Introduction

This chapter examines the film Journal de Rivesaltes, 1941–1942, a 1997 documentary film about Swiss paediatric nurse Friedel Bohny-Reiter (1912–2001) and her experience as a nurse for the Swiss Red Cross/Aid to Children organisation at the Rivesaltes internment campFootnote 1 near Perpignan in southwest France. Made by Swiss filmmaker and anthropologist Jacqueline Veuve (1930–2013), the film focuses on the journal Bohny-Reiter kept while at Rivesaltes, recording daily her struggle to relieve internees amidst the daily onslaught of suffering and atrocities, which in 1942 included the deportation of the camp’s Jewish internees. In the film, an 84-year-old Bohny-Reiter revisits Rivesaltes for the first time in 54 years while the camera follows (Fig. 5.1), recording her unscripted comments and reactions as she wanders through the camp’s windswept ruins. Interspersed with this footage are fictional reconstructions of selected passages from the journal, interviews with camp survivors, photographs taken by Bohny-Reiter and Swiss photographer Paul Senn (1901–1953), press films from the Second World War (1939–1945), as well as still shots of Bohny-Reiter’s own paintings and drawings she made over the many years after her experience at Rivesaltes. The camp’s architecture, with its seemingly endless rows of shoddy barracks, emerges as one of the film’s principal antagonists, figuring prominently in the oral and written accounts given in the film as well as in the visual documentation shown from 1941 to 1942 and Veuve’s own footage from 1996. Journal de Rivesaltes had a dual agenda, aiming to attribute Swiss women humanitarians their rightful place in the history of the Second World War, while still representing the complexity and subjectivity of their experiences, and at the same time, awaken public conscience to the existence of internment camps of France and the involvement of the French army and national guard in the deportations. In filigree is the humanitarian paradox of helping in a helpless situation, revealing a darker and less heroic side to organisations like the Swiss Red Cross Aid to Children.

Fig. 5.1
A set of two photographs, the side and back view of a man in a desolate land. He is looking at a distant building.

Excerpts from the film Journal de Rivesaltes, 1941–1942 showing Bohny-Reiter revisiting the camp’s ruins © Cinémanufacture

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This chapter will examine what the film adds to Bohny-Reiter’s written account of her experience as a humanitarian, how it contributed to shaping a new understanding of Switzerland’s role in the Second World War in the late 1990s, and its value as a source for the history of emotions. I will examine this documentary film not as formal exercise of establishing ‘resonances between … “historical reality” and “camera reality”’ (Kracauer 1969, 3; Albano 2018, 188; LaCapra 2018, 24), but rather as an example of what Emma Hutchinson has described as ‘representational practices’ which make ‘traumatic events collectively meaningful, including to those who do not experience trauma directly, but only bear witness, from a distance’ (Hutchinson 2019, 3). Understanding distance here to be temporal, I propose to examine how Veuve’s film retroactively constructs (or deconstructs) a humanitarian crisis by performing both the trauma of others in the past and that of herself and her projected public in the present. I will also discuss how Veuve’s approach as an anthropologist makes her film an important source for the history of emotions.

Negotiating Political Emotions Through Rivesaltes

While Bohny-Reiter’s journal is a historical source in and of itself, Veuve’s film constitutes a document of the journal’s reception in the specific emotional context of Switzerland and France in 1996 as both countries come to terms (after a significant delay) with their histories in the Second World War. The film’s release coincided with a critical moment of reassessment of the Second World War. There was mounting international pressure to return stolen assets of Holocaust victims, especially after the revelations regarding the collaboration of Swiss banks with the Third Reich. In 1996, the same year Veuve began working on the film, the International Red Cross opened their archives related to their activities during the Second World War. It was also during this period that Swiss historians such as Jean-Claude Favez (1938–2013) began reassessing the putative ‘neutrality’ of Switzerland and the Red Cross during the Second World War (Favez 1988, 1998, 1999, 2015; Favez and Python 1998). Veuve was no latecomer to the game; Rivesaltes was almost finished when the Swiss parliament voted in December 1996 to appoint an independent commission of experts to examine the country’s relationship with the Third Reich and the controversial policies regarding refugees fleeing the Nazis. Led by historian Jean-François Bergier, the commission began research in 1997 and published their findings two years later in what is commonly referred to in Swiss medias as the Bergier Report (Commission indépendante d’experts Suisse – Seconde Guerre mondiale et al. 1999). Veuve was well aware of the revelations regarding knowledge of the deportation of Jews to Nazi concentration camps and spoke openly about it in the extensive press coverage of the film. Interviewed by the French-Swiss journal 24 heures Veuve insisted: ‘At the time, prisoners knew they would not return from Poland. The opening of the [Swiss Red Cross] archives leaves no doubt, the [Swiss] Federal Counsel also knew’ (Chappuis 1997).

