Holidays with caravan
Caravan Holidays
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The Mythologies can be traced back to 1957, a time too early for Barthes to pen a sociology of the iconic VW Combi, a myth that took shape in the 1960s and 1970s. The “bus”, as referred to by the Jablonka family, was the vehicle of Ivan’s holidays from the age of 6 to 16, taking him across the United States and later Europe (Portugal, Greece, Morocco, Italy, and more). It was the vehicle of his Bildungsroman, symbolizing a journey towards freedom and happiness. These vibrant summers were filled with card games, swimming, sightseeing, and collecting mementos like postcards, museum tickets, photographs, and small trinkets. The usual sensory delights of these moments included salads and roasts, sunshine, the smell of iodine, and laughter. The Jablonkas didn’t travel alone. They usually invited the Parents, a couple they met in California, so there were two Combis, one green and one beige, both of which are featured on the book’s cover.
However, En camping-car is not a simple collection of photos and memories, nor a scrapbook of a nostalgically vintage childhood. This was a time before smartphones, GPS, laptops, or Wi-Fi networks. It is a tale of a legacy passed down: from a father born in April 1940 to parents who were deported and murdered in Auschwitz, to a son who inherits a nuanced understanding of happiness and freedom. The father, brought up in Jewish and communist institutions for Shoah orphans, yearned to provide his children with the happiness and carefree existence he never experienced. “Be Happy” was his weighty directive to his sons, urging them to embrace happiness as a form of defiance against history. The book is a dialogue between the “child of the Shoah” and his father, a letter from a son to his father, akin to a baton pass, as Ivan Jablonka concludes his book with a message to his daughters. Memory, too, is this ‘vital force’, this ‘energy’ that propels us forward.
Now, the choice is theirs on how to maintain their freedom in an increasingly mobile world.
Christine Marcandier, Diacritik, 20.04.2020
Ivan Jablonka, En camping-car, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2018
Article 27 of Law 5170/2025 criminalizes the free lifestyle of living and traveling in a caravan, including hosting a second vehicle on private property. The new law bans the placement or parking of caravans, motorhomes, and trailers in public spaces like parking lots, beaches, parks, or forested areas. Violations can result in up to 3 months of imprisonment or a fine of 300 euros per person, camper, or vehicle.
“The slogan for the Volkswagen Beetle was ‘Strength through Joy’, a name borrowed from a major Nazi organization [the Kraft durch Freude (KdF) movement was a mass leisure organization under Nazi control -c.. Was our caravan a place of ‘joy through strength’? (…) It unveils, in an exaggerated and comical manner, a family dynamic, a comedic theme, my father’s dialectic, his struggle to find happiness and his guilt because we weren’t happy either, due to him. In this sense, this episode uncovers a structure of my childhood.”
Ivan Jablonka, En camping-car, Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2018 (pp. 87-88)
“We often forget how our individual lives are part of a larger collective movement. In history, we are never alone. This portrait of a family spending their summer holidays in a caravan in the 1980s concludes with a reflection that spans the twentieth century. With this book, I also intended to tackle a lighter subject than in my previous works. However, you can’t escape it. The Shoa surfaces like a rock in the sea. Saint-Exupéry once said, “A man’s homeland is his childhood.” The homeland of my own childhood was forged by those summer trips and my father’s advice to his two sons as we crossed an oasis in Morocco in that iconic caravan: “Be happy!” He, who could never find happiness due to the war, implored us to seize our good fortune.
Our family’s first trailer was bought in California the year my father took up a position at Stanford University. When we returned to France in 1980, my parents brought back the ‘bus’ before eventually settling on the Volkswagen Combi. Thanks to the Combi, I embarked on a formative journey that spanned ten summers and one spring. We journeyed across various European countries and throughout the Mediterranean basin. These unstructured camping vacations were a school of discovery, tolerance, and diversity. My mother’s cultural passion allowed us to experience antiquity through the Greek and Roman temples and museums we visited. During those carefree summers, we weren’t just learning about history, we were living it.”
“My father was no ‘unwashed hippie,’ but he embraced it; he wanted his children to sleep in a tent, eat hamo, play in the dunes, pee outside, bathe every third day, disregard conventions, and forget to show respect to their parents. He believed that a child didn’t need to respect his father, and, moreover, the fact that we were always on the move, changing locations daily, effectively negated any authority. Having grown up without a father, he had chosen to embrace the best aspects of fatherhood.”
“There have been times in my life, at receptions in the Sorbonne or the Elysee Palace, when I’ve been struck by thoughts of my four artisan grandparents, my illiterate great-grandmother, and the inhabitants of the poor shtetl in Poland, with its caravans and horses, where my grandfather worked as a saddler. Regardless of my successes and failures, I’ve never forgotten my roots. I come from the land of the stateless. I stand with those who carry their past like a caravan. I stand with the nomads, the dreamers, the peddlers, the wanderers. I stand with the caravan.”
“Thanks to the caravan, I was able to explore the world, delve into reading, and also history – not just the facts, but the process of historical reasoning: the surprise, the questioning, the gathering, the experiences, the voyages, the encounters, the writing. The history of our childhood, but also that of our summers, with the ethics of idleness, the recollection of experiences, the dynamism of bodies surrendered to nature.
A history that is revitalized – social sciences invigorated through contact with Herodotus. Certainly, that’s not something you learn in khâgne [literary preparatory class – ed].
Excerpts from Ivan Jablonka’s book, En camping-car.
En camping-car, une histoire de nos vacances (In a camper van, a history of our vacations), a documentary by Andrés Jarach featuring contributions from Ivan Jablonka, France, 2020.
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