Although Morocco has a predominantly Muslim population, the Uyghurs receive no support in China. To address this, we built a memorial, which only gained attention from the Arab press after an Israeli newspaper reported on its similarity to the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. BBC Arabic covered the project, triggering an international media boom that shifted the focus from the Uyghurs to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Artwork successful!
The Moroccan Holocaust history on Wikipedia never mentioned the forced labor camps in the desert where Jews died. Our memorial was destroyed by the Moroccan Ministry of the Interior after a year of construction. With this act, we brought the issue of forced labor into the Moroccan history on Wikipedia as well, in order to fight against historical revisionism and antisemitism. This occurred even though it was originally conceived as an art installation to draw attention to the human rights violations committed by China against the Uyghurs.
The boomerang of art once again flew a creative arc to fight against anti-Muslim racism and to mention the forgotten forced laborers within Wikipedia.
Unfortunately, Morocco does not have such forms of performance art. The team
On our Moroccan site, which features a replica of the Orthanc Tower from Lord of the Rings, the Moroccan authorities are making life difficult for us. A soup kitchen for 500 people, run by the German Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW), was confiscated, a grave for a German aid worker was destroyed with bulldozers, and a development aid bakery, from which the local population directly benefited, was razed to the ground.
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Open letter to King Mohammed VI of Morocco.
Your Highness Mohammed VI, art is not a crime. Our German organization for human rights and the promotion of art and culture urgently needs to complain to you about serious human rights violations in Morocco. It all started with a mobile soup kitchen for Africa, which your customs officials confiscated in Tangier in May 2018 because we were accused of intending to sell soup commercially in Marrakech. For a year now, we have seen people eating from garbage cans, and our soup kitchen would certainly have helped many people get enough to eat. Why are your officials demolishing our artists' garden? Your authorities did not respond to our building application in September 2018. Every day, we tried to contact your administration through all available channels in the country, from parliament to your Moroccan embassies, but without success. You never replied. In December 2018, our PixelHELPER development worker, Tombia Braide, died of a heart attack after becoming so extremely upset by the authorities' behavior. Of course, he was buried without anyone present as a form of remembrance, and the blame was placed on the Moroccan undertaker. We built a sundial in his memory, which was destroyed by their bulldozers. We invested €100.000 in Morocco within a year. We ran a canned bread bakery to ensure food stability in Africa and provided our village with free bread daily. Your gendarmerie takes our visitors to the station, claiming it's forbidden to visit us. An interrogation with accusations that our guest was a traitor and a Freemason is unacceptable. Afterwards, our visitor was slapped. Journalists have repeatedly been denied access to our property by the police. Although we possess all the necessary documents to obtain an investor visa in your country, including a three-year lease with an option to buy, your police want to deport us. We demand compensation for the destruction and the reconstruction of the canned bread bakery. Furthermore, you should inform your local police officers that artists are not terrorists. Because that's how we are being treated. Our staff are being physically threatened by the Mkadem, the Caid's right-hand man, for not closing the holes in our outer walls. Our team needed a rabies shot for Eid al-Fitr due to a dog bite. Unfortunately, their health departments in Ait Ourir and Marrakech were closed. We demand €100.000 for reconstruction and a personal apology from their police chief in Ait Ourir and the Caid in Ait Faska, who never speak to us directly but only communicate with us through uninvolved parties. Because of the police violence against our guests, we demand 100 employees of our choosing from Ait Faska and Ait Ourir for 100 years to work on our art projects.
In the summer of 1942, an International Red Cross (IRC) mission led by Dr. Wyss-Denant visited the camps of Boudnib, Bou Arfa, and Berguent. Today, no one in these remote villages remembers the sun.
In total, there were 14 camps of various types in the French Protectorate of Morocco, holding 4.000 men. A third were Jews of various nationalities. The inmates were all men, except in Sidi Al Ayachi, where there were women and children. Some camps were guarded detention centers, meaning actual prisons for political opponents of the Vichy regime. Others were so-called transit camps for refugees. Still others were reserved for foreign workers. (Or, in the case of Jews, the Bou Arfa camp.) Under Vichy, the Trans-Saharan Railway became an important symbol of cooperation with the Third Reich. Therefore, there was a great demand for labor. Those who could no longer work often died.