In France, the context was no less turbulent with the culmination of Maurice Papon’s trial for his role in the deportation of 1560 people in the Bordeaux region between 1942 and 1944. Not only was Papon the first Vichy official to be tried and convicted of crimes against humanity, but his paradoxical association with Gaullism and the French resistance, as well as his subsequent brilliant political career in successive French governments, would reveal deep divisions in French public opinion regarding the country’s implication in war crimes and genocide (Mouralis 2002). The long delay before Papon’s conviction in 1998 (some 17 years after the trial began), embodied the lack of re-examination of France’s Vichy government in the Second World War. Major historical studies began to appear on deportations in France such as Annette Wieviorka’s 1992 Déportation et Génocide (Wieviorka 1992) and on French internment camps, such as Anne Grynberg’s 1991 landmark Les Camps de la Honte (Grynberg 1991). Early in the prior decade, French historians had already begun to question the role of collective memory in the construction of national identities by analysing the ‘memory places’ (Nora et al. 1984) or ‘places in which the collective heritage of France was crystallized’ (Nora and Kritzman 1996, xv) such as Vichy and Jewish culture within French society. In early projects for the film, Veuve criticised both France’s reluctance to address the crimes of the Vichy government and its readiness to attribute hero status to those who resisted. While France had, ‘after 50 years of silence’, begun to ‘reckon with their guilty conscience’, press coverage, documentaries and historical studies only enabled camp survivors and former camp officials to ‘invent a glorious past for themselves while curiously, and systematically, neglecting to mention the work of the Swiss Red Cross Aid to Children in those camps’ (Veuve 1995a). For Veuve, Bohny-Reiter’s journal provided a ‘view of the camps [that] is closer to reality than those who are describing it from memory fifty years later in films and books and who depict themselves as faultless, guiltless heroes’ (Veuve 1995a).

Public debate around the reassessment of the history of the Second World War was also fuelled by the atrocities of the Bosnian War (1992–1995) and the ensuing armed conflicts which continued until 2001. Ethnic cleansing, mass rape and the 1995 Srebrenica massacre, stirred outrage and horror as traumas of the World Wars were reactivated in Europe and the United States, revealing the latent violence and hegemony of Western civilisation and belying ‘its claims to universality and leadership’ (Weber 1997, 88). Protesting the ‘insanity’ of the Kosovo Crisis in 1999 (on the occasion of the 1999 Journée de l’Europe), Swiss confederation president Ruth Dreifuss declared that Europe had not witnessed such blatant violations of human rights since the Second World War (AP 1999). Elected federal councillor in 1993 and the country’s first woman president in 1999, Dreifuss was a prominent socialist and feminist political figure. The year of her election, she famously returned from a humanitarian visit to the Macedonian refugee camp in Stenkovac with 20 refugees in her plane. Of Swiss-Jewish heritage, Dreifuss also spoke proudly of how her father had broken Swiss law in order to save Jews fleeing Nazi Germany (Hazan 1999).

It was within this context that Veuve framed her project for Journal de Rivesaltes as an urgent ‘necessity’ (Veuve 1995b, 53). Time was also of the essence; not only was the camp itself threatened with demolition but both Friedel Bohny-Reiter and Maurice Dubois (director of Swiss Aid to Children during the Second World War) were then 85 and 87 years old, respectively. Moreover, as Pierre Nora observed ‘a need for memory is a need for history’ (Nora and Kritzman 1996, 8). In seeking to preserve the memories of the actors in its sinister history, Veuve drew a great deal of attention to the history of Rivesaltes and to that of French internment camps. Reactions to her film brought additional testimonies from survivors (Veuve 1990a) with whom she corresponded regularly, sometimes requesting material for a future museumFootnote 2 (Veuve 2000b).

Jacqueline Veuve and Anthropological Cinema, a Nexus for the History of Emotions

Jacqueline Veuve was not only a major figure of the new Swiss cinema; she was the country’s first woman filmmaker. When her first mid-length film came out in 1966 (Veuve and Yersin 1966), women still didn’t have the right to vote in Switzerland and wouldn’t until 1971. Compared to that of other countries, Swiss film production has always been small. Its beginnings were dominated by documentary films, due in part to federal funding schemes only available to this genre up until the late 1960s (Boillat 2010, 210). Fiction or cinema d’auteur became more prominent in French Switzerland in the 1970s with film makers such as Jean-Luc Goddard and the ‘Group 5’ (Alain Tanner, Claude Gorreta, Michel Soutter, Jean-Louis Roy and Jean-Jacques Legrange), a milieu from which Veuve felt largely excluded (Rohrbach et al. 2010, 17:47). However, Swiss fictional cinema remained heavily influenced by the documentary style and an interest in local ethnography, as can be seen in the films of Yves Yersin (Boillat 2010, 210), with whom Veuve made her first film. In addition to the usual obstacles faced by women filmmakers, Veuve also confronted the financial constraints specific to the Swiss market in which independent filmmakers must essentially produce their own films; a constraint which also accorded them a great deal of independence. The fact that Veuve made almost 60 films in her career attests not only to her tenacity as an independent woman filmmaker but also to her business acumen.

