaning the vegetables, scrubbing the barracks, sorting the post, etc.,” 

wrote Adele Cantor of Mannheim, who spent over two years there.29 Cantor was referring mainly 

to duties performed by women prisoners and prisoner functionaries within the îlots. Male and 

female internees living in each of the îlots apportioned food from the kitchens, prepared food in 

the barracks, washed and laundered clothes, ran the canteens, cleaned the barracks and latrines, 

and crafted tools and equipment. Prisoner duties were assigned by the chefs de baraque (barrack 

chiefs) and sous chefs de baraque (barrack sub-chiefs), as well as by administrators, guards, and 

members of the maintenance crew. These duties were sometimes compulsory and sometimes 

assigned on a volunteer basis in exchange for additional rations or money.  

The tasks performed both voluntarily and compulsorily varied according to gender. 

Instead of washing or laundering clothes30 or preparing additional meals for their families, 

Jewish prisoners in the men’s îlots often gathered and chopped firewood, designed small, 

portable ovens built out of tin cans, or carved or designed utensils, furniture, or other objects.31 

Rolf Weinstock earned extra food by building windows and furniture for other prisoners. In his 

 
29 Adele Cantor, “Tears and Joys of a War-Time Deportee,” trans. Tolly Cantor, 1946, Renata de Gara Cafiero 
Collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 9. 
30 Laundering clothes was a highly gendered task, and some observers remarked on a lack of cleanliness among of 
the male prisoner population. Rosa Traub wrote in her diary about a reencounter between separated family members 
in which this got her attention: “We were all happy when the men, brothers and other relatives were allowed to come 
to us and we could see each other and talk. You could already tell from the clothes and underwear of most of the 
men that the women were missing, and that was just the beginning.” Rosa Traub, “Tagebuch 1940-1942,” 1940-42, 
LBI Memoir Collection (ME 1041), Leo Baeck Institute Archives, 41. 
31 Gertrude Oppenheimer’s husband, Leo, for example, occupied himself making these stoves. She wrote: “Leo 
made a lot of them. He supplied the entire family with them and also made them for the older people.” Gertrud 
Oppenheimer, “Gertrud Oppenheimer Memoir,” n.d., United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 8. 



 

26 

memoir The True Face of Hitler’s Germany, he described how he began to construct windows 

for other prisoners in the barracks: “One day a friend received a package. It contained noodles, 

which were again wrapped in cellophane paper. I had this paper given to me and tried it, 

choosing according to the size of the paper, wooden parts were removed from the walls to make 

a window.”32 Later, the French camp administration hired him to repair suitcases, increasing his 

income and earning him permission to circulate freely throughout the camp.33 He also worked in 

a nursery in the camp and formed part of a team of prisoners that monitored the nearby Dognen 

pumping station.34   

Women, as well as men, had some opportunities to take on work outside the îlots, and 

sometimes, outside the camp. They sewed and mended clothing for camp guards or local 

households. Esther Topaz Tichauer remembered that her mother, Adrienne Rosenthal Tichauer, 

earned extra food by sewing for the families of camp guards.35 Similarly, Marie Grunkin of 

Lörrach wrote in a letter to family members that she sewed in a French household two to three 

times per week and received supplementary food.36 Ida Jauffron-Frank wrote that she earned 

 
32 „Eines Tages erhielt ein Bekannter ein Paket. Darin befanden sich Nudeln, die aber noch einmal in 
Zellophanpapier eingeschlagen waren. Ich ließ mir diesem Papier geben und versuchte nun, indem ich entsprechend 
der Größe des Papiers Holzteile aus den Wänden entfernte, ein Fenster zu machen.“ Rolf Weinstock, Das wahre 
Gesicht Hitler-Deutschlands : Häftling Nr. 59000 Erzählt von Dem Schicksal Der 10000 Juden aus Baden, aus der 
Pfalz und aus dem Saargebiet in den Höllen von Dachau, Gurs-Drancy, Auschwitz, Jawischowitz, Buchenwald 
(Singen Hohentwiel: Volks-Verlag/Singen HTW., 1948), 47. 
33“I now had enough to do from early morning to late evening. But I continued to work after work, repairing 
suitcases and chairs and making suitcase handles out of iron. I often had to work for the French command. After a 
while I even received an ID card that entitled me to enter all the camp's buildings. This meant I could visit the 
women's îlots where I had urgent work to do without fear of inconvenience.” Weinstock, Das wahre Gesicht Hitler-
Deutschlands, 49. 
34 Weinstock, Das wahre Gesicht Hitler-Deutschlands, 51-56. 
35 Alia Pagin, “Born in an Internment Camp: Esther Topaz,” Remapping Refugee Stories (blog), 2025; Oral History 
Interview with Esther Topaz Tichauer. May 4, 2025. 
36 Letter from Mari Grunkin to Rosel and her mother on March 18, 1942. Lukrezia Seiler, ed., Was Wird aus uns 
Noch Werden? Briefe Der Lörracher Geschwister Grunkin aus Dem Lager Gurs, 1940-1942 (Zürich: Chronos, 
2000), 101. 



 

27 

extra money by sewing and knitting because she “was not lucky enough to receive a subsidy.”37 

These examples illustrate that women prisoners also sought out and often found ways to remain 

active in order to earn additional rations. However, there were fewer opportunities to earn extra 

food or wages available to them overall, especially if lacked skills like sewing when they arrived. 

 

Figure 2. Paul Ripp. Handmade Combination Fork and Spoon Used by a Jewish Man in an Internment Camp. 
USHMM. 

 

Because of the division of the camp into men’s and women’s spaces, women prisoners 

often had to perform forms of work that they found physically demanding. Ida Jauffron-Frank, 

born in Mannheim in 1891, recalled that women in the camp gathered, hauled, and chopped 

wood: “Sawing, chopping and carrying wood was also far too difficult for most women, and only 

a few were able to carry out these tasks. In addition, the strongest of us were burdened with this 

manly work.”38 Jauffron-Frank’s use of the words “männliche Arbeit” (“manly work”) 

underscores how a woman prisoner relied on prewar gender distinctions to apprehend the 

 
37 „Ich selbst verdiente mir einige Groschen durch Nähen und Stricken für die, die Geld von außerhalb bekamen, 
denn ich hatte nicht das Glück, einen Zuschuss zu erhalten.“ Ida Jauffron-Frank, “Rückblick, Erinnerungen und 
Gedankensplitter einer alten Mannheimerin,” 1971, ME 337, Center for Jewish History/Leo Baeck Institute, 33.   
38 „Auch die Holzsägen, Hacken und Tragen war für die meisten Frauen viel zu schwer, und nur wenige waren 
imstande, diese Arbeiten auszuführen. Auch dazu wurden die Stärksten von uns mit dieser männlichen Arbeit 
belastet.“ Jauffron-Frank, Center for Jewish History/Leo Baeck Institute, 20. 



 

28 

character of women’s work in the camp. It also suggests that the need for women to perform 

grueling physical tasks at Gurs was experienced as an affront to the gendered character of 

manual labor that members of the Central European middle classes perceived as natural and 

proper.  

