Roni Mikel-Arieli: Jewish Detainees in Mauritius During WWII

In this episode, we speak with Roni Mikel Arieli, a cultural historian and Teaching and Research Fellow at the Rabb Center for Holocaust Studies, Ben Gurion University of the Negev. Mikel Arieli specializes in modern Jewish history, African studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and memory studies. We dive into her work on Jewish detainees exiled to Mauritius during World War II—a story of colonial entanglement, survival, and remembrance.

Her book Remembering the Holocaust in a Racial State: Holocaust Memory in South Africa from Apartheid to Democracy (1948–1994) (De Gruyter, 2022) expands on themes of memory and power. You can read her recent articles on deportation, digital Holocaust memory, and anti-fascism in South Africa, down below!

📖 Selected works:

“The Jewish Question in the British Colonial Imagination” – Jewish Social Studies (2023): https://muse.jhu.edu/article/873285

“What We Talk About When We Talk About Digital Holocaust Memory” – The Communication Review (2023): https://doi.org/10.1080/10714421.2023.2177489

“The Great Trek Towards Nazism” – South African Historical Journal (2022): https://doi.org/10.1080/02582473.2021.2009014

Book: Remembering the Holocaust in a Racial State (2022): https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110715545

VIDEO TIMESTAMPS:

00:00:00 | Intro – Interview with Dr. Roni Mikel Arieli

00:01:51 | Why were 1,581 Jewish detainees sent to Mauritius in 1940?

00:31:48 | How did detainees respond to Shertok calling Beau Bassin a “British Dachau”?

00:41:23 | What sources and testimonies informed your research?

00:48:05 | How did Genevieve Pitot’s and Nathacha Appanah’s works relate to yours?

00:57:33 | How have family, friends, and scholars responded to your research?

01:06:34 | Were there any surprising moments during your research?

Transcript

0:00

So it becomes not only a Jewish story, of course, it's an imperial story. It's a colonial story of an island that is strategically important to the British Empire and also perceived so far away and far away from what? From Europe and from America. So we cannot use Trinidad, it's too close to America, people will see. But in Mauritius we can create a Dachau. Today’s episode features Roni Mikel-Arieli, a cultural historian and Teaching and Research Fellow at Ben Gurion University’s Rabb Center for Holocaust Studies. Mikel-Arieli specializes in modern Jewish history, African studies, Holocaust and genocide studies, and memory studies. Today, we discuss her work on Jewish detainees exiled to Mauritius during World War II—a story of colonial entanglement, survival, and remembrance. Please enjoy our conversation. We're happy to have you here today Roni for this interview about a very important aspect of history least known by many people in Mauritius and abroad. In 1940, 1,581 Jewish detainees, men, women and children arrived in Mauritius, which was then under the colonial rule from Mandatory Palestine and were detained in the prison of Beau Bassin, coincidentally my hometown. Tell us more about that and why were they in that vulnerable position in the first place? Thank you so much for having me. So, yes, this is a very unknown and under-researched until very recently episode in Jewish history, but also in Mauritius history. It actually begins in Europe. Following World War Two and the rise of Nazism in Germany and of course the expansion of the Third Reich, at first the Nazis, when they imagined a world without Jews, they aimed for pushing Jews into immigration, so cleaning the Reich from Jews, by encouraging Jews to immigrate outside of the Reich. And but we do know that there were, at the time, very limited options for Jews who actually wanted to leave their homelands in Europe. And this is a story of what we all know as Aliyah Bet in Zionist history, where 3,500 Jewish refugees from Eastern Europe and