5 Oct 2009
The Shoah Memorial in Paris
In recent years, the French government has begun to recognize the shameful role the Vichy government played in the deportations of some 70,000 Jews and other people from occupied France to the concentration camps during World War II. Marble plaques have been placed on exterior walls of buildings – often on schools or residences – where the deportations took place. You see them most frequently in the Marais, which was the old Jewish quarter, but if you’re attentive, you can find them almost anywhere in the city.
On my last trip to Paris, I visited the Shoah Memorial, a museum and study center dedicated to the history of this time in France. You walk in through tight airport-like security, and the first thing you see are long walls inscribed with the names of those who were lost. It’s a very simple thing – just names – and yet overwhelming in its silent testimony. In the courtyard there’s a bronze cylinder – symbolizing the chimneys of the death camps – that bears the names of the Warsaw Ghetto.
Part of the Wall of Names
Because this is a fairly new museum (it opened in 2005), there are lots of interactive displays, and much of the text is presented in both French and English. I was particularly interested in seeing the films clips and photography of everyday life before the war, and of the deportations and life and death in the camps. It’s not easy to take, but the material is beautifully presented. On a lower floor is an eternal flame, which sits across from the door of a barrack from one of the camps.
The memorial also contains the Center of Contemporary Jewish Documentation, which has reading rooms, an excellent bookstore and a café. There’s no entry charge, but voluntary donations are encouraged.
If you, like me, sometimes get your history through reading historical fiction, you might enjoy reading Sarah’s Key, by Tatiana de Rosnay, a novel that contrasts the life of a contemporary Parisian woman and a young girl who was deported in the 1942 Vel’ d’Hiver roundup, when several thousand Jews were sent to the camps.
Barracks door from one of the camps.
The Shoah Memorial is located at 17, rue Geoffroy l’Asnier in the 4th arrondisement. Metro: Saint-Paul, Hotel de Ville, Pont Marie. Open every day from 10am – 6pm except Saturday.
Wow, so powerful. Ironically, on my recent vacation I finally read the Diary of Anne Frank. Your post reminded me of her innocence that was forever lost along with so many others. I can’t help but wonder if Darfur is our present day holocaust. I say that and yet I am fairly ignorant to the reality of it.
Frank Finamore
October 5th, 2009 at 10:23 pmpermalink
Sounds like a moving visit. I’m reminded of our Vietnam Memorial, and the impact of the list of names. I’m also reminded of that book that we all read – of course, can’t remember the name! – of Jews in Paris leaving as the Nazis drew near. Thanks for sharing your experience.
Barbara Wendell
October 6th, 2009 at 8:01 ampermalink
I’m reminded of the Holocaust Memorial here in Washington, too. It’s stunning how powerful that list of names is…. another terrific post that pushes me to go back to Paris!
Judy Leaver
October 7th, 2009 at 9:23 ampermalink
It makes me feel like an absolute freak that I don’t find these Official Grief Museums very moving at all. I don’t know what it is–the packaged-ness of everything? Or is it me–the way I experience things? Or both?
I’ve visited several camps and countless places important to European Jewish life, and I have vivid memories of many viscerally moving moments–at the Anne Frank house, feeling what it would have been like to live with 7 other people in that tiny space (it looks much larger in the film); at Birkenau, in the freezing cold of November, with the crumbled chimneys of the burnt barracks stretching as far as they eye could see; at Majdanek in mid-summer, entering into the “shoe building” and being overcome, first, by the sight of hundreds of thousands of shoes filling the entire building, floor to ceiling, with the exception of a narrow passage in the middle, and second, by the overwhelming stench of the decaying shoes–so undeniably human, so uncomfortably intimate.
I guess the commonality in these experiences was the way they engaged a fuller range of senses–I could feel the extremes of heat and cold, the cramped claustrophobia of the inside spaces, the exhausting vastness of the outside spaces. And the smell of those shoes still haunts me…
Denise
October 11th, 2009 at 10:43 pmpermalink
This is state of the art museum. good one
Neo
April 13th, 2011 at 1:02 pmpermalink