Gurs internment camp survivors

Hannah Arendt (, , 14 October 1906 – 4 December 1975) was a German-born American political theorist. Her many books and articles have had a lasting influence on political theory and philosophy. Arendt is widely considered one of the most important political thinkers of the 20th century.

Eva Busch (born Eva Zimmermann: 22 May 1909 - 20 July 2001) was a German born singer and cabaret artist.

Jean Améry (31 October 1912 – 17 October 1978), born Hanns Chaim Mayer, was an Austria-born essayist whose work was often informed by his experiences during World War II. His most celebrated work, At the Mind's Limits: Contemplations by a Survivor on Auschwitz and Its Realities (1966), suggests that torture was "the essence" of the Third Reich. Other notable works included On Aging (1968) and On Suicide: A Discourse on Voluntary Death (1976). He first adopted the pseudonym Jean Améry in 1955. Améry took his own life in 1978.

Samuel Conlon Nancarrow (October 27, 1912 – August 10, 1997) was an American-born composer who lived and worked in Mexico for most of his life. He became a Mexican citizen in 1956.

Charlotte Salomon (April 16, 1917 – October 10, 1943) was a German-Jewish artist born in Berlin. She is primarily remembered as the creator of an autobiographical series of paintings Leben? oder Theater?: Ein Singspiel (Life? or Theater?: A Song-play) consisting of 769 individual works painted between 1941 and 1943 in the south of France, while Salomon was in hiding from the Nazis. In October 1943 she was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she and her unborn child were gassed to death by the Nazis soon after her arrival. In 2015, a stunning nineteen-page confession by Salomon to the fatal poisoning of her grandfather, kept secret for decades, was released by a Parisian publisher.

Carola Strauss Trier (1913–2000) was born in Germany in 1913, the second daughter of German chemist and philosopher Eduard Strauss and of Beatrice Rosenberg, an American citizen. She attended the Philanthropin in Frankfurt am Main, and then studied at the Laban School. Her family lived in Europe until the Second World War, emigrating to the United States in 1938, while she initially stayed in Germany, then emigrated to France. For reason of being a German, she was sent to the Gurs internment camp in France, from which she was finally released with the help of fellow dancer Marcel Neydorf. Together, they moved to the zone libre, and she was able to immigrate to New York in 1942, shortly before the zone libre was occupied, leading to thousands of Jews being detained, with most then being sent to Auschwitz. Neydorf stayed in France, as he did not receive a US visa.

Mollie (or Molly) Stimer (Russian: Молли Штеймер; November 21, 1897 – July 23, 1980) was born as Marthe Alperine in Tsarist Russia. She emigrated to the United States with her family at the age of 15. She became an anarchist and activist who fought as a trade unionist, an anti-war activist and a free-speech campaigner.

Lotte H. Eisner (5 March 1896, in Berlin – 25 November 1983, in Paris) was a German-French writer, film critic, archivist and curator. Eisner worked initially as a film critic in Berlin, then in Paris where in 1936 she met Henri Langlois with whom she founded the Cinémathèque Française.

Alice Herz (née Straus; May 25, 1882 – March 26, 1965) was a longtime peace activist who was the first person in the United States known to have immolated herself in protest of the escalating Vietnam War, following the example of Buddhist monk Thích Quảng Đức who immolated himself in protest of the oppression of Buddhists under the South Vietnamese government.

Maria Darmstädter (22 June 1892 – 13 February 1943), also known under her married name Maria Krehbiel-Darmstädter, was a German religious scholar and Holocaust victim. Born to a prominent Jewish family from Mannheim, she was baptised in the Lutheran church as an adult and shortly after joined the newly established Christian Community in the early 1920s. She was one of the community's first and most influential members, and contributed greatly to its liturgy. She was deported to Gurs internment camp by the Nazis in October 1940 and murdered in Auschwitz. Her letters from Nazi concentration camps were published in 1970.