 

Figure 3. Lili Andrieux, Drawing of Women Washing Clothes in a Basin by a German Jewish Internee, 
December 1940. USHMM. 

 

 Trade and the sale of services to other prisoners in the informal economy was also 

important to internee subsistence in both the men and women’s camps. Upon his arrival in the 

camp in fall 1940, Arthur Trautmann of Karlsruhe, a shoemaker, quickly opened a workshop in 

his îlot after he arrived at Gurs and ordered materials from the surrounding villages. He supplied 

other prisoners with more durable footwear.39 In his letters to his son, Maurice Meier referred to 

a panoply of “private entrepreneurs” in his îlot: “Shoemakers, watchmakers, tailors, saddlers, 

hairdressers, masseurs and foot care specialists, as well as two dental technicians.”40 Prisoners in 

the women’s îlots also sold their services to each other. Alix Preece of Hamburg, who was 

 
39 Arthur Trautmann, “# 62 118: In Auschwitz,” 1945, ME 645, Leo Baeck Institute, 2. 
40 Maurice Meier, Briefe an Meinen Sohn (Switzerland: Steinberg Verlag Zürich, 1946), 83. 



 

29 

interned at Gurs during the summer of 1940, recalled: “There were beautifully drawn signs on 

our barracks: Laundry washed here, shoe shining, manicures, pedicures, water waves, tailoring, 

laundry sewing, language lessons, fortune telling, scripture reading, bridge courses, typewriter 

work, translations.”41 Rosa Meyer-Murr remembered that when she attended weekly religious 

services in a men’s îlot, “Every week a tall, elderly spinster sold good, simple baked goods in the 

form of rings or pretzels.”42 Evidence from women’s memoirs, diaries, and letters indicates that, 

though women also participated in informal trade within the camp and provided services to other 

prisoners, the informal economy in the women’s camp was more precarious because there were 

fewer opportunities available overall relative to the men’s camp. This also meant that, while both 

male and female prisoners’ individual and small-scale initiatives added to the informal 

economy’s ability to supply goods and services, its benefits may have been distributed unevenly. 

 

Figure 4. “Internment Camp Gurs: Old Woman Shaping.”  (Internierungslager Gurs; Ältere Frau Beim 
Hobeln.) is licensed under CC BY 3.0 DE.  

Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek & Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Abt. Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. 
 

 
41 “Eyewitness Account by Alix Preece, Paris, of Gurs Concentration Camp and Her Emigration to London,” 
February 1956, Wiener Holocaust Library. 
42 Mayer-Murr, 6. 



 

30 

CHILDREN AND THE ELDERLY 

Prisoners who did not work for the camp guards or local families and could not sell their 

services in the informal economy looked for other ways to earn additional food in the camp. 

They worked shifts as helpers in the sickbays, as well in as special barracks reserved for the 

elderly. Internees of both genders attended to and comforted infirm refugees. In addition to 

writing letters to family, attempting to arrange her emigration to the United States, and knitting, 

for example, Gretl Drexler served as a companion in the elderly barracks, noting “I help where I 

can and with the many old people there is opportunity”.43 Hans Solomon, only a teenager at the 

time, recalled in his memoir that he spent busy eight-hour nights in the infirmary during his short 

stay at Gurs.44 Caretakers included family members of the sick, but also neighbors, friends, kin, 

and members of the same ethnic group.  

Though they occupied the lowest rungs of the prisoner society’s social hierarchy, the 

elderly were not abandoned by other prisoners. Younger prisoners sometimes developed special 

relationships with older prisoners who had been separated from biological kin. Flora 

Uffenheimer invited a “nice young man”, a chef de baraque who “takes good care of Papa”, to 

her father’s birthday celebration.45 Older and younger prisoners also found occasions to trade 

favors. For example, Gretl Drexler rewarded a young man who helped her carry a heavy package 

with bread.46 Younger prisoners also regularly accompanied older prisoners to the lavatories and 

washrooms, so they did not suffer immobilization, injury, or death in the sludge. Younger 

 
43 Roland Paul, ed., Gretl Drexler. Briefe Aus Mannheim, Gurs Und Grenoble (1939-1942). Das Schicksal Einer 
Jüdischen Frau Aus Landau in Der Pfalz (Kaiserslautern: Institut für pfälzische Geschichte und Volkskunde 
Kaiserslautern, 2014), 194. 
44 Hans Salomon, “A Personal Story: The Holocaust Years, 1940-1942,” United States Holocaust Memorial 
Museum, 5. 
45 Letter from Flora Uffenheimer to Semi Uffenheimer. September 16, 1941. “Flora Uffenheimer‘s Letters to Semi 
Uffenheimer from Gurs, 1941 - 1942,” n.d. Semi Uffenheimer Family Collection. Leo Baeck Institute Archives.  
46 Roland Paul, ed., Gretl Drexler. Briefe aus Mannheim, Gurs Und Grenoble (1939-1942), 227-228. 



 

31 

caretakers were usually motivated by the desire to serve others and stay active, but material 

incentives like additional rations also played a role.  

Some prisoners left memoirs and testimonies that contest this image of good-willed 

inmate behavior toward elderly prisoners, however. One of them was Curt Lindemann, who 

alleged in his memoir Mein Campleben that two îlot chiefs in the women’s camp “forgot about 

the old age barracks” even though they “knew how to ensure a pleasant and comfortable 

existence in every possible way” because they had been absorbed in the care of their skin and 

nails.47 Though these accusations cannot be corroborated and their accuracy might be put in 

question for reasons related to trauma and memory, it is also possible that the îlot chiefs 

Lindemann mentioned failed to find volunteers to help in the elderly barracks because they did 

not offer incentives, such as additional food. Hanna Schramm, who worked as an îlot chief in the 

women’s camp at Gurs, noted that few people volunteered to work in the elderly barracks when 

no reward was offered, but that the promise of additional food solved the problem. Nonetheless, 

the separation of the elderly into separate barracks was a tactic relied on to organize their care 

and supervision, not merely their isolation.  

This relative attentiveness to the elderly among Jews at Gurs stands in contrast to 

Theresienstadt, where older internees were often treated as social outcasts.48 This difference 

reflects the specific demographics and origins of the Gurs prisoner society. The elderly formed a 

critical mass at Gurs that could not be ignored, while the number of children was relatively low. 

Moreover, because many internees from southwestern Germany had been deported from the 

 
47 Curt Lindemann, Mein Campleben (Lourdes, France: Imprimerie Lacrampe, 1946), 6. „Bei den Frauen war es 
auch nicht, wie es sein sollte, beispielsweise in dem Îlot J; Îlotchefin Frau Scheidt, Îlot K Îlotchefin Frau Kauffmann 
aus Mannheim, herrschten sehr miessliche Zustände. Für die beiden Damen gab es nur eine, allem übrigen 
vorangehende Arbeit: ‚die Sorge und Pflege für ihren Teint und ihre Finger-und-Fussnägel. Sie vergaßen darüber 
sogar sich um die Altersbaracken und Krankenabteilungen zu kümmern und wussten auf allererdenkliche Weise sich 
ein angenehmes und bequemes Dasein zu verschaffen.“ 
48 Hájková, 113-114. 



 

32 

same cities and towns in Baden and the Saar Palatinate, ties to communities of origin remained. 

In this sense, the prisoner community at Gurs displayed some of the characteristics of immigrant 

populations in urban areas. This is yet another factor that distinguished the prisoner society at 

Gurs from those of other camps in existence across Europe during the same period. 

The total number of children at Gurs was relatively low because they had been among the 

first to leave Germany through initiatives like the Kindertransport, but children still occupied a 

privileged category, and their presence impacted the structure of work in the camp. Because all 

children were housed in the women’s camp, many women prisoners had responsibilities as 

caretakers and educators, while men did not. Male family members were sometimes allowed to 

visit for a few hours at time, but the greater part of the responsibility for childcare fell on women, 

female relatives, and female friends. For example, Susan Phillip remembered that she was 

“underfoot” in the company of her mother in the barracks of kitchens for most of the day.49 

Similarly, Elsa and Martha Liefmann described a mother with four children ages seven and 

under in Barrack 11, Îlot K, where she slept with all of them in a double bed.50 An aunt, a sister 

of their mother, assisted with childcare duties in the absence of their father, who was in the 

men’s camp. Female kin, such as aunts, sisters, cousins, neighbors and friends, increasingly 

stepped into the role of primary caretakers in the absence of a female parent. For example, Fanny 

Gottlieb’s aunt took charge of her siblings and her after her their mother’s death.51 Her father 

was also interned at Gurs but separated from his children, who remained in the women’s 

barracks.  

 
49 Dr. Albert Erlebacher, “As I Recall,” 2009, USHMM, 10; Susan Philipp. Interview 48261. Interview by Mindy 
Kornberg. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, November 15, 1998. Accessed December 23, 2024. 
https://vha.usc.edu/testimony/48261  
50 Else Liefmann and Martha Liefmann, Helle Lichter auf Dunklem Grund: Erinnerungen von Martha und Else 
Liefmann (CVB-Druck Zürich: Christliches Verlagshaus Bern, 1966), 37. 
51 Fanny Gottlieb. Interview 50121. Interview by Toby Lieberman. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 
July 07, 1999. Accessed December 23, 2024. https://vha.usc.edu/testimony/50121 



 

33 

Women prisoners from Baden and the Saar Palatinate had devised partial solutions to the 

problem of childcare before international aid organizations stepped in. Soon after the arrival of 

the Jews of Baden and the Saar-Palatinate at Gurs in late October 1940, each îlot designated 

specific barracks for the creation of kindergartens. In these children’s barracks, small children no 

longer had to share beds with their parents. Girls and boys lived in separate barracks within the 

women’s camp but were allowed to visit their mothers daily. These children received 

supplemental rations and participated in organized group activities. Laure Kolb remembered that 

she stayed with her mother and sister in the boys’ barracks because her mother was assigned the 

job of teacher there.52 This arrangement was practical. The spatial separation of the children in 

separate barracks also made the delivery of additional food more efficient. 

In early 1941, three other developments that indirectly assisted women prisoners with 

childcare emerged. In March 1941, many families chose to be transferred to Rivesaltes, a family 

camp. In February 1941, the American Society of Friends (Quakers) transferred forty-eight 

children from Gurs to the Maison des Pupilles de la Nation, a children’s home in Aspet, France, 

where they were supervised by Alice Resch Synnestvedt, a well-known humanitarian who later 

published a memoir about her work in France. Finally, in February 1941, the Oeuvre secours aux 

enfants (OSE), a Jewish childcare and child rescue organization founded during World War I, 

initiated efforts to place children prisoners in local homes where they would receive schooling. 

These efforts materialized gradually, but OSE would eventually operate 18 children’s homes in 

unoccupied France lodging up to 1,500 children.53  

 
52 Laure Kolb. Interview 30356. Interview by Ruth Meyer. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, June 25, 
1997. Accessed December 21, 2024. https://vha.usc.edu/testimony/30356;  Segment 14. 
53 Stephanie Corazza, “The Routine of Rescue: Child Welfare Workers and the Holocaust in France” (Ph.D. Diss., 
University of Toronto, 2017), 127. 



 

34 

International aid organizations could do little to assist youths aged fifteen and above, who 

were legally too old for transfer to a children’s home. In the case of young men, this did not pose 

a problem. They could perform manual labor and earn extra rations at Gurs because of their 

physical strength, good health, and gendered privilege, and they were often central to family 

economies in the camp. Ellen Litman remembered that her older brother was “always working” 

at Gurs: “He was working for the guards. The people were working in the kitchen. They were 

working to dig graves in the cemetery. They were working to clean latrines.” He managed to 

earn extra food rations for her family this way and “did well for all of us”.54 Similarly, Josef 

Grunkin wrote in a letter to relatives in late November 1940 that thanks to his work in a camp 

kitchen, he managed to eat enough and provide for female family members: “I come to Mom and 

Marilie almost every day, and not a single one went by without me sending something across.”55 

The relative cultural and economic valorization of manual labor at Gurs put young men in an 

advantageous position when it came to obtaining resources and supporting family members. It 

also kept them busy. 

 

THE EMERGENCE OF THE COMITÉ CENTRAL DE ASSISTANCE (CCA) 

The growth and centralization of Jewish self-help committees operating at the level of the 

barracks and the îlots in the form of the Comité Central de Assistance (CCA) in early 1941 

marked a turning point in the history of the prisoner society at Camp de Gurs. The consolidation 

of Jewish self-help efforts strengthened ethnic identity by energizing pre-existent, inchoate 

efforts aimed at productively mobilizing the labor of the Jewish prisoner population within the 

 
54 Ellen Litman. Interview 33969. Interview by Eileen Molfetas. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 
September 24, 1997. Accessed December 22, 2024. https://vha.usc.edu/testimony/33969 
55 „Ich komme fast jeden Tag zu Mama und Marilie; und es verging noch keiner, ohne dass ich etwas rüber gebracht 
hätte.“ Lukrezia Seiler, ed., Was wird aus uns noch werden?, 72. 



 

35 

camp. In early 1941, a Belgian rabbi named Jehuda Leo Ansbacher assumed the committee’s 

helm with the help of his brother Max Ansbacher.  

Alongside the Quakers and Secours Suisse, the CCA attempted to alleviate some of the 

internees’ most pressing material problems, such as hunger and cold. By instituting a tax of 5% 

on remittances destined for internees in the camp and accepting donations in kind from packages, 

it created a small collective welfare fund that needy prisoners drew on to improve their living 

conditions. In early 1941, it also created a special team of male prisoners who assisted with tasks 

in the women’s camp, such as collecting and chopping firewood for barrack stoves. 

 The CCA also leveraged ties to a nearby conglomerate of French Jewish organizations, 

the Camp Commission headquartered in Toulouse, to obtain materials needed by female 

prisoners to participate in vocational training focused on sewing and crafting. This support 

allowed Senta Luzie of Talheim to participate in a sewing workshop run by another prisoner. In 

her memoir, Luzie recalled learning to handle a needle in cold weather and using her mattress 

cover to make a dress.56 Many other female prisoners also participated in workshops on 

fashioning items out of raffia, a fibrous material donated by the Camp Commission. In 1990, 

Ruth Newmann Saffro, the daughter of Johanna Zwang Neumann, donated a purse made from 

raffia that her mother had made in the camp to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.57 

Numerous other objects made from raffia form part of the Museum’s collection today. 

 
56 Senta Luzie Manasse Victorovich, “J’étais une Juive Allemande: Histoire de Senta Luzie, née 1926, à Talheim,” 
2005, USHMM, 8.  
57 Johanna Zwang Neumann, Purse Made while Johanna Zwang Neumann was Interned in a Camp, USHMM. 



 

36 

 

Figure 5. Purse made while interned in Gurs Concentration Camp. 
Johanna Zwang Neumann. USHMM. 

 
Fewer male internees, particularly those who were younger during their internment, 

mention the workshops and crafts making activities sponsored by the CCA. Because younger 

men’s labor was in higher demand within the camp and the Vichy state had created CTE 

battalions for Jewish men between the ages of 18 and 55 by January 1942, the primary 

participants in CCA-sponsored workshops at Gurs were women.58   

In addition, Rabbi Leo Ansbacher made special efforts to mobilize Jewish women 

prisoners, particularly the young, in religious and social organization within the camp.  Several 

sources mention the formation of the young women’s group Menorah, formed in 1941.59 

Menorah was a cultural and social group of about twenty-five young female prisoners above age 

fifteen who met weekly to sing, discuss the Torah, and study Hebrew. Its members also assisted 

the CCA leaders with service work with the elderly in the camp. The group was formed because 

young women over age fifteen did not qualify for transfer to children’s homes and lacked the 

 
58 By the beginning of 1942, all young men healthy enough to work were integrated into the CTEs. Peter Gaida, 
Camps de Travail Sous Vichy: Les “Groupes de Travailleurs Étrangers” (GTE). France et Afrique du Nord 1940-
1944 (Paris: Les Indes Savantes, 2023), 194; Hugo Schriesheimer, “Die Hölle von Gurs,” in Oktoberdeportation 
1940: Die Sogenannte “Abschiebung” der Badischen und Saarpfälzischen Juden in das Französische 
Internierungslager Gurs und andere Vorstationen von Auschwitz (Konstanz: Hartung-Gorre Verlag, 1990), 190. 
59 Bella Gutterman and Naomi Morgenstern, eds., The Gurs Haggadah: Passover in Perdition (Jerusalem: Devora 
Publishing and Yad Vashem, 2003), 29. 



 

37 

same opportunities to perform labor for wages and food as young men. Menorah provided 

leadership and service opportunities to young women who lacked other safe pathways to 

subsistence due to their age and gender. 

 

Figure 6. Members of Menorah. Rabbi Leo Ansbacher stands in the back row, left of center.  
Yad Vashem Photo Archive. 

 
CONCLUSION 

Though the efforts of outsiders to support prisoners at Gurs must be acknowledged, 

internees’ contributions to the materialization and stabilization of everyday life in the camp 

should not be overlooked. One of the signs of German Jewish prisoner agency was its gendered 

character. Prisoners attempted to restore ties to family members in the face of persecution and 

displacement, and they often did so by adhering to a gendered division of labor. Tasks like 

sewing, crocheting, knitting, and craftmaking gained importance, as did service as teachers and 

caretakers of children. The prisoner society created new spaces for women’s participation but 

faced constraints that curtailed women’s agency.    

Age, in addition to gender, conditioned these limits. Younger male prisoners who had the 

strength and vitality to perform manual labor had more access to opportunities to earn wages and 



 

38 

food within the camp and outside of it as members of work groups. In turn, providing 

supplementary support for female and elderly family members became central to the experience 

of young Jewish men in Camp de Gurs. Women at Gurs also performed domestic chores like 

laundering and cooking for male family members and friends. Both genders attended to elderly 

prisoners. Unlike other prisoner societies during the Holocaust, elderly prisoners at Gurs formed 

a critical mass and could not be ignored. 

The emergence of the Comité Central de Assistance (CCA) gradually improved the moral 

and material well-being of the prisoner society. The CCA facilitated collaboration with the 

French Jewish community and centralized self-help efforts within the camp. It organized 

workshops that provided prisoners with training in sewing and crafting. It also formed Menorah, 

a service and leadership group for young women that enhanced their agency. The creation of the 

CCA led to the mobilization of women in new capacities and attempted to compensate for the 

uneven effects of internment on Jewish women at Gurs. It restored only fragments of the agency 

that German-speaking Jewish women had enjoyed in the pre-war era, but its efforts still 

enhanced internee well-being overall. 

 It is important to acknowledge the structural and demographic inequalities related to 

work and gender at Camp de Gurs because they can contribute to a growing understanding of 

how social differences influenced human experience during the Holocaust. In Vichy France, as 

in the labor camps of the East, men were considered more desirable for manual labor and often 

enjoyed privileges or protections as a result. In Vichy France, however, the process of 

differentiation of necessary or surplus labor occurred in more subtle fashion than in the east 

because it did not involve the infamous process of selection upon arrival, which immediately 

separated those who would live from those who would die in places like Treblinka or Auschwitz. 



 

39 

At the same time, Vichy France did not draft foreigners for labor in industry, which also 

constrained German-Jewish women’s possibilities for survival through labor. 

By the same token, widening our understanding of the structural inequalities facilitates 

recognition of both internees’ suffering and their accomplishments. By recognizing the specific 

forms of exclusion of women that existed at Gurs, we can perceive the challenges that women 

faced, such as the need to perform work for both for the operation of the camp and for their 

families. We are also better able to perceive the ways in which they acted. Women prisoners 

acted when they devised solutions to everyday challenges in the barracks, participated in the 

informal economy both inside and outside the camp, and took part in social and political 

activities that contributed to the organization and stabilization of the prisoner society’s living 

space. Though their stories have been left out of accounts of life at Gurs, they were integral to 

the internee collective’s social fabric. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 
 
 
 



 

40 

THE TIME OF TOPINAMBOUR: FOOD AND HUNGER 

 In her diary of her experiences during the Holocaust, Friedel Stern Weil described an 

encounter with a Spanish prisoner at Gurs. She recalled that she “begged the Spaniard to sell me 

a piece of bread and, when he saw the condition I was in, he looked around and, while no one 

was looking, he gave me a piece of bread.”60 Weil’s account illustrates the flexible disposition 

that German-Jewish prisoners needed to beg for food. It also documents a moment in which a 

Spanish prisoner contravened the dominant social logic governing behavior in the camp, which 

mandated that food be shared within groups of kin. Life at Gurs was punctuated by moments of 

fear and surprise like the one Weil described in her diary. It was characterized by scarcity and 

regulated by logics that made transactions with prisoners beyond the limits of one’s ethnic group 

improbable but not impossible.   

 The Gurs prisoner society was hierarchical, and access to food was instrumental in 

structuring it. Broadly speaking, the hierarchy possessed five layers. The centrality of food as a 

unit of exchange positioned prisoners with jobs in the kitchens and manual laborers at the top of 

the hierarchy. Similarly, the relatively high level of economic capital of Spanish prisoners, who 

belonged to the Foreign Labor Groups (CTEs) and thus the “T” ration category for hard laborers, 

was also linked to their greater access to food. The same applied to German-speaking prisoners 

with money that could be used to buy food at the camp canteens, which were small self-managed 

retail stores in the îlots (compounds or blocks). The managers of the canteens also had enhanced 

access to supplies at lower prices. A fifth group of prisoners with increased access to food was 

 
60 Friedel Stern Weil, “Diary of Friedel Stern Weil : 1886-1970.,” n.d., Leo Baeck Institute, 14. 



 

41 

the “parcelled class”.61 These internees received individualized aid packages from outside the 

camp.  

 One effect of this hierarchy was that, as they translated traditional categories like 

ethnicity, class, age, and gender into kinship, prisoners played an active role in both the 

distribution and maldistribution of food at Gurs. Despite the centrality of food distribution to the 

camp’s internal hierarchies, however, prisoner attitudes toward and behaviors around food have 

received relatively little attention from scholars. Instead, most studies of Gurs and other Vichy 

camps have tended to focus on the role of the Vichy French state, international aid agencies, and 

the local population in the province of Béarn in supplying and distributing food to prisoners.  To 

some extent, this is a by-product of the sources that historians have used to study Gurs. Claude 

Laharie used administrative documents and local archives to estimate the amount of food that 

prisoners were allotted as official rations. Based on this research, Laharie laid blame for the 

maldistribution of food on the camp administration and staff. He found both that the rations 

supplied to the camp were not fully distributed, and that rations that had been withheld were used 

to benefit the supervisory staff.62  

 Laharie acknowledged the importance of the black market and aid agencies to food 

provision in the camp but left a historiographic gap that has only recently been filled. In her 2020 

dissertation “Feeding France’s Outcasts: Rationing in Vichy’s Internment Camps, 1940-1944,” 

Laurie Drake offered a fuller picture of the camp’s food system. Drake expanded her aperture to 

include the state rationing system, impact of international food aid, and internee accounts of 

hunger in six camps in southern France. Drake’s dissertation included an account of the canteen 

 
61 Arthur Koestler, Scum of the Earth  (London: Eland, 2006), 107. Koestler wrote about his experience at Le 
Vernet, another camp in Vichy France. 
62 Laharie, 307. 



 

42 

system and the efforts of the Camps Commission in Toulouse, a collective of French Jewish 

organizations that worked with internees to procure, produce, and distribute food (“Feeding 

Themselves: Internee-led Food Solutions in Vichy’s Camps”). She addressed unofficial social 

practices such as bartering, purchasing food on the black market, rummaging, and stealing in the 

camps in one chapter. In a later study in the edited volume More than Parcels: Wartime Aid for 

Jews in Nazi-era Camps and Ghettos (2022), Drake focused on the efforts of the American Joint 

Distribution Committee and the Quakers, as well as the Camps Commission, in delivering food 

aid to the Vichy camps, including Gurs.  

 In most studies of the camp, the actions and choices of prisoners are granted little 

importance. Most historians of the Vichy camps have devoted their attention to the camp’s 

administration and the actions of its administrators.63 The scope and character of the food-related 

agency of prisoners at Gurs has largely remained unexplored. In what follows, I analyze the role 

of prisoners in food procurement, (mal)distribution, and preparation at Camp de Gurs at the level 

of the German-Jewish group of kin. How were food sharing practices structured? How evenly 

was food distributed by prisoners between generations and genders? What role did food 

preparation play in the division of labor within these units? I argue that food-related attitudes and 

practices of prisoners encompassed efforts to ameliorate the shortage of food at Camp de Gurs 

but also contributed to it. The food-related actions and beliefs of prisoners, not just those of 

administrators, aid workers, and functionaries, mattered. Prisoners developed strategies for 

coping with and combatting hunger, including expanding what they consumed, liquidating assets 

 
63 One example is Denis Peschanski, La France des Camps: L’internement, 1938-1946. Mayenne, France: Éditions 
Gallimard, 2002. Another is Anne Grynberg, Les Camps de La Honte. Les Internés Juifs des Camps Français 
(1939-1944) (Paris: La Découverte/Poche, 1999). Both examples are studies of multiple Vichy camps, which may 
have limited the authors’ attention to some of the particularities of Gurs and its inmates. 
 



 

43 

in exchange for food, engaging in trade, barter, or sale of products or services within the camp, 

begging, stealing, practicing sexual barter, and participating in individual and collective efforts 

to increase the food supply to the camp. In addition, prisoners chose when and how to share or 

withhold food. Finally, they were responsible for grassroots efforts to organize food supply and 

distribution in the camp prior to the entry of representatives from the Camps Commission on the 

scene, though these efforts were only partly successful. These efforts could not break down 

gender or ethnic boundaries within the prisoner society, and their impact is difficult to quantify. 

Nonetheless, a complete picture of everyday life in the camp calls for serious consideration of 

prisoners as historical actors. 

 

OFFICIAL RATIONING AND FOOD PROCUREMENT 

 In assessing the role of food in the prisoner society, it is worth bearing in mind how Gurs 

differed from other sites of detention and confinement in Nazi-dominated Europe. In Nazi-ruled 

Europe, the state engaged in a deliberate politics of hunger, weaponizing food and its distribution 

and allocation in accordance with racial policies that distinguished between desirable and 

undesirable groups. By contrast, no policy of racial purification underlay the collaborationist 

Vichy French government’s administration of Gurs and other camps. Marshall Pétain’s newly 

formed Ministry of Food Supply (Ravaitaillemente générale) in October 1940 devised a 

rationing policy that made no explicit distinction between Jews and non-Jews. Instead, the policy 

divided the population into broad, non-racial categories: the “A” category (for non-laboring 

adults ages 21-70), categories E, J1, J2, and J3 (children and young adults under age 21), and the 

“T” category (for hard laborers).64 Most of the French inmates, including the Jews among them, 

 
64 Drake, 29. 



 

44 

fell into the “A” category. The daily diet for a prisoner in category A consisted of between 900 

and 1200 calories.65 Thus, the official food supply never adequately nourished most of the 

French population, least of all prisoners in its internment camps.  

 The official rations at Gurs were not only meager but also lacking in nutritional variety. 

Their most common ingredients were root vegetables, particularly topinambour (the French 

name for the Jerusalem artichoke), turnips, and rutabagas, as well as chickpeas and pumpkins. 