Central Europe to Czechoslovakia, Austria, Germany, Poland and other places actually embarked on three ships from Bratislava through Tulcea, Romania on their way to Palestine, to British mandated Palestine. This was a very diverse and heterogeneity group of people, as you said, women, children, elderly and of course, men. And I'll give you only a few examples. So that Czechoslovakia group was a few hundreds of young men and women, very Zionist, but many of them active in Zionist movements such as the HeHalutz and Maccabi, and they were actually very much prepared for making Aliyah for immigrating into Palestine. Many of them went through training, agricultural training in order for them to actually contribute to the build up of Eretz Yisrael and they arrived actually around nine months before they actually leave Bratislava, they are held there in a building that is turned into a camp for a long duration until the ships are ready for them. So this is one group but if we speak about the Viennese, we speak about more than 600 men, women and children of families that were able to get visas and to actually escape 100 of the men from the Viennese group were actually, after the Kristallnacht the November pogrom in 1938. They were sent to Dachau and later some even to Buchenwald, and they were released after a few months under the condition that they would leave at once with their families. And so those are only two of the many groups that built these what we can say human cargo, and they, of course, did not know each other before The 3,500 Jewish refugees were on board three ships, the Milos, the Pacific, and the Atlantic. They set sail from Tulcea, Romania on the way to Haifa. As I said some were Zionist, some were not, some were religious, some were secular, and they all had to get along, those ships were not meant to put so many people on. So if we focus on the Atlantic, which is the ship that our people, the ones that were eventually deported to Mauritius were on, they put 1,700 people on a ship that was prepared for 700, so it was very very crowded. The sanitary conditions were very bad. And as I said, many elderly, many children and no water and not enough food. And it was only this voyage through the Black Sea towards Eretz Yisrael was a nightmare. The two ships, the Milos and the Pacific arrived in early November to Haifa. When they arrived, the British authorities already had what we all know as the white paper, the British white paper of 1939 and this British white paper was an immigration policy practically preventing Jews from entering Palestine. And those Jews who arrived on the two ships were considered illegal immigrants. And a ship called the Patria was purchased by the British as a deportation ship waited for the refugees when they arrived and all of the refugees that were on the Milos and the Pacific were moved onto the Patria and the conditions on the Patria were were actually very good compared to the other ship. But very soon the refugees realized that they are actually being held on a prison ship. We will go back to the Atlantic. We have 1700 men, women and children still on their way to Palestine. They have a Greek crew on board that is not Jewish, of course. And as they approach a British territory, they start to be very stressed and they decide to throw all their the cargo to the sea in order to prevent the ship from continuing to to travel. And the refugees, the younger one, actually take over the ship. They take all the crew, lock them in a room at the bottom of the ship. And they actually, with British ships escorting them, they arrive in Greece and then Cypress and Haifa. They arrived on a 24th November. When they arrive, their friends are already on the Patria. And until the evening we have 143 women and children from the Atlantic that are already being transferred in small ships to the Patria, the rest are supposed to be transferred to the Patria over the next day.

