On May 21, 1940, the German Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger took a taxi from his home in Sanary-sur-Mer, on the Mediterranean coast, to Les Milles, an internment camp near Aix-en-Provence. It was a last extravagance to ward off reality, because Feuchtwanger knew what awaited him behind the gates. Eight months earlier, during the so-called Drôle de guerre (Phony War) that followed Hitler’s conquest of Poland, France had ordered all Germans and Austrians in the country, including those, like Feuchtwanger, who had fled fascism, to report to camps and detained them briefly. On May 14, four days after the Germans invaded France, an order went out for all “enemy aliens” between the ages of seventeen and fifty-five to turn themselves in once again. This time things were far worse. Even though Les Milles was not a labor or death camp, the conditions were squalid enough to make Feuchtwanger regret not having left for America while there was still time. Fueled by a new methamphetamine called Pervitin, which it had developed to eliminate the need for sleep, …