Memorial de la Shoah
From Paris Hotels Reviews
A little further east, at 17 rue Geoffroy l’Asnier, the grim fate of French Jews in World war II is commemorated at the Memorial de la Shoah, within the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine, access to which usually involves queuing, as visitors and bags are scanned at the entrance. President Chirac opened a new museum here in January 2005 and, alongside the sombre Mémorial du Martyr Juif Inconnu (Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr), unveiled a Wall of Names; ten researches spent two and a half years trawling Gestapo documents and interviewing French families to compile the list of the 76,000 French Jews – around a quarter of the wartime population – sent to death camps from 1942 to 1944. Chirac, in 1995, was the first French president to formally acknowledge that France was involved in systematically persecuting Jews during World War II. In most instances, it was the French police, not the Nazi occupiers, who rounded up the Jews for deportation. The most notorious case was in July 1942, when 13,152 Jews (including over 4000 children)were rounded up in the Vel d’Hiv bicycle stadium in Paris and sent to death camps.
This episode, along with much else, is documented in the excellent new museum, with plenty of information in English. Its main focus is events in France leading up to and during World War II, but it also gives lots of useful background on the history of Jews in France and in Europe as a whole. Individual stories are illustrated with photos, ID cards, letters and the other documents. You learn about model citizens such as the Javel family, who were all deported and died in the camps, their long-established residence in France and distinguished record of military service counting for naught in the relentless Nazi drive to exterminate all Jews. Others, such as the Lifchitz family, who fled pogroms in Russia and settled in France in 1909, managed to survive the war – in this case by going into hiding and obtaining false ID as Orthodox Christians. There are some drawings and letters from Drancy, the holding station outside Paris, from which French Jews were sent on to camps in Germany; in one letter a woman urges her elderly mother left behind to be “courageuse et forte” (“brave and strong”) and to look after her daughter. One chilling letter in 1942 from the Comité des Questions issues a cold refusal to a request by the chief of police to free twenty non-Jews who had donned the yellow star – presumably as a form of protest and solidarity. The museum ends with the Mémorial des Enfants, an overwhelming collection of photos of 2500 French children, each marked with the date of their birth and the date of their deportation.
Visitors' Information
- Opening Hours: daily except Sat 10am-6pm, Thurs till 10pm
- Admission Charges: free
- Website: www.memorialdeshoah.org
- Address: M° St-Paul/Pont Marie)