But at 9: 10:16

00 in the morning on November 25, an explosion is happening on the Patria. Apparently the Haganah, which was the military organization of the Jewish Yishuv in Palestine. They try to prevent the ship from being deported, and they put some explosives into the ship. They send a message to the people on board

telling them, please, at 9: 10:46

00, be on the ship and not at the bottom. But of course, they had many people that were ill-informed and some were not. And the ship actually drowned very very quickly, 267 people die and the rest are being rescued and brought to the shore. The Atlantic people are watching their friends and family, their colleagues dying. This is a very tragic moment. It takes another ten days or so. And then the Atlantic people are being moved to a camp in Atlit near Haifa, a refugee camp, a detention camp. But they where they meet their fellow friends, the survivors of the Patria. But they are being held in a separate part of the camp. And there is actually a fence that separates them from the survivors of the Patria. Everyone, pretty sure that this is their last stop that eventually they'll be free and they are in Palestine, they are in Eretz Yisrael and everything will be okay. But on December 8, in the evening, they are being told that they will be deported the next day. They need to get all of their belongings and be prepared. And they decided they will not go without resisting, though everyone are staying. The women separately, the men separately, but they are all naked. They are not packing their stuff. They are pretty sure that the British will not be comfortable to evict a

naked women At around 8: 12:51

00, there are a lot of military British forces surrounding the camp and they're starting to violently evict the men and then, of course, the women, some of them were actually able to pack their stuff very quickly. They are put on on trucks on their way to Haifa, to the harbor. There they have two ships the Newzealand and the Johan de Witt, two Dutch ships that were chartered for their deportation. The British police are actually searching them before they are being put on the ship in order to make sure that they don't have knives or any weapon. But testimonies actually say that they actually confiscate some of the Jews belongings like glasses, the watches or personal belongings. And some of the testimonies will say that what the Nazis did not take from those Jews the British did on that day. It takes them 17 days to reach Mauritius and well, you know, most of them never heard of the of Mauritius, never knew even where is it on the map. And some of the more educated refugees start telling stories about monkeys and lions that are running around and this exotic imagination of the island. And then they approach that day on December 26th, the day after Christmas. And they were very much surprised to see roads, to see busses, to see a city. They approached Port Louis, British administrators are a getting on the ship and eventually they are putting all of their refugees on busses. And as they cross on their way to Beau Bassin, the locals throwing flowers at them and cheering them. And what I know now from my archival work was that the idea of sending Jewish refugees to Mauritius was planned very much earlier before the refugees even left Europe. I could find inner discussions, but also publications in local newspapers in migration. Speaking about the possibility of sending 4,000 Jewish refugees to Mauritius since August 1940. So this is December and Mauritius is a British colony. When the refugees arrive, there is already local legislation to legislate their presence on the island so we can see they are defined as European detainees, which is very important because very they arrived as helpless Jewish refugees, but they have their own nationalities and this nationality has a lot of meaning in the imperial context. The meaning is dual. On the one hand, many of them have passports of the Reich. And I was able to locate many telegrams and correspondence between the British authorities claiming that among those refugees we may find some enemy agents. And so they were not even sure about their identities the idea, Lord Lloyd, the Minister of Colonies. He he said there is no chance that the Nazis would allow so many Jews to escape without taking the opportunity to plant enemy alien among them. So this was one part of their European nationality that was problematic, but on the other hand, they were European. There were many of them very talented and educated. We had engineers, we had the artists, we had teachers. So at a very early point. The British authorities in Mauritius realize that we can also gain some benefit to the colony if we make use of their European characteristics. And one of the sentences that from, there is a diary written by Aaron Zwergbaum, who was a Czech Jewish refugee and lawyer and very Zionist. And when he writes about their arrival to Mauritius and the very warm hospitality and welcome they received from the local population, he said that it was very surprising and it was a stark, you know, comparing to the attitude that they received from whites in Europe that he called, he wrote in English, he wrote the attention and the welcome that we received from the Mauritian colored population was very pleasant and surprising. And then again, those trucks arrived at the Beau Bassin prison and, you know, the refugees arrived. They were put into the prison and the door is locked and they realize that they are not free, so they are alive. They escaped. They escaped Dachau. They escaped Buchenwald. They escaped the Nazi regime. They were freed from the Atlit camp in Haifa, only to find themselves in a detention camp in Mauritius. And well they arrived there, the men are being held in the prison cell. So they have each man will receive it’s own cell. They are not locking the doors, but the women and children are brought into a separate compound where huts are being are being established for them. They leave 30 to 40 women and children together in huts and there is a wall separating between the men camp and the women and children