She was born Jacqueline Reber in 1930 in Payerne, an agricultural region in the French speaking part of Switzerland which counted approximately 5000 inhabitants and an important military training base. Brought up in a bourgeoisie family, Veuve trained as a librarian and documentarist of cinema and anthropology. At the age of 25, she left for Paris to work at the Musée de l’Homme as assistant to vanguard anthropologist-filmmaker Jean Rouch (1917–2004), analysing, documenting and classifying the museum’s extensive collection of ethnographic films. Her work with Rouch is largely acknowledged as a turning point, her entrance into the world of cinema through the door of anthropology. For the rest of her life and career she would refer to herself an anthropologist filmmaker, an ethical and aesthetic position at the crossroads of two disciplines crucial to the history of emotions.

Both anthropology and anthropological cinema are a nexus for questions in the history of emotions. According to Jan Plamper, anthropology has, ‘more than any other discipline’, contributed most to ‘debunking the myth that emotions are identical all over the planet’, and was the first to demonstrate the cultural and temporal variability of emotions, developing auto reflexive practices regarding the anthropologist’s own emotions and their influence on the analysis of those of others (Plamper 2017, 15–16). Jean Rouch was also one of the pioneering figures of cinema vérité in anthropology, an approach to documentary filmmaking started in the late 1950s, which sought to acknowledge the subjectivity of the filmmaker and the artificiality of the act of filming itself, often by rendering visible the camera’s presence. Rouch also used the cinema vérité technique of inserting deliberately fictional constructions within the documentary in order to highlight the plurality of truths and perspectives involved in any singular situation. Ethical issues of subjectivity, such as the ‘intersubjective encounter’ between the filmmaker and those being filmed (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2009, 546), are at the centre anthropological cinema. Rouch famously handed over the camera at times to those he was filming (Rouch 1958). He also contributed to technical developments that enabled synchronised recording of sounds and images, thus capturing multi-sensorial impressions that transcend a uniquely visual observation. A friend of the surrealists, perceived as an iconic yet unclassifiable figure, Rouch’s ethno-fictional films ‘dissolve the boundaries between fiction and reality, fantasy and truth, acting and real life’ (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2005, 11). Veuve’s cataloguing work at the Musée de l’Homme would have brought her in contact with other anthropological filmmaking approaches such as observational cinema. Unlike Rouch’s approach, observational cinema excludes fictional constructions but similarly seeks to ‘[bring] one into intense engagement with the senses’ questioning the limits of purely visual representations and ‘involve[ing] the making of a certain kind of representational object, one that is not a surface copy of the original world but a new form revealed through its shapes and textures’ (Grimshaw and Ravetz 2005, 15). Veuve also studied in the United States during the 1970s with British documentarist Richard Leacock (1921–2011), a pioneering figure of direct cinema who founded MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology's)’s film department.

Although she had conducted extensive historical research in preparation of Rivesaltes, Veuve described it as ‘a film which privileges emotions over history’ (Veuve 1995b, 53). The focus on psychological and affective aspects of individual experiences, especially traumatic ones, and the general political engagement of Veuve’s documentaries are also representative of 1970s film theory. The medium of film itself has been considered a vector of emotions and empathy since its inception with the anticipation that viewers project themselves into the film just as much as the film is itself projected. As early as 1916, German experimental psychologist Hugo Münsterberg maintained that the primary interest in the earliest moving pictures was psychological and related to human perception. Pioneering figure of experimental and applied psychology, Harvard professor and influential intellectual in the United States at the turn of the twentieth century, ‘Münsterberg was the first film theorist to seriously argue for the film medium as a model of the workings of the human mind’, which would be the basis of highly influential film theorists of the 1970s such as Jean-Louis Baudry (1930–2015) and Christian Metz (1931–1993) (Münsterberg and Langdale 2002, 9). Like proponents of cinema vérité, Jean-Louis Baudry also postulated that if ‘cinema were to reveal the marks of its own inception, a knowledge effect could obtain, which would serve as denunciation and resistance to the dominant ideology’ (Casebier 1991, 73–74). Veuve’s cinema vérité reflected not only her feminist engagement (Veuve 1974; Veuve 1976; Veuve 1978; Veuve 2000a), but also her efforts to document social groups and practices that were marginalised or likely to disappear such as female workers (Veuve 1978), or agricultural communities (Veuve and Yersin 1966; Veuve 1990b). Of Rivesaltes, she expressed a desire to do justice to the all but forgotten ‘“little heroines” who worked in the shadow of the Swiss Red Cross Aid to Children’ (Veuve 1995b, 53). Like her other films, Rivesaltes also reflects Veuve’s own approach to anthropological cinema which she defined as a deliberate choice to examine her own culture through an anthropological lens, examining the roots of its institutions (Probst 1995, 28).

