Review of Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa

Since Maus, graphic novels have been used with great effect to describe both Jewish and the Palestinian experiences by authors such as Harvey Pekar and Joe Sacco; this is a worthy addition to the tradition.

The book tells the story of the protagonist Hans Frank, a radical Jewish journalist, as he lives through the descent of Germany from Weimar to the Nazis and moves from Germany to France to Spain and to North Africa.

The first episodes in the book are familiar but well told. The later passages tell a story that is unfamiliar to most of us.

The early episodes set Frank’s personal dilemmas about whether to stay and use his journalist’s skills to combat the Nazis or to seek personal safety abroad leaving his father in Berlin. The book describes the inability of Frank and his circle to believe that ordinary Germans would allow the Nazis to dominate their lives and their country and their developing realisation that through belief or fear they would accept their rule.

In Paris Frank is welcomed by Makhalouf, an Algerian Jew who has come to Paris to escape the growing antisemitism of the French settlers who have not forgotten the Dreyfus Affair or acknowledged Dreyfus’s innocence. (Perhaps could read “who have still not acknowledged the innocence of Dreyfus more than 100 years later” – or even “believe the eventual finding of Dreyfus’s innocence was unjustified”….The importation of antisemitism from Europe into North Africa and its disruption of longstanding amicable relations between its Jews and its Muslims is a central theme of the book.

Establishing himself as a writer for radical publications in Paris, Frank observes the growing fascist strength in France. In 1936 he is sent to cover the Republican fight in the Spanish Civil War. The book reports but does not analyse the causes of the Republican defeat but does indicate the human suffering and the flight of the refugees from Franco that followed this defeat.

After his time in Spain the story moves to North Africa where Frank joins many exiled republicans and many Jews in signing up for the Foreign Legion with the aim of preparing for fighting Nazi Germany. In 1940 is deployed back to France to defend France against the German invasion. Following the fall of France, the legionnaires return to Algeria.

Algeria comes under the control of Vichy and who institute repression of Jews with German Jews  at particular risk. Frank is rounded up and put in a cattle truck and transported to a labour camp in the Sahara. The book describes the foul treatment of the inmates, Jews, Arabs and sub-Saharan Africans, and the harsh labour demanded of them. They were put to work building a railway to transport minerals the Germans needed for their war effort. They were replacements for local labourers who would not work for low wages under a strict labour regime. The narrative tells of the collaboration developing into close friendship between interned Jews and local Arabs and of the close relationships between the Muslims and the local rabbi and his community. The rabbi tells Frank of how the Europeans disrupted the centuries old peaceful relationship between Muslims and Jews with their complementary lives supporting each other.

Frank rebels against the treatment of his fellow inmates and, as a troublemaker, is transferred to a punishment camp further in the desert where abuse, punishment beatings and torture were routine.

After the Nazi invasion of Russia, Frank feared that German Jews were slated for deportation back to Europe. Feigning a scorpion bite, Frank was able to escape and undertook a perilous journey to Morocco where Jews had a better chance of survival as the King resisted the harshest demands of Vichy.

The book ends with the American invasion of Casablanca and Frank’s reflection on the people, of many backgrounds, who enabled him as a German Jew to survive.

The drawings move the narrative along and do not spare the more grim parts of the story.

While the willing cooperation of Vichy with Nazis is well known, their activities in North Africa in running their own system of labour, effectively concentration, camps is not. The history of urban Algerian Jews under French colonial rule as an intermediate group between the French and Muslims, congruent with the role of Asians in East Africa, is somewhat better known. Their alignment with the French in the Algerian War of Independence based on a common contempt for and fear of the Muslim majority has also been recognised. What has been overlooked is how this semi-acceptance into the colonial state undermined a long history of amicable relationships which sustained in the desert areas that were of less interest to the colonists.

While there are elements of ‘Boys Own’ storytelling, the book is based on solid historical research and is both an accessible and an important addition to our understanding of the history of Jews in North Africa the roots of which go back to the days of the powerful Moorish Empire of North Africa and Al-Andalus.