camp, so no family life as well. And those two realizations one that they are not free and the other that they cannot actually be a community and maintain normal family life. Those for them are very devastating. And I think that most of the protest that the refugees are organizing at the beginning are mainly around their right to have family life. So at the beginning, I must say, this is an imperial policy to separate sex, to separate between men and women and children. It was not an anti-Semitic issue or something like that. But still, we're talking about Jewish refugees and not about criminals. But that's the thing for the British authorities. Those refugees, they committed a crime against the British Mandate policy. So this is the reality that they find themselves in, at the beginning, the married couple are permitted to meet twice a week in distinct time outside in an open area and with guards and many of the testimonies of the children. It's really interesting how the children recall how eventually their parents used to actually create a tent and the children used to sit outside the tent and that the parents used to do what they were doing inside the tent. And here we have 60 babies born at Beau Bassin. Eventually I want to say that the protest that was led by the women, I must say, succeeded. And they were allowed after a year or so, the married couples were allowed, the women received a permit to go into the men’s prison and there they had a more privacy. But it created another interesting phenomenon, because if only married couples were able to meet. So we need to have a lot of married couples. So you can see a lot of marriages, a lot of weddings happening very early on. And I want to say that there was this combination of the British understanding that they need to keep the detainees busy in order for them to be loyal to the empire. And the detainees need to have some kind of a community and normality that created this very unique cultural life on camp. So the detainees, they established two synagogues, one Reform, one Orthodox, of course, they had a youth movement, they had schools and kindergartens, they had bakeries, and they had workshops where they actually produce toys and furniture and all kinds of stuff and a lot of artworks and you can see so many amazing, even one man workshops that were established there. So I'll give you one example. There was Alfred Heller, a German refugee who escaped Munich, and he had in Munich was in the industry of creating paper. And in Mauritius he was able to use local plants in order to create special paper, decorative papers, and then to sell it on the island. So this was only one example, as I said, many artists and they created in 1941, they created an exhibition where they displayed their artwork. And so it was sold to the local population. And interestingly, when I first arrived in Mauritius in 2019, I was able to locate two families who still have some artwork that their family members bought from the refugees, which from me for me was an amazing trace of the refugees that is still there on the island. And I'll get there in a moment, because when I arrived in Mauritius, I was not sure what I would find, but I knew that there was the Jewish cemetery where 126 of the detainees that did not survive, are buried. But I didn't know what else I would find. But if we’ll get to the cemetery. The cemetery was one of the first things that were established as the refugees arrived. One of the detainees passed away from typhoid and they soon realized that they have to find a location for a cemetery. And of course, they got a space beside a local cemetery. So this was one of the things that happened. The other thing that happened was the creation of the camp hospital. So they arrived. They were were very sick. Many of them arrived carrying a lot of pandemics from from their long journey. And the local population newspapers reveal how there was a huge anxiety. This was a very small island, only 400,000 people and pandemics were very dangerous and they were very anxious about the fact that those refugees will arrive to local hospitals and will spread their pandemics all over the island. And there was a clear demand from the government to create a separate hospital for the detainees, which happened eventually. It was occupied by local doctors who brought their professional knowledge about local pandemics, malaria particularly, and the other stuff was, of course, nurses and doctors from Danzig, from the Jewish refugees community. So they were very busy. They also established a jazz band called The Beau Bassin Boys, which was very popular among British Commandant which decided to give them permission to actually do concerts outside the camp. And they were the first to get permission to work outside the camp. They did a lot of performances in weddings and local events. So this is also an amazing thing, not only because this is another trace we can find, it's also that it opened the opportunity of other refugees to use their own skills and in order to contribute to getting some money. And we find many refugees who worked as teachers in local schools, as art teachers and language teachers. We know of engineers among the refugees that worked around the island and maintaining electricity lines and. And so and the communication lines. So they were very busy. But still everything was very strict, even when they were permitted to go to the market or to go to the cinema, it was only, you know, so the gender separation was clear, it was under supervision and it was very fragile. It was they did not have a normal routine that was stable. And everything that happened on the outside affected them. And one example from August 1943 where U-Boat there was this U-Boat war at the Indian Ocean, where one of the submarines, the British submarines was heard around Port Louis. And rumors started that the detainees had radio and they were communicating code to the enemy. And at once all of their privileges were completely canceled. And the camp was shut down by military forces and no one explained anything. So, it happens every once in a while. So it was very