By the time she discovered Bohny-Reiter’s journal, Veuve had already made three documentary films on subjects related to the Second World War, La Filière, La Traversée and Lettres de Stalingrad (Veuve 1972; Veuve 1986; Veuve 1987). Also, as a young trainee librarian at the Musée de l’Homme, she was exposed to the experiences of older colleagues of the Second World War including Jean Rouch. Rouch was fervently opposed to Pétain, colonialism and racism (Diop 2007, 186), and had avoided serving in the Second World War by enrolling in the French Engineer corps in Niger. Veuve’s fellow librarian Yvonne Oddon was a survivor of the Holocaust who had been imprisoned at Ravensbruck and through whom Veuve believed to have discovered the ‘suffering of others’ (Rohrbach et al. 2010, 13:01). Two of her four films on the Second World War, La Filière and Rivesaltes (Veuve 1986; Veuve 1997), focus on Swiss women humanitarians and their defiance of the protocols which forbade them to prevent or hinder deportations. The 1986 short-length documentary La Filière was inspired by Anne Marie Imhof-Piguet’s book about her experience as a Swiss nurse at Chateau de la Hille (Imhof 1985), a French colony run by Swiss Aid to Children where, along with her colleague Rösli Näf and the complicity of a handful of French and Swiss citizens, she organised the escape of 150 Jewish children into Switzerland between 1942 and 1944, saving them from deportation. The film features rare interviews with the ageing Imhof-Piguet and Näf, capturing how they narrate their memories and experience at a distance of over 40 years. By the time Veuve began making Rivesaltes, she had thus already engaged in denouncing the invisibility of humanitarian women in historical records and secondary literature. Friedel Bohny-Reiter was no exception to this invisibility: the number of official documents concerning the humanitarian work of Friedel’s husband August Bohny-Reiter (A. Bohny-Reiter) is considerably greater than those held in Friedel’s archives. Prior to 1993 there was no printed, filmed or other published record of Bohny-Reiter’s humanitarian experiences. Also, there was very little interest in academia in the 1990s for the history of humanitarian women (Fleury-Seemuller 2020). While the French edition is annotated and substantially introduced by Swiss historian Michèle Fleury-Seemuller, subsequent studies have been rare (Kanyar Becker 2010).

Gathering Emotional Documents

Veuve described Rivesaltes as a ‘meeting between a place and a book’ (Veuve 1995b, 1). In her accounts of the film’s genesis, she mentions how during her many stays in Fitou, a village near Rivesaltes, her ‘filmmaker’s curiosity had drawn [her] to the “ghost town” of [the Joffre military camp in] Rivesaltes’ where she sensed that ‘something bad had happened’ without knowing what (Veuve 1995a). It was in Fitou that she discovered the French edition of Bohny-Reiter’s journal when it came out in 1993, which revealed to her what had ‘happened’ at Rivesaltes, at least in between 1941 and 1942.Footnote 3 This edition regroups entries from two journals, the first of which dates from 6 July 1940 during Bohny-Reiter’s stay in Florence, where she worked in an orphanage for one and a half years, to 13 December 1941, shortly after her arrival at the Rivesaltes camp (F. Bohny-Reiter 1993, 5). The second (currently held at the ETH archives for contemporary history in ZurichFootnote 4) dates from 15 December 1941 to 5 February 1943, is an unlined school notebook measuring 22 cm × 17.5 cm × 1.5 cm. Both journals might have slipped into oblivion were it not for the efforts in the early 1990s of Michèle Fleury-Seemuller, then an assistant to professor Jean-Claude Favez at the University of Geneva. Seeking new sources on Swiss humanitarian work during the Second World War, Fleury-Seemuller attended an annual reunion of former Swiss Aid to Children workers where she inquired about anyone who might have kept a journal during that time (Fleury-Seemuller 2020). Someone suggested she ask Friedel Bohny-Reiter. Doubting the historical value of her personal experience, Bohny-Reiter had to be coaxed by the young historian to let her have a look at the journals, which had been lying untouched in the back of a drawer for nearly 50 years. Overcoming her initial reticence, Bohny-Reiter finally agreed to publish an edited version, first in French, translated by Fleury-Seemuller (F. Bohny-Reiter 1993), then in German (F. Bohny-Reiter 1995).

According to Veuve, Bohny-Reiter’s journal provided testimony that was ‘closer to reality’ than the accounts given by witnesses or survivors over fifty years after the events (Veuve 1995a). She nonetheless sought testimonials from multiple witnesses, working with Michèle Fleury-Seemuller, who was co-author during the first stages of the project. They obtained a list of 11 names of camp survivors from August and Friedel Bohny-Reiter, five of whom would end up interviewed in the film (A. Bohny-Reiter and Bohny-Reiter 1994). Certain had already published memoirs and autobiographies which mentioned their stay in Rivesaltes, such as Dolorès Ortiz-Favier (Ortiz-Favier 1988, 1991), a refugee of the Spanish War and Fred Wander (Wander 1996), a German Jew sent to Rivesaltes after being refused entry into Switzerland and later deported to Auschwitz (after the war he became a writer by trade). Hannelore and Margot Wicki-Schwarzschild, who were saved from deportation with their mother by Friedel Bohny-Reiter (the father was deported to Auschwitz from Rivesaltes), took years to come to terms with their traumatic past and published their memoires after the film (Wicki-Schwarzschild and Wicki-Schwarzschild 2011). Veuve had sought other testimonies of Rivesaltes as well, interviewing German prisoners detained at Rivesaltes after the war (Veuve 1996). Although they are not included in the final version of the film, she had gone to some lengths to gather their accounts, publishing at least one call for witnesses in a German newspaper (Publicitas 1995).

