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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 November 2019
Between the inauguration of the Tomb of the Unknown Jewish Martyr in 1956 in Paris and the opening of the Shoah Memorial in Drancy in 2012, the narration of the Shoah in France has evolved through the use of archives, discussions, commemorations and exhibitions. In the immediate post-war period, a small group of people worked on the construction of a dedicated place to document the genocide of Jews in Europe in order to ensure that the memory of the Shoah would be impregnated into the collective consciousness. This project, which later evolved into the Paris and Drancy Shoah Memorials, could be seen as an expression of what remembrance is in France today.
The author was an Education Coordinator at the Drancy Shoah Memorial at the time of writing this article. References to historical facts in this contribution come from materials available in the Memorial.
1 Renamed the Shoah Memorial Documentation Centre in 2013.
2 See FMS, “The Foundation”, available at: www.fondationshoah.org/en/foundation (all internet references were accessed in August 2019).
3 27 January 2005 is a symbolic date referring to the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz camp in 1945. A few months before the Memorial was inaugurated, the United Nations designated 27 January as the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
4 For example, the internment and deportation memorial at Royallieu was opened in 2008, the Memorial Museum to the Children of Vel d'Hiv in 2011, the memorial site of the Les Milles camp in 2012, the Museum in Le Chambon in 2014, and the memorial site of Rivesaltes camp in 2015.
5 Among all deported Jews from France, 84% were deported from the Drancy camp.
6 For example, factories, barracks or military camps.
7 In the journals Urbanisme, No. 16, July 1933, and L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, No. 6, 1935.
8 “All of Europe has visited Suresnes and Drancy. They came to take a look at what was being done under the direction of Sellier.” Lods, Marcel, “Cité de la Muette à Drancy”, L'Architecture d'Aujourd'hui, No. 9, 1935, p. 40Google Scholar.
9 High rent prices meant that the working class could not afford to live there.
10 In this northeastern suburb of Paris, other camps were set up – Fort Romainville in Lilas and Fronstalag in Saint-Denis – which were at the disposal of the Germans.
11 According to “The Calendar of the Persecution of Jews in France”, published by Serge Klarsfeld, in La Shoah en France, Vols 2, 3, Fayard, Paris, 2001.
12 See Georges Horan-Koiransky, Journal d'un interné: Drancy, 1942–1943, Créaphis, Paris, 2017. Horan-Koiransky was an internee who volunteered for “wagon duty” so that he could observe the operation of the camp. He witnessed the departures and described in great detail how they were organized, and the roles assigned to French and German officers.
13 The categories were constantly changed: at one point, the spouses of Aryans were considered non-deportable, as were French Jews and Jews of some other nationalities in accordance with diplomatic agreements. François Montel and Geroges Kohn, Journal de Compiègne et de Drancy, Les Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France (FFDJF), Paris, 1999.
14 Noël Calef, Drancy 1941: Camp de représailles, Drancy la faim, FFDJF, Paris, 1991. In 1948, Noël Calef wrote an account of his internment in 1941. In it, he discusses the problems arising from the social distinctions between inmates from different parts of Paris – Belleville and Champs-Elysées – and belonging to different social classes.
15 See the chapter “Une immense tour de Babel”, in Renée Poznanski, Denis Peschanski and Benoît Pouvreau, Drancy: Un camp en France, Fayad and Ministère de la Défense, Paris, 2015.
16 For example, Simone Veil, Marceline Loridan-Ivens and Ginette Kolinka, who was interned and deported when she was 19 and remembers imagining that she would be sent with her family to a work camp: “As my father was 61 and too old to be sent to a factory or a farm, I imagined he would work as a tailor in a workshop. I thought that my brother Gilbert, who was 12, would go to school and that Jojo, my 14-year-old nephew who was strong, would work like me in a factory or in the fields.” This is an excerpt from Kolinka's first testimony in 1997 for the Spielberg Foundation, available in the Multimedia Learning Centre of the Shoah Memorial. In this exhibit, these three young women, who were all interned in April 1944, speak about romances at the camp, describing Drancy both as “a little village” and “the last stop”.
