Alain Chouraqui and Serge Klarsfeld are elected President and Vice President of the “Camp des Milles Foundation - Memory and education”

Alain Chouraqui, a researcher at CNRS, has been elected President of the Foundation. The historian Serge Klarsfeld has accepted to be Vice-President.

The Camp des Milles Foundation and the Association for Remembering the Camp des Milles wish to preserve the memory of all the victims of this camp, “undesirable” aliens, anti-Fascists and Jews, as well as the Righteous who succeeded in preserving a flame of humanity at the camp.

Alain Chouraqui insisted on the “importance of preserving the memory so that the terrible lessons of the past remain alive. The tensions around the identity of different communities that we are experiencing today impose it upon us.” Mr Mohamed Moussaoui , President of the French Council for the Muslim Faith, said “This is a place filled with suffering, and the duty to remember is fundamental because to forget is to commit a second crime against the victims. At a time when we are seeing memories vying for recognition, it is fundamental that we affirm that memory is One… For us Muslims, he who annihilates life, annihilates all lives, and he who saves one life saves all… At a time when barbarity was at its peak, Morocco – Moussaoui is a native Moroccan – opened its doors to the Jews of Marseilles and protected the Jews living in the country.” He then went on to recall childhood memories of playing with his Jewish friends and spoke of his recent meeting with Elie Wiesel in Monaco, who “is endlessly seeking an answer to man’s barbarity… A place like the Camp des Milles honours those men and women who have desired to make it an instrument of education contributing to the nation’s memory. There have been massacres and genocides since the Holocaust. If memory does not live on, it will give hate-filled people the possibility of committing other crimes… I hope that your project will resonate through its educational programme.”

The Camp des Milles was the main French internment, transit and deportation camp in the South East of France, and is the only French camp that is still intact. Some 10 000 people of 27 nationalities passed through it, including 2500 Jewish adults and about a hundred Jewish children who were deported to Auschwitz via Drancy.

The Memorial is due to be opened to the public in early 2011.