unstable. And eventually in February 1945, they received the announcement that they will be released, that they eventually be allowed to go back to Palestine, although it took another six months and only in August 1945, they went on the Franconia and arrived in Haifa. And later, of course, not everyone stayed in Eretz Yisrael. Some went to other places as well. So this is this is wonderful. I mean, I have a lot of questions for you here, but I do want to point out something that you mentioned in your paper. There was Shertok who was a secretary of the Jewish Agency’s Political Department at the time, and he basically described the deportation and eventual incarceration to be very oppressive and he even went on to describe the prison in Beau Bassin a “British Dachau”. How was this received and interpreted by other detainees? So I want to say that it was Churchill who mentioned the British “Dachau” but it was before the Beau Bassin prison was actually established, I would say that when Lord Lloyd started looking for colonies that potentially can actually take over refugees or illegal immigrants, as he called them, he turned to Mauritius but he also turned to Trinidad too, and when he turned to the governor of Trinidad, he actually said that those immigrants come from European countries. We have nothing over them. We cannot prove that they are not the enemies, they would need to be guarded and behind barbed wires. And Churchill got this telegram and he was very upset. And he said, you know, Mauritius is one thing, but one cannot imagine creating a British Dachau so close to America. And for me, this says a lot about the British imagination of Mauritius, because Mauritius was in many ways it was a strategic point for the British during the war in the Indian Ocean, but it was also very far from sight and it became in many ways an exile island. It became the island of not the enemies of the empire but, you know, the people that the empire doesn't know what to do with. And I will give examples, and very shortly. But together with the refugees, we will find in March 1941, a group of 70 P.O.W.s, German P.O.W.s that were captured in the Indian Ocean, brought to a camp one kilometer from the Jewish camp at Rose Hill, and they are being held there for a month and then be transferred to another camp in Kenya. Though we have one month that we have on the one end of this small island, 70 German soldiers, and on the other end we have 1,580 Jewish refugees. At the same time, we have a German family that arrived in Mauritius in 1933. The father is a businessman and they are being, of course, the British suspected they are enemy aliens and they decide to put them in that Jewish camp, but they cannot put them with the Jews. So they establish a small house close to the Jewish hospital. This house is is being guarded and of course it's been surrounded with barbed wire. But they live together. The men, the women and the 12 year old daughter. And I know that only from testimonies of Jewish children who in their testimony said how unfair it was that they, the Jewish refugees who escaped Nazi controlled Europe were not allowed to stay as families. But then again, at the same camp, this German family, German-German, they say, not Jewish, they were held as a family. And there are many letters of complaint on this. But from the side of the Jewish detainees to the British authorities. So and this without speaking about about the exiles on the island. So we have Reza Shah who was being exiled to the island. And thanks to you, Sabah, I actually investigated this further. And also we have the former Prime Minister of Yugoslavia who’s been exiled in Mauritius. So it becomes not only a Jewish story, of course, it's an imperial story. It's a colonial story of an island that is strategically important to the British Empire and also perceived so far away and far away from what? From Europe and from America. So we cannot use Trinidad, it's too close to America, people will see. But in Mauritius we can create a Dachau. But of course it would not a Dachau. And to your question, I want to emphasize it was not a brutal regime. It was an unstable one and they were not free. But, you know, I gave my ten year old son when he was seven. I wanted him to interview one of the the survivors of the Mauritius that was at the time ten years old. And you know, he asked them what children ask. What did you do all the time? What did you learn in school? Why did you play? Who did you play with? And, you know, they had a good childhood. The children did not feel that they are imprisoned, but they were separated from their fathers and for the older generation, it was, of course, very challenging. And I think that another thing that comes up very much in the memoirs, in the diaries, the feeling that they particularly the younger ones, not the children but you know the equipped younger people that can contribute to the war effort but instead they are sitting there in what they see as nowhere doing nothing. They are being imprisoned while they can actually enlist to the British army and contribute to the war effort. And we had three groups that succeeded actually to enroll, the Czech exiled army and the Polish one and a very small group of Jewish brigade. But it was not easy. So this is also something that comes up. That they feel like they are useless. They want to be productive. They want to contribute and of course, they know what is happening in Europe. They have radio, they hear BBC in German and they are following the war and they are following the Holocaust. And I must say that the post office was very slow, but it was efficient. So the very first thing that happened was that the British, once the Jews arrived, they started looking for German speakers because they wanted to create a censor department for the letters. And so if it was letters, it was very slow. But they actually had received newspapers, of course, local newspapers both, but also many newspapers from South Africa, from the Jewish community in South Africa for the South African Jewish community, this group of refugees was the closest thing for them to the Holocaust, and they contributed a lot of kosher food, books, money, equipment for the workshop, and also a lot of newspapers and the refugees also had a daily newspaper that they printed every day which had news from the war and news from home. And of course, inner news that the news from what is happening inside the camp. So I wouldn't say that it was a Dachau but it was certainly not what we imagined. When we now think about Mauritius, we think about honeymoons, we think think about resorts. Yeah, but it was a prison. It's still actually an active prison. This is really fine retelling and I really appreciate all the details. I'm curious as every other researcher, what were your sources and how did you gather them? Who are the people you spoke to? I'm very interested in that. So this was my journey. I started six years ago. So actually it started long before. 