17 According to the list of convoys published in Klarsfeld, Beate Auguste and Klarsfeld, Serge, Le Mémorial de la déportation des Juifs de France, FFDJF, Paris, 2012 (first published 1978)Google Scholar.
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 See the report of council of 18 March 1946 in the Municipal Archives of Drancy.
21 In addition to pilgrimages made by individuals and families to the site, a religious ceremony was organized by the Israelite Central Consistory in front of the camp on 22 September 1944.
22 Darville, Jacques and Wichené, Simon, Drancy la juive ou la deuxième inquisition, A. Breger Frères, Paris, 1946Google Scholar; Aimé, Denise, Le relais des errants, Desclée de Brouwer et Cie, Paris, 1945Google Scholar; Crémieux-Dunand, Julie, La vie à Drancy, E. Dauer, Paris, 1945Google Scholar; Wellers, Georges, De Drancy à Auschwitz, CDJC, Paris, 1946Google Scholar.
23 The first plaque erected in 1947 made reference to “120,000” Jews interned “by Hitler's occupying forces”. In February 1993, after a decree had been issued designating 16 July a national day in remembrance of racist and anti-Semitic persecution, a plaque was erected bearing an inscription that refers to the crimes committed “under the de facto authority known as the Government of the French State (1940–1944)”, although French responsibility had not yet been officially recognized in these terms.
24 The speech by President Jacques Chirac on 16 July 1995, during the commemoration of the Vel d'Hiv round-up, cleared up this ambiguity by recognizing that “the criminal folly of the occupiers was seconded by the French” and that “France, on that day, committed the irreparable” (Review’s translation).
25 Letter of invitation to the ceremony of 25 October 1987. At the end of the 1980s, when the trials of Klaus Barbie and Maurice Papon were in progress, the ceremonies provided an opportunity to respond to the anti-Semitic declarations of Jean-Marie Le Pen and the Holocaust denial theories that were gaining currency. The installation of the freight wagon corresponds to a more explicit form of memorialization that seeks to put the evidence on display.
26 From Yvette Levy's conversations with children at the Memorial. The Memorial gives an opportunity for schoolchildren to meet a survivor and speak to them.
27 Betsch, William, Drancy ou le travail d'oubli, Thames & Hudson, Paris, 2010Google Scholar.
28 Excerpt from the report that William Betsch sent to the Regional Directorate in June 2000, cited in R. Poznanski, D. Peschanski and B. Pouvreau, above note 15, p. 261.
29 After the three trials for crimes against humanity held in France (Klaus Barbie, 1987; Paul Touvier, 1994; and Maurice Papon, 1997) and the controversy in the mid-1990s regarding French president François Mitterrand's past under the Vichy government, Vichy continues to torment the collective memory. Faced with the Drancy case, William Betsch, above note 27, titled his book Drancy ou le travail d'oubli (Drancy or the Effort to Forget). See also David Rieff, “…And if There Was also a Duty to Forget, How Would We Think about History Then?”, in this issue of the Review.
30 Françoise Choay has published a number of works on heritage; the most frequently cited is Allégorie du patrimoine, Seuil, Paris, 1992.
31 Choay, Françoise, “Cité de la Muette, Drancy: Le culte patrimonial”, Urbanisme, No. 325, 2002Google Scholar (Review’s translation).
32 Ibid., p. 92.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.
35 Alice Géraud, “Drancy: Sous la cité le camp”, Libération, 14 November 2012 (Review’s translation).
36 See FMS, “Inauguration du Mémorial de la Shoah à Drancy”, available at: www.fondationshoah.org/memoire/inauguration-du-memorial-de-la-shoah-drancy.
37 From the firm Diener & Diener in Basel, created by his father in 1942.
38 Excerpt from “Le projet architectural”, the dossier presenting the Shoah Memorial in September 2012. On file with author.
