FDR’s broken promise: The Allies defeated the Axis powers in Africa — but the concentration camps stayed open

Operation Torch helped topple the Axis powers and Nazi-controlled Vichy regime, but local Jews and Muslims continued to suffer

American Generals George Patton and Dwight Eisenhower planning Operation Torch, the invasion of Africa, 1942. Photo by MPI/Getty Images

By Aomar Boum, Sarah SteinNovember 8, 2022

Eighty years ago today, 107,000 American and British troops triumphed over the Axis powers in North Africa, ending the regime’s cruel antisemitic laws.

The weeklong campaign, known as Operation Torch, toppled the hold of the Nazi-aligned French government that controlled Morocco and Algeria. This opened a crucial front of war, allowing the Allies to make their way eastward across North Africa and, ultimately, into Europe via Italy.

To the extent that this military campaign has been understood, it has been through the perspective of the Allied forces themselves. The North African stories of war have scarcely been told.

For 10 years, we’ve been working to change that. We have been gathering the voices of those who survived wartime in North and West Africa, and whose lives were forever changed by the campaign.

Then, as in today’s Ukraine, war was an intimate affair, experienced through hunger, violence, environmental devastation, sexual abuse and a shift in how people viewed their future and their world.

Their arrival was a miracle

As with D-Day in Western Europe, Operation Torch was a turning point for everyone in North Africa, not just Jews. Fascist hate and violence victimized North African Jews and Muslims, Jewish and Christian refugees from Europe, as well as West Africans.

Ait Ali Driss, a Muslim Amazigh bus driver, remembers Jewish and Muslim women ululating in celebration as military jeeps full of American soldiers drove through Casablanca’s central square. Jewish residents celebrated the miracle of the Allied victory over the French fascist regime in front of the synagogues, just a few meters away from Casablanca’s landmark clock tower.

Three days of bombardment had shaken the feeble foundations of homes in Casablanca’s walled city, a neighborhood that overlooked what was then the biggest port of the northern Atlantic. With the end of this historic battle, the local population was overcome with relief. The Vichy and Nazi regimes had some Muslim supporters in North Africa, but most welcomed an end to fascist occupation, famine and war.

Many North African Jews, like those in Casablanca’s Place de France, also welcomed the Allied troops with (literal) open arms, gathering on the streets to welcome them with song and dance.

Sidney Chriqui, a Moroccan Jew, recalls viewing the Allied landing from his window which looked out onto Casablanca’s waterfront. When Anglo-American soldiers came ashore, the young man was astounded to meet Black Americans for the first time.

Soon, he was working for the American military as a translator and interpreter. Jews in North Africa had long served foreign regimes as employees (partly because they were more likely to be multilingual), and sometimes received legal protection because of their service. Chriqui followed in this long tradition, and was awarded a visa to the United States for his efforts.

The Tunisian Jewish composer and musician Simon di Yacoub Cohen wrote a popular song, “Khamous Zana,” that heralded the arrival of the Allies as a bride approaching her betrothed. The song is still sung by Jews of Tunisian descent.

The legendary Moroccan musician Houcine Slaoui had a more skeptical take. His famous song “Lmirikan” (the Americans) presented Moroccan women as gullible dupes of American consumerism seduced by novel treats like cosmetics, chewing gum and candy. It was a misogynist take, but had an important underlying point: American and British troops became the new power brokers in North Africa, at a time when it wasn’t yet clear who would fill the power vacuum left by war.

The suffering continued

Al-husin Al-Gedari, a native of Morocco’s Anti-Atlas Mountains, holds a copy of the authors’ book on Wartime North Africa. September 2021. Courtesy of Aomar Boum

After Operation Torch, President Franklin D. Roosevelt vowed to purge the Vichy presence in North Africa, and to liberate the thousands of prisoners who languished in dozens of internment, concentration and forced labor camps in Morocco and Algeria.

These camps held a tremendously diverse prisoner population. Local Jews and Muslims, European refugees (Jewish and Christian), and a wide array of perceived “undesirables” — enemies of Vichy France — were held there.

Rather than immediately dismantle these camps, Great Britain and the United States signed a power-sharing agreement with the French Vichy leadership on Nov. 10, 1942. Admiral Jean Francois Darlan remained in power, and the camps remained in place.

During these post-Operation Torch years, camp prisoners were overseen by the same sadistic overseers who had overseen them during the war. Despite widespread protests, the inhumane camp system existed for years. As in Europe, where traumatized Holocaust survivors lingered in Displaced Persons camps, in North Africa, the postwar era was still a time of de facto internment for many.

Al-husin Al-gedari, a native of Morocco’s Anti-Atlas mountains who is now in his 10th decade, said that on the North African homefront, children, women and men struggled to survive famine and malnutrition. Some of this devastation was brought on by the French Vichy regime, which redirected food from North Africa to continental France during World War II. But in his memory, Operation Torch threatened the local food supply even further.

The arrival of so many soldiers, combined with the demands of existing European settlers, meant that foreigners’ hunger continued to be prioritized over the hunger of native Jews and Muslims.

Local Muslims and Jews suffered the effects of the war and its tumultuous end. They experienced Operation Torch as a force of liberation and opportunity, but also as a perpetuation of their hunger, imprisonment and vulnerability.

It has taken historians eight decades to listen to local accounts of wartime North Africa. As we remember the campaign that ended the war in this region, we would do well to remember that the pain of global conflicts lingers locally, complicating the very meaning of victory.

To contact the authors, email [email protected].

Aomar Boum is a professor and the Maurice Amado Chair in Sephardic Studies in the Department of Anthropology, Department of History and Department of Near eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of California, Los Angeles. A historical anthropologist, Boum is interested in the place of religious and ethnic minorities such as Jews, Baha’is, Shias and Christian in post-independence Middle Eastern and North African nation states. He is the author of “Memories of Absence: How Muslims Remember Jews in Morocco” (Stanford University Press, 2013), co-editor with Sarah A. Stein of “Wartime North Africa: A Documentary history, 1934-1950 (Stanford University Press, 2022)” and author of the forthcoming graphic history: “Undesirables: A Holocaust Journey to North Africa” (Stanford University Press, 2023).

Sarah Abrevaya Stein is the Sady and Ludwig Kahn Director of the Alan D. Leve Center for Jewish Studies, the Viterbi Family Chair in Mediterranean Jewish Studies and a professor of History at UCLA. She is the author and editor of ten books, including, most recently, Aomar Boum and Sarah Stein, Wartime North Africa: a Documentary History, 1934-1950 (Stanford University Press, with the cooperation of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2022).

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Forward. Discover more perspectives in Opinion. To contact Opinion authors, email [email protected].

A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

The coming year promises to be filled with more complex and historic developments. We are entering an era where independent, fact-based Jewish journalism will be more important than ever. We need to be ready for whatever 2025 will bring, and with your help, we can be.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO