Camp des Milles

A former tile factory that became a Vichy internment camp, now a powerful memorial

Address 40 Chemin de la Badesse, 13290 Aix-en-Provence

The Camp des Milles is the only large French internment camp from World War Two to have survived intact, and the museum that occupies it is one of the most affecting historical sites in the country. From 1939 to 1942 the disused tile factory south of Aix held foreign nationals, then Jewish men, women, and children — over two thousand of whom were deported to the death camps.

The visit takes you through the kilns and dormitories where the inmates slept on straw, and along the rail siding where the deportation trains pulled in. A separate gallery sets the camp in context with material on other twentieth-century genocides and the mechanisms of mass complicity. Allow at least two hours; it is not a quick visit. Twenty minutes by bus from central Aix.

things to do museum
A story
Among the artists and intellectuals imprisoned here were Max Ernst, Hans Bellmer, and the writer Lion Feuchtwanger. They covered the walls of their dormitories with murals — many still visible — and Ernst painted clandestinely on scraps of canvas while waiting for the train that finally carried thousands of the inmates onwards to Auschwitz.