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'" Un livre pour enfants '": Mickey au Camp de Gurs as Picture Book Philip Smith Children's Literature, Volume 47, 2019, pp. 104-119 (Article) Published by Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.2019.0006 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/725044 [ This content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the COVID-19 pandemic. ] ‘“Un livre pour enfants’”: Mickey au Camp de Gurs as Picture Book Philip Smith The Gurs camp was the largest internment center in occupied France. Despite hunger, thirst, separation from loved ones, scarcity of even the most basic resources, an uncertain future, and widespread sickness, its occupants actively sought to maintain signs of culture within the camp, including hosting lectures, staging plays, performing music, and creating visual art. One work to have emerged from Gurs is Horst Rosenthal’s Mickey au Camp de Gurs, which uses Disney’s Mickey Mouse as a representative camp prisoner. Rosenthal’s use of irony, gallows humor, and satirical wit is all the more remarkable for the fact that he produced the work while under such terrible conditions. Mickey au Camp de Gurs, this essay argues, uses a visual vocabulary borrowed from the picture book and the comic book to offer a double-voiced criticism of Vichy racial politics, highlighting not only the violence of the regime, but the ways in which it sought to legitimize that violence through bureaucracy and nationalist rhetoric. In criticism to date, Mickey au Camp de Gurs has often been associated with Art Spiegelman’s Maus and, as such, has received significant atten- tion from comics scholars. This essay instead reads Rosenthal’s work as one that shares certain generic conventions with the picture book. It draws out Mickey au Camp de Gurs from the shadow of Maus to explore it using analytical tools from children’s literature. It shows, first, that approaching Mickey au Camp de Gurs as a picture book yields readings beyond the codes found in comics, and, second, that Mickey au Camp de Gurs’s primary target is not German anti-Semitism as in Maus, but rather the officiousness, xenophobia, violence, and hypocrisy of the Vichy regime. Mickey au Camp de Gurs, this essay argues, uses a form of double address to ridicule the Vichy regime’s treatment of foreigners, and Jews in particular, as a danger to French ideals. In order to appreciate the import and context of Rosenthal’s work, we must begin with his biography. Horst Rosenthal was born to a Jewish family in Germany in 1915. Faced with rising anti-Semitism and an uncertain future, he fled to France in 1933—the year Hitler 104 Children’s Literature 47, Hollins University © 2019. ‘“Un livre pour enfants’” 105 came into power. At first, he lived in Paris, on rue de Clignancourt and then rue Richomme. After war broke out, he was arrested in a round-up of French Jews and Jewish refugees from Germany. He was held first in Buffalo Stadium in Paris, then Marolles in Loir-et-Cher, Damigny, Dreux, Tence, and finally the camp in St. Cyprien. As he was moved between these camps, in 1940, northern France fell under German control. Most of France was occupied by the German military, and the remaining regions were administered by the Vichy regime in accordance with the terms laid out by Germany. The Vichy regime was, as Michael Marrus and Robert Paxton contend, “authori- tarian, traditionalist, pious, and neutral in the war between Hitler and the Allies” (xvi). They were also nationalistic and deeply anti-Semitic, blaming immigration and foreign influence for, as they saw it, the degradation of French society. The persecution of Jews, Marrus and Paxton argue, was not purely a case of the Vichy government aligning their policies with those of the German occupiers, but also a project of recovering (in their eyes) French values by purging France of those considered a threat to national unity—the most demonized among these groups being communists and Jews. Their policy was not of extermination but of forced relocation or (in a minority of cases) as- similation with the goal of building a “homogeneous French nation” (xvii). A series of laws came into place, denaturalizing French Jews, closing Jewish businesses, barring Jews from certain occupations, and allowing for the internment of foreign Jews. The anti-Semitism that Rosenthal had sought to flee had found him in France. After the St. Cyprien camp was destroyed in a flood, Rosenthal was transferred to Gurs in late 1940 (Rosenberg 274). Gurs was the largest camp in occupied France. It had originally been intended to house refugees from the Spanish Civil War but had been repurposed to hold those whom the Vichy regime considered, to use Pnina Rosenberg’s term, “anti-French” (273), namely communists, foreigners, and Jews. Many of those held in Gurs were members of the International Brigade (internationaux), who