Thousands of Spanish Republicans were forced into labor camps with foreign workers, tasked with building and maintaining the railway lines. The pace of work after fleeing Franco's repression was brutal and inhumane. The Spanish workers were transformed into veritable convicts. Jews deported from Central Europe and French Communists were also sent there. Daily life was horrific. Many died from abuse, torture, disease, hunger or thirst, scorpion stings, or snakebites.
The Berguent (Ain Beni Mathar) camp was run by the Department of Industrial Production. It was reserved exclusively for Jews (155 in July 1942 and then 400 at the beginning of 1943, according to a CRI report). “But this spiritual comfort did not lessen the fact that the Berguent camp was among the worst,” said Jamaa Baida. The Red Cross was asked to close it, but the Jews living in Berguent, especially those from Central Europe, had previously fled to France. Volunteers of the Foreign Legion, demobilized after the defeat of 1940, were then interned “for administrative reasons.” This was the case with Saul Albert, a Turkish citizen who came to France in 1922. He was imprisoned in Berguent until his release in March 1943. In his diary, he writes:
"February 10 (1941): Broke stones all day. March 2...: Handed over to the fifth group of German Jews. I don't like this at all. The work isn't the same; we had to make ballast... April 6: We can't endure this life any longer. I have a fever, a toothache... September 22: Rosh Hashanah: Nobody wanted to work... October 1: Didn't eat..."
The guards, many of whom were German, behaved tyrannically, hostilely, and maliciously. "They should have joined the notorious Nazi SS." Some prisoners managed to escape, reached Casablanca, and banded together.
In Boudnib, a small town of 10.000 inhabitants, the current military barracks are the last remaining vestiges of the French army camp. Older residents retain fragments of memory: “I can tell you two things for sure. The first is that the Boudnib wing was mainly occupied by Jews. The second is that most of the town’s campers attended primary school there” (Tel Quel Magazine No. 274, May 19/25, 2007).
Maurice Rue, a communist journalist, was interned there. He told us that “of 40 prisoners, three-quarters were communists, socialists, and Gaullists, before 40 Jews arrived for a few months.”
Following the American landings on November 8, 1942, Morocco joined the Allies. In January 1943, the Allies met at a conference in Casablanca. A strategic and military agreement was signed. Shortly thereafter, with the invasion of Sicily (Operation Husky, July 1943), the end of German-occupied Europe began.
Construction in Bou Arfa was not interrupted, and conditions did not improve significantly. They were paid better when Italian and German prisoners replaced the communists and Jews. However, the construction of the Trans-Saharan Highway remained a daily hell. The project, deemed a misappropriation of resources, was not abandoned by France until 1949.
Otherwise, the camps were hastily dismantled between the end of 1942 and the beginning of 1943.
The documentary by Bill Cran and Karin Davison, broadcast on Arte, ent
The first Holocaust memorial in North Africa
A statement against persecuted minorities worldwide. The construction of the first Holocaust memorial in North Africa is intended to serve as an information source about the Holocaust for schools and the general public.
When every block speaks louder than a thousand words. On July 17.07th, construction began on the first Holocaust memorial in North Africa. We are erecting stelae to convey to visitors in the labyrinth of gray blocks the feeling of helplessness and mortal fear that people experienced in concentration camps. We want to create a place in North Africa that brings remembrance into the digital age. Viewers can follow the construction progress via livestream and influence the number of workers and blocks built with their donations. The more people watch and donate, the larger the Holocaust memorial will become.
The Holocaust Memorial in Marrakech is planned to be the largest in the world. Five times the size of the Berlin Holocaust Memorial, it will eventually consist of over 10.000 stone stelae surrounding an information center that educates visitors about the Holocaust.
Oliver Bienkowski, the founder of the PixelHELPER Foundation, searched the Yad Vashem database for his last name and found several entries. He then looked for the nearest Holocaust memorial in Africa and found only one in South Africa. Since that's practically a world away from Morocco, he decided to build a Holocaust memorial on the PixelHELPER grounds. The neighboring plots are all empty, so there's enough space to build at least 10.000 stelae.