Although no images are credited in the film (sources are only mentioned in the generic), many came from Bohny-Reiter’s own album of photos she took while at Rivesaltes. It is a collection of alternately commemorative and macabre souvenirs, including images of famished and ill internees, emaciated babies, Jews awaiting deportation, her dog, the vegetable garden she managed to cultivate in the camp, mealtimes in the Swiss Aid barrack (Fig. 5.2) and the gardens surrounding the Chateau La Hille.Footnote 5 All annotations are in French, the language she used while at Rivesaltes. On the title page, garnished with a small gouache painting by Bohny-Reiter of the barracks, is written ‘de mon travail au Camp de Rivesaltes du 12. Nov. 1941-25. Nov. 1942 Friedel Reiter’ (F. Bohny-Reiter 1941). The annotations are in Bohny-Reiter’s hand, but are of two different qualities, one smooth and sure and well placed in respect to the photos, a second more shaky and in a thicker stroke that is sometimes squeezed into the margins, suggesting that Bohny Reiter made annotations later in life, revisiting her memories and adding key details. An image of a rudimentary wood and wire-framed cot with no mattress bears a first legend ‘Lit du camp’ (camp cot) to which is added underneath in the second handwriting ‘I slept in this for one year’, perhaps in retrospective disbelief that so crude a structure could serve such a purpose (F. Bohny-Reiter 1941, 6). A photograph of children in the back of a truck and another of a small group of adult internees surrounded by various parcels bears the (later) legend ‘Saved from deportation’ (F. Bohny-Reiter 1941, 37). Another showing a crowd of internees waiting in the middle of a barren field (Fig. 5.3) is labelled ‘Before departure’ and then ‘for Poland? towards death?’ (F. Bohny-Reiter 1941, 39).

Fig. 5.2
A snapshot of a page has three photos with handwritten notes around the photos. Two photos of children dining together and a photo of a group of children posing with a man and woman, at the back.

Page from Bohny-Reiter’s photo album showing the Swiss Aid to Children barrack in Rivesaltes. Friedel Bohny-Reiter Collection, ETH Archives of Contemporary History, Zurich: NL Friedel Bohny-Reiter/12

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Fig. 5.3
A snapshot of a page has three photos with handwritten notes around the photos. Two photos of groups of people outdoors and a photograph of a truck and a car with a few individuals on and near the truck.

Page from Bohny-Reiter’s photo album showing Jews awaiting deportation from Rivesaltes. Friedel Bohny-Reiter Collection, ETH Archives of Contemporary History, Zurich: NL Friedel Bohny-Reiter/12

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Veuve conducted extensive research to understand ‘what happened’ at Rivesaltes, and her librarian’s training shows through in the great quantity of documentation, correspondence and administrative papers she kept. In her archives held at the Swiss National Film Archive, there are nine boxes for the Rivesaltes film alone, including six of documents, two of photos and one of negatives. The two boxes of photographs (Veuve n.d.) contain mostly copies ordered from other archives and photographic collections relative to the Second World War including those of the International Red Cross, The Contemporary Centre for Jewish Documentation, Paul Sauvage and Paul Senn. Veuve also took photographic documentation herself on location for both Rivesaltes and another film she had planned to make on the nearby Elne maternity hospital (Veuve 1998).Footnote 6 Also run by the Swiss Aid to Children under the direction of Swiss nurse Elisabeth Eidenbenz, Elne took in pregnant mothers and malnourished babies from the internment camps in the region.

Performing Trauma

Veuve’s film can be understood as a performance of trauma in many different respects: that of Bohny-Reiter’s and of survivors, but also that experienced by Veuve and, by proxy, the public, in learning of Rivesaltes and its attendant horrors. In 1996, the French public remained largely ignorant of the extensive network of internment camps from 1938 onwards (Peschanski 2002, 15). Despite her documentary work for La Filière, Veuve claimed to have been ignorant of French internment camps prior to reading Journal de Rivesaltes, stressing both her own and her audience’s surprise that internees suffered so terribly at the hands of the French and not the Germans (Chappuis 1997). The film’s emphasis on Bohny-Reiter’s haunting visual memories and flashbacks reflects contemporaneous discussions of trauma and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder that had been developing since the 1980s in American and European psychiatry which were centred on ‘the notion of the traumatic image, conceived as an “iconic” memory that haunts the victim in the form of flashbacks, dreams, and other intrusive repetitions’ (Leys 2007, 93).

Certain journal entries suggest Bohny-Reiter formed such images already while at Rivesaltes. These are also reproduced in Veuve’s film, forming a mise en abime of the mnemonic qualities of cinema. In August 1942 when the deportation of Jewish internees began, Bohny-Reiter writes ‘the film of the day’s events play over and over again in my head’ (F. Bohny-Reiter 1993, 144; Veuve 1997). The need to create physical images was also imperative for Bohny-Reiter. ‘What a joy’ she wrote when her camera and drawing supplies arrived from home on 13 January 1942, following with a phrase of self-encouragement ‘Don’t think, continue, help where help is needed, believe in peace’ (F. Bohny-Reiter 1993, 74; Veuve 1997, 30:05–30:15) This passage in the film is accompanied by scenes which actually show the materiality of creating images: first a fictional reconstruction of Bohny-Reiter’s table at Rivesaltes where a box of gouache paints, brushes and rags sits next to a drawing of internees, followed by a shot of similar clutter on the table where Bohny-Reiter’s paints at home in Basel. Writing too is just as important: ‘the need to write is at once a constraint and a deliverance’ she observed in her journal (F. Bohny-Reiter 1993, 125; Veuve 1997, 48:03–48:40).

