MONTREAL — On the last weekend in April, Esther Topaz will be returning to her birthplace.

Esther Topaz stands behind the sculpture she has dedicated to the Gurs concentration camp.

But this homecoming will be different from the type people usually make.

That’s because Topaz, 66, was one of 20 babies who was conceived and born in Gurs concentration camp in Vichy-occupied France, a place from where thousands of Jews were deported to their deaths at Auschwitz.

Topaz, a prominent Montreal sculptor, will be among many others worldwide – and the only known local Gurs survivor – going to commemorate the 70th anniversary, on April 25 and 26, of Gurs’ opening in 1939.

“I think it will be like closing a circle,” she said in an interview. “I was only three [years old] when we were liberated, but I wanted to go. It’s important for me. Where you are born is a big part of your life.”

Accompanying Topaz on her trip will be Tom Durnford, a professor of modern languages at Keene State College in New Hampshire. He spent several years translating, from its original French, a book about Gurs written by French professor Claude Laharie, titled Gurs Internment Camp: 1939-1945, an Ignored Aspect of Vichy History.

In 2005, as part of his research for the book, Durnford spent time in Montreal searching for former Gurs internees and learning more about the camp’s history.

Another local Gurs contact Durnford met then was Natania Étienne, a native of France whose name he got from Rabbi Chaim Steinmetz of Tifereth Beth David Jerusalem Synagogue, where she is a congregant.

Étienne’s late father, Rabbi David Feuerworker, was a heroic figure at Gurs whose deeds are chronicled in Durnford’s translation. At risk to his own life, Rabbi Feuerworker tended to the needs of inmates and even helped some escape the camp.

Étienne told The CJN that while she was aware of the April commemoration, she could not attend due to the recent death of her husband, Gérard, a prominent Haitian-born Quebec intellectual and writer who became an Orthodox Jew.

According to Topaz, the French government decided to stage a commemoration of the opening of Gurs, a camp whose very existence was for decades obscured by France presumably because it was completely manned and operated by the French, with no German ever setting foot in it.

The camp was constructed over a period of only four months in the Basque region of southwest France at the foothills of the Pyrenees mountains.

Gurs opened in April 1939 and initially served as a internment camp for Spanish republican fighters and refugees fleeing to France from Spain after suffering defeat by the fascists.

After the collaborationist Vichy government came to be in June 1940, however, small numbers of French Jews began to arrive at the camp, along with people of other nationalities who were considered “undesirables.” Germany deported 7,500 Jews from Baden to France’s unoccupied zone in late 1940, and about half of them wound up in Gurs, which soon held only Jews, the vast majority of them German.

In all, the number of Jews who passed through Gurs on their way to the Drancy transit camp and then death in Auschwitz totalled 20,000.

Topaz noted that despite how “normal” Gurs appears in family photographs she possesses, the reality was otherwise.

Unlike concentration camps in Germany or the Nazis’ extermination camps in Poland, conditions in Gurs were slightly better, but only relatively so. During winters, several thousand succumbed to appalling cold and illnesses. The camp, which was almost always buried in mud, also had no running water or proper sanitation, and food was scarce.

The main differences lay in the possibility of escaping the camp and treatment of prisoners. Gurs had relatively low, unelectrified fences, and according to the Wikipedia web encyclopedia, there were no guard towers or sadistic treatment of internees. This made escape possible, despite the unlikelihood of success due to the harsh conditions.

After the Allies liberated Gurs in 1944, it became an internment camp for French collaborators and German prisoners of war.

The camp closed down for good in 1946. What stands there now is a reconstructed cabin shaped like a triangle – as all the Gurs inmates’ cabins were – and a Jewish cemetery, impeccably maintained by the German municipalities that sent their Jews to Gurs.

Topaz said that she is looking forward to the commemoration. Her mother, Adrienne, who lives in Frankfurt, Germany, was also interviewed for Durnford’s translated book. At 95, she is now too old to attend the commemoration. Adrienne’s father, Wilhelm, is dead. A large part of the family survived the war, with Topaz and her parents going as illegals to Israel in the late 1940s, where her brother, Motti, was born and where she and her brother grew up.

The weekend at Gurs includes the installation of a plaque on April 25 at the train station in Oloron-Sainte-Marie, the town where Jews from Gurs began their last journey to Auschwitz. Special ceremonies take place the next day at the site of the camp itself.

Representatives of the French, German and Spanish governments are also expected to attend.

Topaz said she has sculpted a work dedicated to Gurs, as yet untitled, which she hopes to install at the campsite at some future date.

“The theme is about saving the children,” she said.