Internees ate meat about once per week. Rationed meals were almost always served in the form 

of soups or stews, which prisoners often described them as watery in substance and lacking in 

flavor. This likely reflected their insubstantial contents as well as the absence of variation in 

ingredients, which both affected internees’ ability to enjoy rationed meals. 

 The lack of variety was due, at least in part, to the camp’s geographic location. Gurs was 

situated on a wetland and lay in the vicinity of three small villages, whose total population 

reached only 1,000 people, a number that the camp population came to surpass eightfold with the 

arrival of the internees from Baden and the Saar-Palatinate in October 1940. The camp’s eighty 

hectares were unfavorably positioned for the purpose of both food procurement and agricultural 

development. To complicate matters further, the department of the Basses-Pyrenées (today called 

the Pyrenées Atlantiques), where Gurs was located, was split in two because of the armistice 

agreement following the German invasion: the department’s coastal strip was under direct 

German rule, while the rest remained subject to Vichy. German policies prohibited food from 

leaving the occupied zone of the department, which aggravated supply problems in the 

contiguous unoccupied zone.  

 
65 Werner L. Frank, The Curse of Gurs. Way Station to Auschwitz (Werner L. Frank, 2012), 241. 



 

45 

The division of the department also fomented the growth of a “brown market” supported 

by German officials. The “brown market” channeled food illegally from unoccupied to occupied 

zones, whereas the “black market” operated within each zone.66 Rolf Weinstock, a prisoner at 

Gurs, observed in his memoir, “The farmers in this part of the country were very poor. Their 

main crops consisted of turnips and pumpkins. There was very little fat and meat. And the few 

vegetables that were grown were confiscated for transport to Germany.”67 In combination, 

poverty and wartime German poaching of resources across the demarcation line significantly 

reduced the food supply in and around the camp. 

To forestall hunger and starvation, the prisoners of Gurs were compelled to augment 

camp-supplied rations with other sources of nourishment. The Vichy state hampered the 

prisoners’ efforts to augment their food supply through the black market, and their efforts at Gurs 

were more draconian and successful than those made to clamp down on illicit trade among 

French civilians. Ultimately, prisoners relied on a variety of sources of food, including their 

official rations, food obtained in packages, the camp’s informal economy, on the black market or 

in the camp canteens, or obtained from international aid agencies present in the camp. The 

contributions of the latter were supplementary but comprised as much as 20% of total food 

resources by 1941.68 

 

PRISONER FOOD MANAGEMENT: A BRICOLAGE OF TACTICS 

 Laharie emphasizes the isolation of Gurs prisoners vis-à-vis French society. This is 

accurate but also misleading. Even in confinement, Jewish internees continued to inhabit 

 
66 Drake, 55-56. 
67 Weinstock, 50. 
68 Drake, 212. 



 

46 

transnational networks of communication, which they actively engaged by post. As they came to 

terms with their news surroundings in Camp de Gurs in late October 1940, prisoners from Baden 

and the Saar Palatinate sent letters to family members, friends, and Jewish community leaders in 

Germany, Switzerland, England, the United States, and even South America. In them, they 

provided what limited information they had about their whereabouts and requested a wide 

variety of items, including food. “Please send food and essentials, everything, everything one 

needs. Please also ask acquaintances and friends…But soon, soon!”69 wrote Klara and Trudel 

Hirschfelder to friends in England in early November 1940. Moritz Jäger wrote to the 

Oppenheimer Family, also in England, but made his request less directly: “Food was urgently 

requested, maybe there is the possibility of sending some.”70 

 One recipient of their letters was Siegfried “Fred” Weissmann (Weissman), formerly the 

leader of the Jewish community in Karlsruhe and, since May 1940, the executive secretary of a 

small organization founded by German-speaking refugees in the United States in 1937: 

Selfhelp.71 In his New York exile, Weissmann facilitated humanitarian food relief for the Jewish 

inmates. Others wrote to the German-language newspaper Aufbau in New York, which published 

news of the Wagner-Bürckel Aktion’s displacement of Baden and Saarpfalz Jewry and called for 

donations from readers as soon as early November 1940.72 Selfhelp and Aufbau were 

instrumental in organizing the first international aid efforts for Jewish prisoners at Gurs. By 

 
69 Letter from Klara and Trudel Hirschfelder at Camp de Gurs on November 3, 1940. “Letters Written by Inmates of 
Gurs Concentration Camp,” 1940, 1656/3/8/627, Wiener Holocaust Library. 
70 Letter from Moritz Jäger to the Oppenheimer Family on November 1, 1940. “Letters Written by Inmates of Gurs 
Concentration Camp,” 1940, 1656/3/8/627, Wiener Holocaust Library. 
71 “Letters Written by Inmates of Gurs Concentration Camp,” 1940, 1656/3/8/627, Wiener Holocaust Library. 
72 “Nach Südfrankreich Verschickt,” Aufbau, November 1, 1940, Volume 6, Number 44, 1; “Aufruf,” Aufbau, 
November 8, 1940, Volume 6, Number 45, 3. 



 

47 

December 1940, Selfhelp had initiated a committee dedicated specifically to collecting and 

sending food and other resources to Baden Pfalz Jewry at Gurs.73 

In their letters to friends, family, and Jewish organizations overseas, prisoners requested 

both food and money. Money was used by prisoners to purchase food at the canteens during their 

stay at Gurs, and many relied on these internee-led retail stores regularly to supplement their 

official camp rations. The canteen system appeared in the Vichy camps as early as 1939. The 

canteens supplied both food and basic goods like toilet paper. At least to start with, they were 

provisioned by privileged prisoner managers with special permission to leave the camp to 

purchase goods for sale. According to Adele Cantor, barrack chiefs travelled to the canteens to 

buy for their respective barracks: “The purchases consisted, in the first months, mainly of fruit 

such as apples, very large and nice Jaffa oranges, grapes, dates and figs, and were then sold in 

each barrack with great excitement, pushing and bustling.”74 Later, a wider range of prisoners 

gained permission to purchase items at the canteen directly. “We have the opportunity to buy 

food in the canteen, although it's not much. Mainly fruit and canned goods,” wrote Friederike 

Niedermann at New Year’s 1940-1941.75 Prices charged at the canteens were high and the size of 

portions small, but this system presented some advantages to prisoners who ran the canteens 

because they obtained the food items they wanted and set profit margins.76 For other prisoners, 

money remained the decisive factor. “As long as you still have a little money—we hope for 

supplies from Switzerland soon, as they have immediately promised to help—you can still buy a 

 
73 “Baden-Pfalz Hilfe,” Aufbau, December 20, 1940, Volume 6, Number 51, 7. 
74 Adele Cantor, “Tears and Joys of a War-Time Deportee,” trans. Tolly Cantor, 1946, Renata de Gara Cafiero 
Collection, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 10. 
75 “Wir haben in der Cantine Gelegenheit, Essbares zu kaufen; wenn es auch nicht viel ist. Vor allem Obst und 
Conserven.” Stadtarchiv Karlsruhe, ed., Briefe. Gurs. Lettres. Briefe einer Badisch-Jüdischen Familie aus 
Französischen Internierungslagern. Lettres d’une Famillle Juive Du Pays de Bade Internée dans les Camps en 
France. (Karlsruhe: Info Verlag, 2011), 82. 
76 Drake, 162. 



