Remembering the Holocaust in Mauritius: Legacies of slavery, colonial violence, and Jewish displacement

On December 9, 1940, 1,581 Jewish refugees fleeing Nazi-controlled Europe, and surviving a long journey to British Mandated Palestine, were deported to the British colony of Mauritius. The refugees spent almost five years in the Beau-Bassin prison before leaving the island in August 1945. With their departure, the site and the story all but disappeared from collective memory. Despite some commemorative efforts since the 1990s, the Jewish deportation to Mauritius has largely been neglected from most accounts of the Second World War and the Holocaust, and, until recently, it has been also on the periphery of Mauritian collective memory.