2014, I arrived in Johannesburg in this Jewish archive, the Jewish archive of the community, and there was a box titled Mauritius with the years of the war. And I got curious. I wrote on Holocaust memory in South Africa. At the time I couldn't resist. I open the boxed and I realized that the Jewish community in South Africa created a special committee to help with the detainees in Mauritius. And I felt like, okay, this is very interesting, but it deserves more than a paragraph in my dissertation. And I waited very patiently. In September 2018, I went to the Ghetto Fighters house in Israel. They have the most extensive collection of the Jewish exiles. So many of the families of the Jewish exiles donated all of their materials in 2008 to the Ghetto Fighters house, and they did an amazing work digitizing everything. And so I worked there a lot at many of my Jewish sources are from this collection. And this was my very first step. And then in July 2019, I had the fellowship in Munich, and I spent a lot of time at Dachau, working at the archive with the list of my detainees and trying to find out if and who from my men was deported to Dachau. How before he was deported to Mauritius. And as I said already, I was able to locate 100 men, mainly Viennese and Germans, that were around Kristallnacht, deported to Dachau then Buchenwald and were released and later deported to Mauritius. So this is another source. But over there I was very much surprised to learn what you can find in public libraries. So I went to the Munich National Library the only place that was open until midnight. And I took the opportunity because I have to work without my kids. So I worked late and I found reels of Churchill's papers from the war. And there I found a lot of diamonds so I was able to find a lot of secret correspondence between the different colonies and the British government and discussions in the British Parliament around Mauritius. So this was another angle. And then in September 2019, I went to do my fellowship at the USHMM in Washington, where they also have a collection which I use many of them are Jewish materials. But not only, so I used those materials as well. A lot of testimonies at Yad Vashem, at the US Shoah Foundation. Mauritius, so January 2020, just before COVID, I was able to be there for a week, worked at the National Archives there, and of course at Kew at the National Library in Britain, in London. And so it's kind of a transnational archive. But I would say that adding to that, a lot of personal collections that I actually collected throughout the years. So all the detainees that I was able to locate and I was able to locate many detainees, second, third, fourth generation, I have a list of at least 200 people from all over the world, and many of them I interviewed. I'm an oral historian. This is my expertise. So I interviewed many of them and I collected from them many memoirs, diaries, materials. And I'm still collecting. It's endless. So this is a very unique archive because I try to capture all kinds of voices. And if we go back to Mauritius, so in January 2020, when I was there for a week, I also did oral history there with people who remembered the detainees. So I was able to conduct four interviews with people who knew the detainees or one that had a family connection. Of course, none of them are Jewish, all local Mauritians. So this is another angle and things are coming up by the minute, I swear. And whenever I do a commemoration event and I have been doing commemoration events since I August 2020 to present twice a year. So I get more and more materials from people. So yeah, this is the archive trying to capture the voices. I am very much interested in the Jewish experience, but I am very much also interested in the Jewish experience and its relations and encounters with the local communities. So this is the challenging part because I know how Jews remember, the local population very fondly, I must say. But I don't know how Mauritians remember. So that's the challenge but it's it's been a fascinating journey. The first appearance of this important historical moment was by Genevieve Pitot in The Mauritian Shekel Genevieve Pitot is a is a native Mauritian who lived in Germany but formed a close connection with one of the Jewish detainees on the island. Now, how did her work connect with yours and how did you interact with her? I also know of Nathacha Appanah’s “Le Dernier Frère/the Last Brother” that was also published a while ago and touched on the same subject. So Genevieve Pitot she was, as you said a local Mauritian who had a very direct connection as a child. She went to school and one of the detainees was her art teacher. And I love this story because I, through Genevieve Pitot, I found Anne Frank of Mauritius so Anne Frank Klein was a German artist, a very successful one from Berlin, and she was able to smuggle her children out of Germany to Switzerland and during the war. But she decided to stay. And then in 1940 she escaped eventually to Mauritius, she was deported to Mauritius. She’s one of those detainees that received a permit to work outside of the camp. She worked at a high school and Geneviève Pitot was an engineer in Germany, and she went to this exhibition in Berlin in I think it was in the late 80’s or early 