Southern France: Why you must visit these two French museums

The sunny south of France is the last place you'd expect to find a building once called "the waiting room for Auschwitz" but a short bus ride from the smart cafes of Aix-en-Provence takes you to a sombre place: a former brickworks that in 1942 became a transit camp for 2000 French Jews sent to Auschwitz on the orders of the French wartime government of Vichy.

Now a museum, Les Milles Camp is a world away from the usual sites that draw tourists to this part of France. There are no artworks from Van Gogh or Cezanne but poignant reminders of lives cut short: graffiti scratched into the building's red stone walls by the people who were interned there and the blurred black-and-white photos from the identity cards of some of the 100 children held in this place before heading to Auschwitz, their faces are bright and smiling, oblivious of what lay ahead. The youngest child was barely a year old.

For anyone raised on heroic stories of the French Resistance in World War II, the idea that French authorities helped send Jewish people to German death camps is hard to believe. But by 1940, France was split in two. One half of the country was occupied by German forces, while the other had a French government based in the town of Vichy – and it was this government that co-operated with German authorities to deport about 10,000 Jews to Auschwitz and other camps. The Vichy government even decided that Jewish children under 16 in France should accompany their parents to these camps – even though the Germans hadn't demanded it.

Despite its grim story, a visit to Les Milles leaves you feeling inspired rather than dispirited. More than a memorial to the men, women and children sent to their deaths, it's there to educate the living, spelling out how racism and discrimination are part of the process that leads to genocide – and why we should all do our bit to resist it. To do nothing is to let terrible things happen is the loud message from Les Milles. It says it all on the museum's entry ticket which asks "what would I do if it happened tomorrow?".

By the time you reach the last exhibit, a truck used as transport to Auschwitz that stands in the place from where the detainees left, it feels like you've graduated from a workshop on intolerance and how it has paved the way, not just to the Holocaust but to other genocides such as Rwanda in 1994 or the Turkish massacre of 1.5 million Armenians in 1915.

Les Milles, which became a museum in 2012, wasn't France's only internment camp during World War II but it's the only one that survives, and the areas that housed the prisoners are much as they were when they were packed with people sleeping on straw: women and children in an upper floor and most of the men in the basement, some sleeping in the kilns once used for firing bricks. The graffiti they left behind – such as a heart inscribed with "I love you, I love the sky" – has been carefully preserved.

It is some comfort to know that not all the children destined for Auschwitz ended up there. The museum tells the story of some who escaped, including the teenagers who hid in the roof of the camp just before the train left to collect the next batch of deportees. One woman being forced on to a train to Les Milles persuaded a railway worker to take her children and hide them. In Village of Secrets, a gripping account of how French villagers risked their lives to save Jewish children from deportation, historian Caroline Moorehead tells how a team from a child protection organisation rescued 78 children from the camp before trucks arrived to take their families away.

Les Milles isn't the only museum in southern France bent on educating new generations about the dark days of World War II. Toulouse in south western France, where the Gestapo set up headquarters in 1943, has a museum dedicated to the French Resistance movement that operated in the area. A short walk from the centre of Toulouse, La Musee Departmental de la Resistance et de la Deportation is on the street where a member of the Resistance, Marcel Hennequin, was killed in1944; a plaque marks the place where he died.

Inside the museum, the memorabilia from concentration camps such as Ravensbruck and Buchenwald includes insignia worn by prisoners to identify their "crime"; not just the Star of David, but also Communist, Gypsy, Anti-social, Political Prisoner – French, and Political Prisoner – Jewish. Some exhibits can bring you to tears, such as two tiny hearts made of white felt and joined together, one embroidered with Toi (you), the other with Moi (me). Made in Ravensbruck in 1943, it is one of the tokens some prisoners made for each other, even though stealing the materials to make them risked the wrath of camp authorities.