Jewish and ‘Nomade’ Experiences of Internment in Occupied France, 1940-1946

This dissertation explores the experiences of internment among Jews and ‘nomades’ in Occupied France between 1940 and 1946. Drawing on a wide range of sources, many of them previously unused by historians, the dissertation contributes to scholarship seeking to recover Jews and ‘nomades’ as subjects rather than objects of the Occupation. Whereas existing scholarship on French internment camps has relied on the archives of the camp administrations and thus tended to reproduce ‘perpetrator’ perspectives on the experiences and identities of internees, this dissertation uses prisoner files, camp correspondence, private letters and survivor testimonies to gain new insight into the agency of internees themselves. Furthermore, as the first comparative and entangled history of Jews and ‘nomades’ in Occupied France, this dissertation represents a much-needed effort to bring two distinct historiographical sub-fields, on Jewish and ‘nomade’ experiences of internment, into dialogue. Through a focus on three internment camps, Drancy, Poitiers, and Montreuil-Bellay, the dissertation asks how family life, citizenship, networks of aid, and surveillance shaped the everyday life of Jewish and ‘nomade’ internees. Applying themes present in the historiography of one group to interrogate aspects of the experience of the other allows for a reciprocal questioning of assumptions regarding the lives of Jews and ‘nomades’ in French camps. By taking account of how divergent histories of wartime deportation and post-war discrimination shaped the memories as well as the experiences of Jewish and ‘nomade’ survivors, the dissertation seeks to write an entangled history of Jewish and ‘nomade’ internment without establishing ‘hierarchies of suffering’ between victim groups, an approach that could be used to explore the history of Jews and Roma elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe.

Name dc:type.qualificationname

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Level dc:type.qualificationlevel

Doctoral

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

University of Cambridge

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Dijkstra, Clara

Advisors dc:contributor.advisor

• Donert, Celia
• Warnock, Barbara

• Everyday life
• France
• Holocaust
• Internment Camps
• Jews
• Roma and Sinti
• Second World War

Licence

• https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/bitstreams/01d0f7c8-b021-4138-ac4b-987ef7667267/download
• http://purl.org/NET/rdflicense/allrightsreserved

Language dc:language

eng

DOI dc:identifier.doi

https://doi.org/10.17863/CAM.124838

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:www.repository.cam.ac.uk:1810/395286