90’s, where she saw the picture of her art teacher from Mauritius and then she started investigating it and creating what was her life effort. The Mauritian Shekel, which is until today, the most comprehensive research that was done on Mauritius. And I must say that I've been visiting Frankfurt archive where all of the materials of Geneviève Pitot are preserved. I and of course I'm in touch with the family of Anne Frank Klein her older son, unfortunately a few months ago passed away, but he was very actively involved in the book and in the publication of it in various languages. And when I started, this was the only thing that I had. So I had a Hebrew translation of the Mauritian shekel and an English one and a French one. That's it. And she did amazing work. And then of course, for me, I told myself, okay, if there is one person, she's not alive anymore, of course, that remembers detainees. So, there are more. And as I said when I came back to Mauritius in January 2020, I was actually able to interview a classmate of Geneviève Pitot. She was actually to show me how she remembered the way that her teacher Anne Frank Klein taught her how to draw the portrait, the self-portrait. So for me, it was a very vivid direction because, as I said, I am interested not only in the Jewish story, but on the Jewish presence and encounters with the local population. This is not only a Jewish story, this is part of the local Mauritian history. And this brings us also to to the present. So Geneviève Pitot published her book 1998. And then we had a Nathacha Appanah, which you mentioned, also a local Mauritian author who wrote a novel titled The Last Brother. And actually I had the privilege to be in touch with Nathacha Appanah only I never met her in person. Unfortunately, COVID did not allow, but we corresponded. And I also read a lot of interviews that she gave on this book particularly. It was actually also translated into Hebrew. And this is interesting because for me, this is another angle. This is very different from the Mauritian Shekel, the Mauritian Shekel is research. And Geneviève Pitot focuses mainly on the Jewish story. And I'm I think that when I think about my project, my research project is dual because I have a history part which is very interesting. And how Mauritian history, British history, Jewish history are being connected. But on the other hand, I'm also looking at memory, and this is where I think Nathacha Appanah’s work is coming to the fore because taking a local Mauritian author, that chooses to speak about the Jewish short episode four years seven months in Mauritius during the war, and very emotionally and cleverly she actually speaks about Mauritius and not about the Jewish story. What Nathacha Appanah is doing is she creates this fictional friendship between a Jewish Czechoslovakian child and the Mauritian child in order to speak about local Mauritius under British rule. And without actually minimizing or raising the Jewish story, fictional relationship that was never allowed actually in reality allows her to create those layers of history and to reveal those encounters. And she did it. And also Alain Gordon-Gentil did it as well in another novel. But this is another fictional novel focusing on a fictional relationship between a Jewish woman and a Creole or an Afro-Mauritian young man who actually speaks about the fact that Afro-Mauritians do not feel that they have roots compared to Jews who have Zionism and Indians, they have India as a homeland. And this is something that cannot found in Creole society. So at the time, of course, in the forties. I feel like those efforts to speak about about local histories that have been, you know, put under the surface. Through the Jewish story on the island is fascinating. And for me, it's not only fascinating because, it provides space for Mauritians to speak about their own histories, it's also a very natural and direct lens through which we can actually teach about the Holocaust in Mauritius. So this is my educator speaking, but when you speak about memory, you know it's different to speak about the Holocaust that happened in Europe, to speak about Auschwitz, but when you have this concrete story that connects Mauritians to the Holocaust, it then becomes a lever or a tool to actually speak about it and speak about their own histories. So I feel like this is a very unique and fascinating thing that is happening in public memory in Mauritius. And I actually hope to write about it more. I feel like this is for me, the direct route between history and memory because if the world encounters it’s history, they will shape the encounters that we will have in commemoration in memory, in education. You're based in Israel and you just commemorated the eightieth year of the arrival of the detainees in Mauritius. Present at that event were children of these detainees. What were the responses of your friends, your relatives and other scholars who are interested in this research? I want to say it was a very moving event which was postponed, unfortunately, because of our tragic reality here in Israel. And I want to, with your permission, take us back to actually September 2023. September 2023 we had a huge commemoration event in Mauritius where we we had a delegation of 39 of ex-detainees and their relatives and many diplomats from Germany, Austria, Israel, of course Mauritius, the vice president of Mauritius was present and we actually created this commemoration event three days in Mauritius, trying to remember the detainees, to acknowledge the story. And then the idea was to have another event on September 24 and as you all know, October 7, 2023, happened, which was devastating to the entire area and we at the beginning we wanted to do the ceremony at the Ghetto Fighters’ House, which is situated in the western Galilee in the northern part of Israel in September 24. But unfortunately, the war did not allow it. We were not able to do it because of the missile attacks from the north and we had to postpone. But we said that we will not cancel. And eventually we were able to do it last May and two weeks ago. And I was very much surprised to