Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Prologue: Jewish Women in Nazi Germany Before Emigration
- Part One A Global Search for Refuge
- 1 Jewish Women Exiled in France After 1933
- 2 Arrival at Camp de Gurs: An Eyewitness Report
- 3 Women Emigrés in England
- 4 England: An Eyewitness Report
- 5 Women Emigrés in Palestine: An Eyewitness Report
- 6 “Naturally, many things were strange but I could adapt”: Women Emigrés in the Netherlands
- 7 Refugee Women from Czechoslovakia in Canada: An Eyewitness Report
- 8 Women in the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Community
- 9 Shanghai: An Eyewitness Report
- 10 German-Jewish Women in Brazil: Autobiography as Cultural History
- 11 A Year in the Brazilian Interior: An Eyewitness Report
- Part Two Refuge in the United States
- Epilogue: The First Sex
- Index
2 - Arrival at Camp de Gurs: An Eyewitness Report
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 January 2013
- Frontmatter
- Introduction
- Prologue: Jewish Women in Nazi Germany Before Emigration
- Part One A Global Search for Refuge
- 1 Jewish Women Exiled in France After 1933
- 2 Arrival at Camp de Gurs: An Eyewitness Report
- 3 Women Emigrés in England
- 4 England: An Eyewitness Report
- 5 Women Emigrés in Palestine: An Eyewitness Report
- 6 “Naturally, many things were strange but I could adapt”: Women Emigrés in the Netherlands
- 7 Refugee Women from Czechoslovakia in Canada: An Eyewitness Report
- 8 Women in the Shanghai Jewish Refugee Community
- 9 Shanghai: An Eyewitness Report
- 10 German-Jewish Women in Brazil: Autobiography as Cultural History
- 11 A Year in the Brazilian Interior: An Eyewitness Report
- Part Two Refuge in the United States
- Epilogue: The First Sex
- Index
Summary
Elizabeth Marum Lunau was born in Karlsruhe in 1910 to Ludwig Marum and Johanna Benedick. Her father, a Social Democratic member of the Reichstag of Jewish descent, was arrested in March 1933 and assassinated a year later. Her mother and younger sister emigrated to Paris soon after Ludwig Marum's death. In 1936 Elizabeth emigrated to France where, the following year, she married Heinz Lunau in Paris. She was interned in Camp de Gurs from May to July 1940, then lived with a friend in St. Tropez until she was able to emigrate to the United States in September 1941. In the United States, she made her career in the hotel industry as a director of housekeeping. After her retirement in 1976, she published a compilation of the letters her father wrote while he was in a concentration camp. She is currently editing the letters her family wrote in France between 1939 and 1941. This report was written in 1991.
the trip to gurs
One morning in the middle of June we prisoners in the Camp de Hyères were told to pack our belongings and assemble in the yard. On June 10, 1940, Italy had declared war on France and promptly bombarded Toulon, the large French naval port. Hyères was just a few miles from Toulon, and for us, locked in a garage, it felt as if the bombs were coming down right on top of us. The army must have felt the same and decided to move us.
We, about sixty women and some children, were standing in the yard, trembling and scared. We were not told where we would be taken and this uncertainty was frightening. There were some emotional moments.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Between Sorrow and StrengthWomen Refugees of the Nazi Period, pp. 63 - 68Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1995