 

48 

few things from the canteen,” wrote Dr. Hugo Stein to friends in the United States.77 For those 

prisoners with cash, the canteens improved overall access to food in the camp. 

Because access to food in the canteens depended on the possession of money, however, 

there is little evidence that the canteen system improved the evenness of food distribution within 

the prisoner society. This may be the reason that some prisoners harbored distrust for the canteen 

managers and represented them unfavorably in their memoirs. Curt Lindemann, for example, 

wrote in 1946 that in his îlot, “the manager of the canteen was a certain Sepp Weil from 

Karlsruhe. The man had certainly never seen such good days in his life as those he was 

privileged to spend as manager of the canteen. He had a laissez-passer for purchasing groceries; 

he also shopped in the nearby village, but we never saw any of these fine things.”78 Lindemann’s 

words suggest that internees did not want to believe that there was a scarcity of food outside the 

camp when there was so little inside it. At the same time, they signal that Lindemann believed it 

was the responsibility of internees to look after the fair and equitable distribution of food within 

the prisoner society. While the scarcity of food outside the camp may have been real, this seemed 

to him to provide little reason for inequality within it. While Lindemann may not have fully 

grasped that food was scarce throughout France, he could not help but resent the privileged 

access to goods enjoyed by the canteen managers. 

 The uneven distribution of food throughout the camp also tended to work against 

prisoners in îlots holding Jewish internees. For example, food prices at canteens often varied 

between one îlot and another because prisoner canteen managers directly determined the cost of 

food. “Our canteen is very expensive...For example, the small cookies in îlot A cost only 30 

centimes, while they cost 50 centimes here. Apples and everything else are also much more 

 
77 Stadtarchiv Karlsruhe, ed., Briefe, 60. 
78 Curt Lindemann. Mein Campleben. Lourdes, France: Imprimerie Lacrampe, 1946, 5. 



 

49 

expensive here than in the neighboring îlots. Everyone wants to profit from us,” wrote Arthur 

Lorch of Eschollbrücken to a family member in mid-November 1940.79 Lorch’s remark that 

“everyone wants to profit from us” suggests that spatial organization and inequality within the 

camp allowed stark lines of division between “us” and “them” to emerge. These divisions, here 

reflected by prices at the canteens, were an effect of a social hierarchy that positioned Jewish 

prisoners at the bottom.  

This hierarchy also governed exchange on the black market. As both Laharie and Drake 

show, prices of goods that were exchanged illicitly at Gurs heavily favored French officials and 

Spanish intermediaries. They could also be prohibitively high, including as much as 400 to 500% 

of the prices outside the camp. Laharie goes so far as to suggest that the prices for food at Gurs 

were some of the highest in the country.80  

This inequality was not the reason that the Gendarmerie and police attempted to clamp 

down on illicit commerce in early 1941, however. “It was dangerous and there were severe 

punishments for it,” recalled Rabbi Jehuda Leo Ansbacher of the black market.81 As new 

restrictions emerged, illicit trade also adapted to changing conditions. Jewish prisoners attempted 

to gain greater control over prices and supply through smuggling. For example, Wilhelm 

Tichauer of Munich, Germany, participated in the smuggling of additional food through the 

camp cemetery. His daughter, Esther Topaz, recalled that her father told her that he used a tunnel 

under the camp perimeter to bring in food.82  

 
79 Letter from Arthur Lorch to Julius Lorch on November 18, 1940. Arbeitskreis ehemalige Synagoge Pfundstadt 
e.V., ed., Briefe aus den Lagern: Briefe der Brüder Arthur und Rudi Lorch aus Gurs, Noé und anderen Lagern in 
Südfrankreich (Pfungstadt: Frotscher Druck Darmstadt, 2014), 75-76. 
80 Laharie, 323. 
81 Leo Ansbacher, “Testimony of Rabbi Dr. Leo Ansbacher, Regarding His Experiences at the Saint Cyprien Camp 
and the Gurs Camp, 1940-1942,” 1946, Yad Vashem Archives.  
82Alia Pagin. “Born in an Internment Camp: Esther Topaz,” Remapping Refugee Stories (blog), 2025, University 
Vienna, https://refugee-
stories.org/#/story?id=/api/stories/18&lang=en&previousOverviewCompName=map&uiLang=en; Leslie Lutsky, 



 

50 

 Another source of supplementary food was the barter economy. Prisoners traded and 

purchased food and other goods and services, such as the makeshift stoves that were often 

handmade by male prisoners.83 Most prisoners relied on these handmade contraptions, which were 

typically made using tin cans, when cooking outdoors, as the number of camp ovens was limited. 

Prisoners also bartered for cigarettes, foodstuffs, dishware, and utensils. While deals in the barter 

economy could sometimes be more favorable to disadvantaged prisoners than those on the black 

market, this was not always the case. Jack Hirsch remembered that his mother once bartered her 

wedding ring for an egg.84 This example suggests that inequality in the barter economy could be 

at least as severe as on the black market.       

 Perhaps inevitably, food became a form of currency that enabled some inmates to rise in 

the camp’s internal hierarchy, even as others fell. Some prisoners also exchanged their labor 

directly for food. In early 1942, for example, Marie Grunkin worked as a maid for French family 

two to three times a week and received food, not money, in return. “I no longer work in the 

sewing room but instead work in the household for a French family 2 to 3 times a week, and in 

return, I get something to eat. I still sew, but only for food, since I can't buy anything with 

money,” she wrote in March 1942.85 Her words underscore the scarcity of food in the vicinity of 

the camp. Because of this scarcity, food, not money, served as the principal means of exchange 

in and around Camp de Gurs between 1940 and 1942. 

 
Esther Topaz Tichauer. Visit to Her Birthplace at Gurs Concentration Camp, France, 2009, Canadian Jewish 
Archives, https://www.cjhn.ca/link/cjhn49484.  
83 Weinstock, 47. 
84 Jack Hirsch. Interview 24953. Interview by Mia Segal. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, January 
21, 1997. Accessed January 02, 2025. 
85 Letter from Marie Grunkin on March 18, 1942. Lukrezia Seiler, ed., Was wird aus uns noch werden? Briefe der 
Lörracher Geschwister Grunkin aus dem Lager Gurs, 1940-1942 (Zürich: Chronos, 2000), 101. 



 

51 

 This situation forced some prisoners with little food and money to turn to tactics that did 

not involve exchange, such as increasing their calorie intake by expanding the limits of what they 

consumed. Several prisoners documented efforts to collect herring heads and other scraps from 

other internees.86 Hans Steinitz, who arrived in the camp in May 1940, wrote about hunting and 

cooking small domesticable animals and rodents, such as cats, dogs, and rats, in the îlots.87 

Others relied on non-edible additives like woodchips or leather (from clothing items like belts or 

suspenders) to give meager rations more substance.88 

In conditions of food scarcity, theft among inmates was inevitable: the transformation of 

food into currency only underscored the value of food, both as nourishment and as a means of 

social differentiation. Food theft among prisoners may not have been its most impactful form. 