see how many of the ex-detainees of the second, third and fourth generation arrived, many of whom I never met before. So 140 people arrived from all over Israel. And it was very emotional during the event. The head of the archives at the Ghetto Fighters’ House and presented the collection of the Mauritian collection, and she demonstrated, she showed this dress of a child that was prepared to this child by her mother on the Camp at Beau Bassin for a Hanukah festival, and as she presented the story about the dress, asking us where do you think that she got the fabric and how did she do it? One of the people at the audience stood up and said, This is the dress of my mother. And it was so very emotional because we had no idea that she's there. That she arrived and she had no idea that her mother actually donated the dress to the Ghetto Fighters’ House. And this is only one story of many like that people came with a copies of the diaries of their grandparents. And you know a lot of personal letters and photographs. We have a WhatsApp group and people are still sending photos and asking who can recognize this and this and that. I yesterday I had a Zoom meeting with three brothers who actually realized that their great-grandfather and grandmother were deported to Mauritius. Their great-grandfather before he was deported to Mauritius, he was from Vienna and he was very close to Herzl, our big Herzl. And then they realized that he was actually deported to Mauritius as well. And I sat with them on Zoom showing them some photos and we were actually able to recognize him at the synagogue in Mauritius. So those are amazing moment, the precious moments that I will, I feel, I think I will cherish forever because, you know, I realize that for Holocaust studies and even for Jewish history, the Jewish deportations to Mauritius is a very small and marginal episode. But for me, for the past six years, the understanding of 1,581 Jewish refugees equals 1,581 Jewish stories. And each story is a world. And so for me, I felt like this is so important for the families and also important for me and for my research, because as historians, we write a lot. We go to archives. But there is always the question of what are we doing with our knowledge. Okay, I was able to publish it in a Q1 journal. A very important journal. But who will read it, who will have access to this knowledge? And so for me, this is very important and this is part of the work and I feel like it's a struggle because it's something that I have been doing not only with Mauritius, but with my entire work, academic work, bringing Holocaust history into this sustained conversation with colonial post-colonial contexts and trying to really open new conceptual and methodological pathways for the field of Jewish history and of course, this is challenging because I need a lot of pushing to do, to push Jewish history beyond this traditional Eurocentric focus. And also we need to remember one of the things that the ex-detainees and their families say a lot is we were not remembered because we are not dead enough. And I really tried to break this hierarchy of suffering because there is enough room and space to remember all kinds of experiences. The Holocaust was not only Auschwitz, it was not only Dachau, and it was not only Majdanek, it was a devastating episode that has, a lot of different angles and it happened in a colonial war and this is something that people forget and those refugees were persecuted as Jews and then were deported as Jews, and not because the British authorities were antisemitic, but they were still persecuted because of their identity. So the Nazis persecuted them for their Jewish-ness, the British for their European-ness. But at the same time, they were not free. So I feel like this double persecution is something that people need to speak about with the limitation of understanding that there are different kinds of suffering and different levels of suffering. The Jews themselves, say, in their journals, in their diaries, that they realized that they are lucky because they were the ones that got away, the last one that got away. But still they were not free. And this is something that needs to be remembered. Was there anything interesting that happened prior during or after the research project that you took up that you would like to maybe discuss with us? Yes, I think that I wanted to discuss something that happened in September 2023. So it was not part of my research. It was when we actually did the three day commemoration event in Mauritius. And as I said, we had many dignitaries, diplomats, and there was also the Israeli ambassador. And after the events were over an open letter to the Israeli ambassador appeared in the local newspaper, in Mauritius, signed by Friends of Al-Aqsa. Calling, and I am paraphrasing of course, welcoming the Israeli ambassador, acknowledging the suffering of the Jewish refugees and calling him to acknowledge the suffering of the Palestinians as well. And I felt so touched and so moved by this act. I felt it was very well written and not confronting at all. And very hopeful. And this is something that I actually I must say, whenever I come to Mauritius, I'm full of hope because this is a very heterogenic society with a complicated history. But somehow there is this social cohesion that I wish we will have in many other societies all over the world. And this letter touched me in a way that I cannot understand. And then a month later, when October 7 happened, I felt like, you know, I don't know, I felt hopeless. And maybe this is a good way of ending because I think that for the past year and around seven or eight months now I am very much longing to go back to that feeling that I had when I read this letter. So I think that the situation is very complex and that there is a lot of suffering here in our region. But looking at Mauritius and maybe even going back to that letter, that open letter, maybe it will bring us some air and some hope. This was Not to Forgive but to Understand with our guest Roni Mikel-Arieli. To our listeners, don't forget to like, subscribe and stay tuned for more discussions.