Paris has many plaques remembering Resistance fighters killed during the Nazi occupation, recalling Jewish children culled from their classes and deported and paying honor in other ways to victims of fascism.
But one of the largest, and most centrally-located is never noticed by most visitors to the city, and is not that widely known or visited by Parisians—because the Deportation Memorial is one of the most starkly evocative and moving that could be imagined, and one that for me, at least, makes the experience feel very personal.
Surprisingly, the Memorial is directly behind Notre Dame, with only a small park between; even more surprising is that through most of the 19th century, the Memorial’s site was occupied by a city morgue where unclaimed bodies were on public view.
The Martyrs’ Memorial honors the memory of over 200,000 French nationals, most Jewish, who were deported to Nazi camps and died there. It was opened in 1962 in a ceremony led by then-President Charles de Gaulle.
Unlike many memorials, there is no building to be seen from the entrance; nothing rises to hold a slogan or a sculpture. At the Deportation Memorial, everything is down, as if down into the earth and away as if into an infinite distance. Its modernist architect, Georges-Henri Pingusson intended the feeling of claustrophobia it can evoke for many.
Once down in the lower plaza, a narrow passageway opens between these two blocks and the commemorative and conscious elements appear, beginning with the tomb of an Unknown Deportee, who died in the Neustadt camp. The walls along this corridor are lined with 200,000 lit glass crystals, one for each.
Just as at the Arc de Triomphe, here, underground, an eternal light burns.
Above two chambers to the side are carved the names of the camps, the well-known and the less-known. The two rooms each contain earth and bones from the camps.
Other walls contain excerpts of works by French anti-fascist writers including Paul Eluard, Antoine de Saint-Exupery and Jean-Paul Sartre. Here, part of a poem by the deported poet Robert Desnos, who died at Theresienstadt. Published anonymously on Bastille Day in 1942, it begins “The hearts that used to hate war are now beating for freedom…”
Fittings and alcoves at a number of points suggest cells, which heightens the feeling of discomfort.
At another level within the building there are more conventional exhibits of information about the Occupation period and the Deportations.
The Memorial has been criticized at times on various grounds; its earliest times were before France fully acknowledge the role of Vichy French authorities in the deportations, and some feel that it pays too little attention to how many of the deportees were Jewish.
There may be something to be said for those criticisms; on the other hand, the overall effect of the memorial is to remind us, as the slogan shown in several places tells us: “Forgive, perhaps, but do not forget.”
