Duplicitous Refuge: The Story of Jewish Refugees Imprisoned in Mauritius

Please join us on Wednesday, November 18 at 7 p.m. at the Rifkin Campus for a presentation by Rebecca Saunders, Ph.D on “Duplicitous Refuge: The Story of the Jewish Refugees Imprisoned in Mauritius” and Nathacha Appanah’s The Last Brother.” 

This is a little-known story of 1,580 Central European Jews who fled from Nazi-occupied Europe for Israel in 1940 but were then forcibly removed from Palestine by the British Mandate. They were deported to the Island of Mauritius and detained in the Beau Bassin prison complex.

Nathacha Appanah’s portrayal of this extraordinary moment in The Last Brother focuses on a friendship between two boys, the Indo-Mauritian Raj and the Jewish-Czech David, both of whom are fleeing from violence and unbearable loss. 

Rebecca Saunders is Professor of Comparative Literature at Illinois State University. She is the author of Lamentation and Modernity in Literature, Philosophy, and Culture and co-author of The Concept of the Foreign: An Interdisciplinary Dialogue. She is currently at work on a book entitled African Women Rewrite War & Peace and a co-edited volume on “Environmental Justice in African Literatures and Popular Culture.”

The event is sponsored by Congregation Achduth Vesholom, the Jewish Federation of Fort Wayne, and PFW's Institute for Holocaust and Genocide Studies. Light refreshments to follow. 

Questions? Please contact Zachor Committee Chair Kathy Sider at [email protected].