More detrimental were the camp administrators and guards who stole food from prisoners’ 

packages before they were delivered to their intended recipients. Prisoners often noted in their 

letters that goods were missing from packages. Sophie Adler remembered that when she received 

packages from her parents in the camp, they arrived empty.89 In some cases, these thefts occurred 

right before the eyes of the prisoners.90 

 One effect of the camp’s porosity was that prisoners also stole food outside of its limits. 

For example, Jewish children stole vegetables from garden patches in areas surrounding the 

 
86 “Some individuals were so starving that they sought out herring scraps and then ate them.” “Eyewitness Account 
by Clara Hirschfelder, Karlsruhe, of Her Experiences in Gurs and Noé Concentration Camps,” December 1954, 
Wiener Holocaust Library, 3; “Just now there was a young, starving man here who was putting herring heads on his 
bread…” Rosa Traub, “Tagebuch 1940-1942,” LBI Memoir Collection (ME 1041), Leo Baeck Institute Archives, 
46. 
87 Hans Steinitz, “Das Buch von Gurs. Ein Weissbuch über das südfranzösische Interniertenlager Gurs.,” n.d., United 
States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 34. 
88 Meier, 107. 
89 Martin Ruch, ed., Familie Cohn: Tagebücher, Briefe, Gedichte einer Jüdischen Familie aus Offenburg (Offenburg: 
Reiff Schwarzwaldverlag Offenburg, 1992), 178. 
90 Drake describes the findings of an April 1942 investigation by undercover agents at Gurs in response to internee 
reports that the camp staff had been removing food from incoming packages. Drake, 155. 



 

52 

camp. In her VHA testimony, Erika Gold recalled climbing under the barbed wire with other 

children to leave the camp and smuggling in carrots and other vegetables from properties in the 

area.91 Teenagers at Gurs also stole food from businesses in the vicinity of the camp. In 2006, 

Margot Schwarzschild Wicki donated a one-page document to the United States Holocaust 

Memorial Museum that provides some clues as how such thefts occurred. The note is dated 

February 26, 1941, and is signed by the îlot chief Samuel Liebermensch. It reads “I hereby 

confirm that Mr. Richard Schwarzschild from Kaiserslautern served as sports director and youth 

leader in our Îlot and has proven himself to be of the highest caliber in this capacity.”92 The 

USHMM catalogue’s curation states that the donor’s father, Mr. Schwarzschild, the supervising 

adult who had accompanied the youths, was held to account for the theft and sent to jail in the 

nearby city of Pau for three months. The note thus indirectly confirms that youths at Gurs 

engaged in theft outside the camp. Liebermensch’s wording of the note also suggests that he did 

not willingly “collaborate” with the French camp administration in punishing Schwarzschild. 

Liebermensch’s confirmation of Schwarzschild’s “high caliber” further reflects the stark ethnic 

divide between “us” and “them” that the uneven distribution of food produced. 

 
91 Erika Gold. Interview 21372. Interview by Nancy Fisher. Visual History Archive, USC Shoah Foundation, 
November 06, 1996. Accessed April 22, 2025 
92 “Charges against Richard Schwarzschild, 1941,” February 1941, Margot Schwarzschild Wicki Papers, Series 1: 
Official documents, 1941‐1951, Folder 3, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. 



 

53 

 

Figure 7. A young boy strolls down the street at Gurs. He holds a Konservenbüchse (can), a 
typical eating receptacle in the camp, in his right hand.  

(„Internment Camp Gurs: Young boy en route in the camp“ („Internierungslager Gurs; Kleiner 
Junge Unterwegs im Lager“)) is licensed under CC BY 3.0 DE. Deutsche Digitale Bibliothek & 

Landesarchiv Baden-Württemberg, Abt. Hauptstaatsarchiv Stuttgart. 
 

FOOD SHARING AND SOCIAL RITUAL 

 Food scarcity produced isolation and antagonism at Gurs, but simultaneously, it could 

reinforce or rearticulate social ties between friends, family, and compulsory community.93 The 

distribution, preparation, and consumption of food at Gurs were also steeped in social ritual. 

Prisoners considered waiting in food distribution lines an essential activity. Meticulous 

preparation of food did not necessarily diminish in importance due to extreme hunger. Food 

sharing among friends and family members was common, especially during holidays, and food 

 
93 “Compulsory community” and “forced community” are terms used by scholars of Holocaust Studies to describe 
collectives formed involuntarily during the Shoah. In this case, I am borrowing the term from Adam Rayski’s study 
of the UGIF (General Union of French Jews). See Adam Rayski, The Choice of the Jews under Vichy: Between 
Submission and Resistance, trans. William Sayers (Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005). 



 

54 

sharing defined family, which frequently extended beyond or restructured the bourgeois nuclear 

unit of the pre-war era.  

Queuing was one ritual central to the daily food distribution routine in the camp. 

According to Eva Liebhold’s illustrated memoir of the daily routine in the women’s camp at 

Gurs, prisoners waited in line as many as four times per day to obtain food at the canteen, 

kitchen, or ticket counter.94 Lines were one of only a few meeting places where separated family 

members and friends encountered one another. Queuing was also fraught with anxiety because 

the failure to queue meant the forfeit of rations. Prisoners also brought their own dishes or eating 

receptables. Those who arrived in the camp without supplies repurposed coffee tins or 

marmalade jars for this purpose, turning objects into affordances.    

Prisoners also showed creativity in transforming foods served in these queues – like 

white bread – into dishes embodying variety and skill. This enhanced prisoner morale by 

creating a space for resourcefulness and affection to materialize. Flora Uffenheimer wrote 

regularly in her letters to her sister Semi in Buenos Aires about the meals she prepared in the 

camp using ingredients that she had received by post or shared by friends. For example, in 

August 1941, she wrote to her sister “On Saturday I made some pear balls. I got some bread and 

some pears from the Epstein’s, which was great.”95 She shared the pear balls with her aging 

father. While Uffenheimer’s actions might initially appear insignificant, internees’ desire to 

show their inventiveness and create meaning for one another through the preparation of food 

provided them with a measure of satisfaction. 

 
94 Eva Liebhold, Erinnerungen aus Camp de Gurs., 1940-1943, Picture book, 1943 1940, United States Holocaust 
Memorial Museum. 
95 Letter from Flora Uffenheimer to Semi Uffenheimer on August 31, 1941. “Flora Uffenheimer’s Letters to Semi 
Uffenheimer from Gurs, 1941 - 1942,” n.d. Semi Uffenheimer Family Collection. Leo Baeck Institute Archives. 



 

55 

 

Figure 8. Eva Liebhold, “The Whipping of the Marmalade.” (“Die Marmelade wird geschlagen”) 
Page from the Memoirs of Camp de Gurs Illustrated by Eva Liebhold. USHMM. 

 
Uffenheimer was only one of many interne