39 The photos taken in the camp are from five news reports. The first is from 10 September 1941, by a number of journalists from the collaborationist press (Paris-Soir, Le Petit Parisien and Le Matin); it focused on lawyers held in the camp, showing people with “Jewish features”. The second report was carried out on 3 September 1942 during the visit of a German photographer, Wagner, from the French section of the German Propaganda Ministry. The third comprises 56 photos taken by the International Committee of the Red Cross during the visit of Dr Jacques Morsier on 10 May 1944, under the supervision of Aloïs Brunner. The fourth set of photos, known as the Strasser collection, was taken by Nazi officers and found by inmate Adalbert Strasser in the final days of the camp. The last report contains thirteen secretly taken photos dating from the winter of 1942.
40 National Audiovisual Institute and FMS, testimony recorded by Antoine Vitkine, 2009.
41 The great impact of the film Shoah by Claude Lanzmann, released in 1985, led to the adoption of the term to refer to the genocide of European Jews.
42 The maiden name of Simone Veil, which is engraved on the Wall.
43 In his speech delivered for the inauguration, President Chirac said: “Anti-Semitism is not an opinion. It's a perversion. A perversion that kills. The government does and will do everything in its power against anti-Semitism” (author's translation).
44 An appeal was launched for donations in 2018 so that the Wall can be altered in 2020 to add names and correct errors noted by families.
45 Klarsfeld, Serge, Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, 1942–1944: Documentation of the deportation of the victims of the Final Solution in France, B. Klarsfeld Foundation, New York, 1983Google Scholar.
46 Deposited at the CDJC in 1996. On the discovery and history of the “Jewish file”, see Laurent Joly, L'antisémitisme de bureau: Enquête au cœur de la préfecture de police de Paris et du commissariat général aux Questions juives (1940–1944), Paris, Grasset, 2011.
47 Under the direction of Annette Wieviorka, the exhibition ran from 17 September 2006 to 7 January 2007.
48 Isaac Schneersohn is the founder of the CDJC. For more information, see: www.memorialdelashoah.org/en/archives-and-documentation/the-documentation-center/the-history-of-the-cdjc.html.
49 Annette Wieviorka, Il y a 50 ans, aux origines du Mémorial de la Shoah, Mémorial de la Shoah, 2006.
50 Léon Poliakov, L'auberge des musiciens, Mazarine, Paris, 1980, p. 177.
51 These are the words of the great Rabbi Kaplan, who officiated the service for the burial of the ashes.
52 Annette Wieviorka, “La représentation de la Shoah en France: Mémoriaux et monuments”, in Musées de guerre et mémoriaux, Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2005, p. 53.
53 In her article “1992: Réflexions sur une commemoration”, Annales, Vol. 48, No. 3, 1993, pp. 703–704CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Annette Wieviorka quotes the letter from Dr Engelson to Isaac Schneersohn: “It is entirely contrary to the spirit of Judaism to build monuments to spiritual principles, whether relating to God, the soul or the dead. The monument is merely a replica of the monument to the Unknown Jewish Soldier. It does not come close to representing what constitutes the Jewish spirit.”
54 Letter from Isaac Schneersohn to Nahum Goldmann, 9 September 1953, CDJC Archives.
55 Justin Godart was the first president of the CDJC and of the Committee for the Establishment of the Tomb of the Unknown Jewish Martyr. He died two months after its inauguration in 1956. He was named Righteous Among the Nations in 2004.
56 This scenographic choice wasn't applied to the Drancy exhibition, which is full of light, and where it is assumed that clarity isn't an obstacle to the understanding of such an emotionally charged subject.
57 The fourth photo is not framed properly and shows no human figures. The four original photos are in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.
58 The Auschwitz Album consists of a collection of almost 200 photographs, taken by members of the SS in May and June 1944 during the massive deportation of Hungarian Jews to Birkenau. Discovered by a young Jewish survivor, Lily Jacob, in the Dora-Mittelbau camp, this unique document showing the process leading to the mass murder was donated to Yad Vashem.
59 The Memorial Museum to the Children of Vel d'Hiv opened in 2011 in Orléans. Run by the Study and Research Centre on the Internment Camps in Loiret, which was founded in 1991, it has been absorbed by the Memorial in order to ensure its continued existence.