1941 Last Call For Exile

1941, refugees and opponents who wanted to flee Hitler's Europe and Pétain's France found themselves in Marseille, in hotel rooms or internment camps.
Political enemies, intellectuals, writers, artists and anonymous people of all origins, some Jewish others not, were desperate to embark for America, which they hoped to reach via Martinique, a French colony in the tropics.
But the steps that the 'undesirables' had to take were innumerable, often absurd always tedious, and exhausting. The situation was urgent: for a few months, the sea was the last legal escape route from continental Europe, the last hope.
There are only a few photos of the crossing. But no films.
Thanks to the stories left by the witnesses, one can imagine, as Jérôme Prieur does, what it was like for the lucky ones to leave, their odyssey on the few boats that crossed the Atlantic, and then, their forced stay in two camps near Fort-de-France: the Lazaret and Balata camps... Sometimes famous, these men and women forced into exile, wrote to share what the others couldn’t tell.