fought against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War (Rosenberg 274). Claude Laharie maintains that Gurs held 21,790 in- dividuals between March 1939 and November 1943 (219). The camp itself consisted of separate male and female barracks that collectively comprised 382 hastily constructed wooden huts, each twenty-five square meters in size. The huts, each housing up to sixty inmates, had no in- sulation and the tarred fabric roofs deteriorated quickly. During the period 1940–41, Lisa Mulman asserts, dysentery, typhoid fever, and 106 Philip Smith other diseases claimed the lives of 800 prisoners (“Mice” Tale 90). In the face of such privations, however, as Hanna Schramm and Barbara Vormeier document, prisoners put on lectures, musical and theater performances, and art exhibitions for one another (131–46). While in the camp, Rosenthal created picture books, of which three survive. One of these three books, Mickey au Camp de Gurs—the focus of this essay—places Disney’s iconic character Mickey Mouse within the wire fences of the Gurs camp. In the book, Mickey takes a walk through France. He is challenged by a gendarme (police officer) and fails to produce his papers, claiming innocently to be “international” (3). Mickey is arrested and taken to Gurs, where he meets a bureau- crat who is buried beneath a mound of papers. When asked about his parentage, Mickey states that Walt Disney is his father and that he has no mother. The bureaucrat asks if he is a Jew, and Mickey pleads ignorance of such matters. He asserts that he is American, “mais je suis international,” a term that the bureaucrat seizes on, declaring Mickey to be a communist (6). In the Gurs camp, Mickey witnesses and endures several hardships, most significant among them being starvation and restricted movement. Ultimately, Mickey decides to erase himself from the story and reappear in America, a place, he tells the reader, where the spirit of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity remains alive. Rosenthal was not the first to appropriate Mickey Mouse. In America, “Tijuana Bibles,” such as those collected by Bob Adelman, featured Disney characters, Mickey included, in various sexual scenarios. Disney characters were also invoked in international politics; for example, on 28 July 1931, an article in Film-Kurier, in response to Nazi attacks on American cartooning, argued that Mickey Mouse might serve as an antidote to “swastika and persecution” (qtd. in Leslie 80). Rosenthal was also certainly not the last to use Disney or an animal allegory: during World War II, Donald Duck fought the Nazis in Der Fuehrer’s Face (1943); and Edmond-François Calvo’s La Bête est morte! (1944) uses cartoon animals and imagery from the French Revolution to depict the end of German occupation. What makes Rosenthal’s text unique, however, is its status as Holocaust art. The authorities who operated the Gurs camp were more tolerant of artistic expression than those elsewhere in Europe, but the survival of Rosenthal’s work is nonetheless miraculous. Those who created art within the camps, Nelly Toll asserts, had to do so using whatever materials they could find or bargain for while under conditions that were far from conducive to the preservation of delicate materials such as hand-drawn and bound books (xvi). Every work of ‘“Un livre pour enfants’” 107 art, whether commissioned by the authorities or created by prisoners often at great personal risk, represents a triumph of art over almost insurmountable circumstances. As works of art produced within the camps, Rosenthal’s books rep- resent a fragment of a world that has otherwise been buried. The Nazi killing project, in which the Vichy regime was complicit, was intended to be self-erasing; in 1943, Himmler remarked of the Holocaust, “[t] his is a page of glory in our history which has never been written and is never to be written” (qtd. in Gilbert 614); and, indeed, as with many of the German-operated camps, many of the records for Gurs were destroyed by the camp authorities. Rosenthal’s picture books, then, like the works of Leo Haas, Esther Lurie, Felix Nussbaum, Bedřich Fritta, Karel Fleischmann, Yehuda Bacon, and Dina Babbitt, are not only self-expression but documentary made under almost impossible conditions; they capture, to use Stephen Feinstein’s words, “[w]hat the camera did not see” (55).1 The French authorities held Rosenthal in Gurs from 1940 to 1941, and, after a period in a forced labor camp, he returned to Gurs for several months in 1942. He was transferred to Drancy on 11 September 1942, and sent on to Auschwitz, where he died two years later. He was just twenty-seven years old. Mickey au Camp de Gurs is now held in the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, along with another of his picture books, La Journée d’un hébérge: Camp de Gurs 1942.

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