The refugee camp Sidi El Ayachi
was a model camp for the Vichy authorities in Morocco. Situated near Azemmour, near the sea, Sidi El Ayachi interned
mostly Jewish women, children, old and disabled Jews. Resident General Noguès, the head of the Vichy authorities in Morocco, visited the camp
end of July 1942. A couple of months before, in March 1942, the wife of the
former Resident General Lyautey organized on behalf of the Red Cross a tour
around most of the camps in Morocco. Although she recommended some improvements
in Sidi El Ayachi, her general impression of the camps was “that, contrary to
what has been said abroad, I found the camps well run, the life well organized,
the food sufficient”.
The camp in Sidi El Ayachi was
an internment camp under a strict regime, where many Jewish refugees,
especially from Germany and Austria, were housed. And in particularly women,
children, old and disabled people. They waited for valid papers and transit to
other countries. In this camp stayed also many war prisoners, and after
November 1942, the former legionnaires (EVDG’s). The camp was a former military
fort. It consisted of fifteen buildings, separated for the diverse groups.
There were fences and barbed wire around the camp. You had to ask permission to
leave the camp. It was of all the camps, the best one, although the refugee
committee of Hélène Cazes-Benatar received many complaints about bad and too
little food, too little sheets, blankets and clothes. I found several testimonies
about this camp.
Ion was a twenty-year-old sailor on a Norwegian ship that was boarded by the French Vichy authorities. All seamen became war prisoners and were directed to different camps, from one camp to another. So he ended up in Sidi El Ayachi and writes about his stay many years later in a kind of diary with stories drawing on his memories. He describes in detail pages long the location, the buildings (fifteen in total), where he and the other prisoners of war were kept and those in which the Jewish refugees stayed. He tells about the Senegalese guards, always there, even when they were taking a shower, twenty minutes walking from the camp. Sometimes he could walk freely into the orchards and farmhouses around the camp, for dietary supplement by buying some oranges or eggs. He describes the daily food, always Moroccan lentil soup, he writes about the language lessons given by some Jewish women, and about all kinds of daily worries, the ins and outs of love affairs between Jewish or Arabic women and sailors, the evenings with chess and poker games and the dance parties.
Around the same time as Ion, June 1941, a little Jewish boy of eleven years old from Germany, named Kurt, stayed in Sidi Al Ayachi, with his parents and grandmother. He told the interviewers of the USC Shoah Foundation in the late nineties he has no bad memories of this camp. He stayed there for about five weeks. They came from Marseille to Casablanca by ship. There the refugees were taken off the ship, surrounded by Senegalese soldiers, that elicited the grandmother to say ‘what are they going to do with us’, and were transported on trucks to the camp. ‘It was not that bad’, sometimes the children went with the camp commander to the sea and they eat oranges, rice, and sometimes some meat and roasted grain. Though there were fences and barbed wire around the camp.
Or the testimony of Regina Gluckman. Following their arrival in Morocco 1940-1941, Regina Gluckman and her husband were directed by the Vichy authorities to the camp Sidi El Ayachi, after a long escape route from Czechoslovakia, Belgium and France. After some time the French authorities sent her husband to the extreme harsh labor camp Bouarfa. They were separated and after November 1942, Regina gave birth to her daughter Sonia. Although her husband was sent away - ’ it didn’t do him any good’, she has no bad memories of her stay in the refugee camp. Mother and daughter stayed for two years in Sidi and left Morocco when Sonia was three years old.
This last story of Regina
Gluckman kept me thinking, ‘why was her husband sent away to a labor camp if it
was a refugee camp waiting for the right papers to get out of Morocco’? I have
read more stories with the same result. So I thought, what about those men who
are sent away to a labor camp?
Due to new research, I started looking at this model camp differently. I had a relative nice image of this camp, a reception location close to the sea, but this camp turned out to be a selection camp. Healthy men were selected to work in the labor camps in eastern Morocco and the sick men from those labor camps were brought to Sidi EL Ayachi to recover until they were healthy again and could be sent again to work in the labor camps. That’s why the German Armistice Commission called it Erholungskonzentrationslager (recover center from illness) or Beherbergungslager (centre de Hébergement/hosting center).
This Commission visited Sidi
EL Ayachi the 16th of July 1942, a week before Resident General Noguès made his
tour. Major Seelisch wrote a control report in which he defined the camp as Lager
der Ausländischen Arbeiter (camp for foreign workers). He resumed: "Unliebsame, für die soziale Struktur des Landes, besonders der Hafenstädte,
schädliche Elemente werden auf diese Weise geschickt aus der Bevölkerung gelöst
und isoliert, ohne dadurch das Asylrecht der Bedrückten anderer Länder zu
gefährden. Eine Aufgabe, die durch dieses Lager geschickt und praktisch gelöst
ist." In English: "Unpleasant and harmful elements for the social
structure of the country, especially the port cities, are cleverly removed and
isolated from the population, without endangering the asylum rights of the
oppressed of other countries. A task which is cleverly and practically solved
by this camp."