In the second scene, we see Bohny-Reiter sitting inside at a table before a blank journal in which she seems to have difficulty writing, while she speaks in voice-off:

What gave me the courage to publish my journal and to accept to do the film is the memory of a woman who was already in the train for deportation. She called to me from the window: ‘Sister Friedel, don’t forget us!’ and I think I have been faithful to that plea, to that woman, because even if I wanted to, I couldn’t forget them. (Veuve 1997, 01:15–01:40)

Not without ambiguity, the statement implies that the publication of her journal and the making of the film are both testimony to the memory of the Jews deported from Rivesaltes and to the indelible mark left on her by the traumatic experience of being a helpless bystander to violence and cruelty and ultimately to a genocide she knew was under way. In this scene, she’s shown attempting to write on a blank page, then giving up, suggestive of the fact that her story will now be told by Veuve, not in writing, but in images and sounds.

Bohny-Reiter seems visibly moved as she walks through the camp, unable to identify the barrack where she had worked. She remarks how the camp seems even more sad in its present state than before, and still just as cold (Veuve 1997, 02:59–03:10). Documents in Veuve’s archive suggest that revisiting Rivesaltes had stirred even darker feelings in Bohny-Reiter. In a journal she kept during the 11 days of filming in November 1996 (during which she stayed at Veuve’s house in Fitou), she wrote (in French) of being disturbed by the film crew’s endless chaos and noise and questioned the validity of their enterprise:

What are they looking for amongst the thousands who died here? Why relive all that? The suffering and the horrors? I worked here 54 years ago, I worked, slaved, fought against this incomprehensible destiny – But it’s the past. Leave these people in peace! (F. Bohny-Reiter 1996, 1)

She wrote of wanting to ‘run away from here and never come back’ since the first day of filming, lamenting how memories of the place had never stopped haunting her and how the making the film was crushing her, concluding on the vaguely hopeful note that perhaps humanity might learn something from such horrors (F. Bohny-Reiter 1996, 2–3).Footnote 7

A central preoccupation for Veuve in projects for the film was the separation of children from their parents (especially their mothers) which she described as a ‘traumatism that one never recovers from’ (Veuve 1995b, 55). By interviewing survivors, she aimed to ‘film them while talking about this traumatism’ (Veuve 1995b, 55). An earlier version of the film describes the opening scene as ‘an aerial view of the camp that will finish on the train station, an emotionally charged place where some 3640 people (of which many were parents who were seeing their children for the last time) leave for Auschwitz’ (Veuve 1995b, 53). Dolorès Ortiz-Favier had fled Spain as a child with her parents, grandmother, older brother and younger sister. More than half of her family would perish (including a brother born during their flight), leaving only herself, her sister and her father. In the film she recounts how they arrived, filthy and starved, with so many other refugees: ‘And then, it was incredible, the Secours Swiss came and these volunteers came to take care of all of these refugees …’ she breaks off, closes her eyes, pulls her hair, gasps and exclaims: ‘There were so many of us, we were so thin, so pitiful, so, so … I wonder if it was really … if it was really … really … I don’t know anymore, I’m a bit lost’ (Veuve 1997, 08:13–08:40). While this scene, incoherent, disturbing and unrehearsed, gives voice (and image) to the ‘unique and somewhat incommunicable experiences of shock and pain’ which reveal the social meaning of trauma (Hutchison 2016, 3), it is not only that of Ortiz-Favier. The scene can also be understood as mirroring the shock felt by both the filmmaker and the viewers to whom this trauma is revealed.

In her introduction to the French edition of the journal, Fleury-Seemuller suggests that the origins of Bohny-Reiter’s unshakeable motivation to help others can be traced to her own childhood, marked as it was by the First World War (F. Bohny-Reiter 1993, 7). Born Friederika Augustina Reiter in Austro-Hungarian Vienna in 1912, Bohny-Reiter was but two when war broke out. Like many children, she was evacuated to the countryside. According to written accounts, her father was killed on the front in the beginning of the war (F. Bohny-Reiter 1993, 7), although there is no father named on the birth certificate for Bohny-Reiter held at the ETH archives (Geburts-und Taufschein, Wien, 14.7.1912). In 1919, Bohny-Reiter was sent from famine-stricken Vienna on one of the Red Cross’s children’s convoys to Switzerland, where she was taken in as a foster child by the Nägeli-Zöbeli family in Kilchberg, Zurich. Although Fleury-Seemuller stops there in her introduction to the French volume, in an interview I had with her in 2020, she specified that Bohny-Reiter had confided she was initially not meant to stay longer than a few months in Switzerland. However, this extended to several years until eventually, according to Fleury-Seemuller, her mother refused to take her back (Fleury-Seemuller 2020). At age 2, Bohny-Reiter was possibly too young to remember her father. However, at age 8 or 9 she would have been at least conscious at the time that her mother had for whatever reasons essentially given her over to another family, and another country. Although her foster parents, Emma and Albert Nägeli-Zöbeli, did not officially adopt her (Fleury-Seemuller 2020) Bohny-Reiter seems to have been well integrated into the family, as suggested by the extensive correspondence she kept with her foster parents and siblings held in the ETH archives (part of which dates from 1941 to 1942) as well as the numerous references she makes to them in the journal.

