Bassins des Lumières

This guide to the Bassins des Lumières in Bordeaux traces the sculptor Regis Pedros carving a monument outside these walls in 2012, and the story he was really finishing. It goes back to September 1941, when Nazi Germany began pouring this U-boat bunker from hundreds of thousands of cubic meters of concrete using thousands of forced laborers, over three thousand of them Spanish Republicans who had already fled a lost civil war. More than sixty of those workers died here, some in accidents, some from exhaustion, before the base finally opened in May of 1943.