Gurs internment camp was an internment camp and prisoner of war camp constructed in 1939 in Gurs, a site in southwestern France, not far from Pau. The camp was originally set up by the French government after the fall of Catalonia at the end of the Spanish Civil War to control those who fled Spain out of fear of retaliation from Francisco Franco's regime. At the start of World War II, the French government interned 4,000 German Jews as "enemy aliens", along with French socialist political leaders and those who opposed the war with Germany.

Charlotte Salomon 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, the largest known artwork made by a Jewish person who died in the Holocaust, 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 Salomon, 5 months pregnant at that time, was captured and deported to Auschwitz, where she was murdered by the Nazis soon after her arrival. In 2015, a 35-page confession by Salomon to the fatal poisoning of her grandfather, kept secret for decades, was released by a Parisian publisher.