In addition to the verbal performances of survivor’s trauma, the film also uses montage to construct visual representations of iconic memories shared by both internees and Bohny-Reiter, such as hunger. Starvation and malnourishment are recurrent themes both in Bohny-Reiter’s journal and in the survivor’s narratives. Camp survivor Fred Wander describes the slicing up of the single daily loaf of bread as a ‘magical ceremony’ (Veuve 1997, 28:01–28:30). Bread had to be divided between up to seven or eight people and slicing was a task reserved for a well-trusted person whose every movement was carefully monitored by all (Veuve 1997, 32:03–32:22). Another survivor, Ernest Marx, speaks of how 50 years later he is still plagued by the fear of not having enough to eat (Veuve 1997, 36:50–37:03). Into these interview sequences is spliced a black-and-white photograph taken from Bohny-Reiter’s Rivesaltes photo-album depicting one of the round bread loaves allotted to internees, neatly sliced into wedges (F. Bohny-Reiter 1941, 22). Iconic memories are also reconstructed through sound. Veuve’s sound technician went to great pains to capture the noise of the wind which accompanies the scenes in which Bohny-Reiter is revisiting the camp, her hair blowing in all directions (Fig. 5.4). Other sounds such as the noise of bicycle wheels or the crunching of gravel underfoot, reconstruct auditive experiences Bohny-Reiter might have had during the numerous trips she made between Rivesaltes and the Elne maternity, some 30 kilometres away. Similarly, Veuve chose a Swiss-German actress to simulate as best as possible the accent Bohny-Reiter would have had when speaking French at Rivesaltes. Alternately, key moments of silence occur, for instance, when present-day Bohny-Reiter is sitting indoors at a table or when the young Bohny-Reiter is represented writing in her journal at night. The opening scene of the camp’s ruins is accompanied by a piece for accordion reminiscent of both traditional Jewish and Romani music. Written by Swiss composer Thierry Fervant, it also creates a specific emotional register of melancholy and mourning, especially accompanied by the images of ruins.

Fig. 5.4
A photo of three persons having a conversation and one among the 3 is holding a device connected to his headset. The photo also includes the left half of a man.

Filming at Rivesaltes camp in November 1996. From left to right: Bohny-Reiter, Veuve and one of the sound technicians. Photo: Cinémathèque Suisse, Penthaz, CSL 119, box 25

Full size image

Press accounts of Bohny-Reiter’s story also focussed on the lifelong effects of the trauma she endured during her time at Rivesaltes. Articles dating from the film’s debut describe her journal as ‘emotionally charged’, distressing and overwhelming (Cuttat 1997) and in interviews, Bohny-Reiter stresses that it was impossible to speak of her experience afterwards because the memory was ‘too atrocious’ (Gasquez 1997). Through her lifelong artistic practice, Bohny-Reiter produced a considerable body of paintings and drawings inspired by memories of Rivesaltes well after leaving the camp in 1943. Speaking to a journalist covering an exhibition of her work in 1998, she stated: ‘Even now as I’m speaking to you, I still see all that misery, all those faces’ (Hurel 1998). She would remain haunted her whole life by her experience at Rivesaltes. In an interview with Veuve made in preparation for the film, Bohny-Reiter stressed that ‘it was only through painting that I could liberate myself’ (Veuve 1994–1996). Visual practices (and anything related to them) figure prominently in the journal as rare moments of respite: a box of watercolour paints or a camera received in the mail, painting the frescoes on the walls and façade of the Children’s Aid barrack with the aid of a Spanish internee named Joseph (F. Bohny-Reiter 1941, 32). The frescoes figure prominently in photos of the barrack, making it stand out in contrast to its unprepossessing surroundings.Footnote 8 While she painted numerous gouaches from her troubled memories (cachectic patients, mothers mourning separation from their children, the barracks) all her drawings and paintings made while at Rivesaltes had been lost. When she reported to the Red Cross centre in Toulouse after leaving the camp in February 1943, she had to turn over her belongings, some of which then disappeared including her sketchbook and numerous jewels given her by Jews and which she had promised to return to their families.

Perhaps the most iconic memory of traumatism at Rivesaltes is the physical environment of the camp itself. With its rigid orthogonal layout of monotonous, crude structures, the unapologetic brutality of the camp’s architecture is somehow a metaphor for the relentless cruelties perpetuated there. Excerpts from Bohny-Reiter’s journal that were selected for the film emphasise the extreme misery and physical hardship of the camp (starvation, illness, vermin, insects, heat, cold, filth). An earlier version of the film project shows she had initially intended to film the camp over four seasons, to capture its insalubrity and harsh climate all year round (Veuve 1995b, 53). On the title page of Bohny-Reiter’s photo album from Rivesaltes is one of her small gouaches representing an alley of barracks, their bright red roofs contrasting with the green blue of the mountains beyond and the dull yellow-white of the buildings. The image recurs in her journal (but not in the film) ‘In front of a line of red roofs that harmonise with the azur – the camp. Is it possible that this little stain of red could conceal so much misery, so much human suffering? Is it possible that the surrounding world can still be beautiful?’ (F. Bohny-Reiter 1993, 117). Despite their being essentially new when internees started arriving in 1940, the barracks never provided adequate shelter. Planned in the wake of the First World War as a transitional camp for indigenous troupes from the French colonies, Rivesaltes, or ‘Camp Joffre’ as it was officially called, was built in an inhospitable, windswept plane meant to test soldiers’ abilities to survive in hostile climates. Although planned in the early 1920s, construction of the Rivesaltes camp did not begin until late 1939 when it was built up by convoys of Spanish War refugees brought from the neighbouring internment camps of Barcarès, Argelès and Saint-Cyprien (Husser 2014, 22–23). Contractors were unstable, volatile and struggled with wartime restrictions on building supplies. The most rudimentary materials and techniques were used for construction such as wood frame carpentry with hollow bricks, cement fibre panels and industrial roofing tiles. French officials (including one doctor) inspecting the camp in 1940 deemed it inadequate for housing military troops, citing faulty construction (roofs blown off by heavy winds, missing windowpanes, no insulation) and inadequate sanitation, water supply and evacuation (Husser 2014, 30–31).

Conclusion

Bohny-Reiter’s experience with Swiss Aid to Children, as preserved in her journal and photo album, is emblematic of what Bertrand Taithe describes as the ‘contrast between what would be desirable and what is socially and politically possible [that] defines humanitarianism throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries’ (Taithe 2017, 478). If humanitarian discourse is more ‘aimed at alleviating suffering than abolishing it’ (Taithe 2017, 479), Bohny-Reiter’s experience is testament to the high price humanitarian workers can pay in their own suffering while alleviating that of others. In addition to the seeming futility of their work, Swiss Aid to Children nurses like Bohny-Reiter were also placed in the position of bystanders, more often than not unable to prevent violence such as when camp guardians raped women and young girls with impunity (F. Bohny-Reiter 1993, 115). Legally obliged to maintain the ‘neutrality’ of the Red Cross’s (and therefore Switzerland’s) position, Bohny-Reiter would question her whole life whether she was acting in complicity with the Vichy and Nazi regimes.

Veuve’s film gives us a moving image of humanitarian images, past and present. While she was inspired by a journal she felt was closer to the reality of the Rivesaltes camp in 1941–1942, her film is nonetheless an image of trauma as it is felt more than 50 years after the events, that of humanitarians and survivors as well as her own and that of the viewing public. The choice of journal entries for inclusion in the film reveals a preoccupation with certain themes (separation, hunger, physical hardship, deportations), while those excluded are equally suggestive. Why no mention of the rape of young women and girls by camp guardians? Also, while Bohny-Reiter’s religious faith is mentioned in passing in the film as something abstract that had been key to her survival, the journal contains numerous references to God and her deep conviction that her purpose at Rivesaltes was to do ‘God’s work’. A devout evangelist, she had copied out Luther’s Hymn praising the force of God’s word against Satan’s conspirations (F. Bohny-Reiter 1993, 115) and even reproached herself at times for ‘not having enough faith in He who holds us in his hand’ (F. Bohny-Reiter 1993, 121). Yet it is this side of Bohny-Reiter that also reveals her standards of what would have been ‘desirable’ for her as a humanitarian. On the 16th of May 1942, Bohny-Reiter recounts a long conversation she has with fellow humanitarian Elsbeth Kasser from the neighbouring internment camp at Gurs about their work in the camps with children and youth, how their greatest pleasure was to see them happy and how at certain gatherings, they were like a ‘large happy family’. They concluded that ‘it would be difficult to find a more beautiful life’ (F. Bohny-Reiter 1993, 125). While Veuve interprets moments such as these of respite and joy noted in the journal as signs of Bohny-Reiter’s love of life and hope, one might also understand them as expressing a certain love of humanitarian life, especially in light of her continued engagement with Swiss Aid to Children after the war.

Veuve’s Rivesaltes is a powerful film that is at times difficult to watch. Its emotional charge mirrors the shock felt at a particular moment in history when the traumatic memory of the Second World War was finally coming to light, both through historical research and through testimonies of survivors and witnesses who had finally found the courage to share their stories. The documentation and archival sources regarding Rivesaltes and survivors that Veuve amassed in preparation for the film (recently made available for consultation at the Swiss National Film Archive), also shows that films can be valuable sources for the history of emotions. Critics have cautioned that the emphasis on iconic images of trauma has resulted in a certain reliance ‘on the image to tell us what violence is’ (Weber 1997, 81–82; Leys 2007, 93). Yet Veuve’s film Rivesaltes had the inestimable value of stirring the memories of numerous other witnesses and survivors as well as raising public awareness to the history of French internment camps. It points to the important role emotions have as catalysts for historical research.