This plaque is attached to a wall in the Vieux Port area of Marseille, France, keeping alive the memory of one of the area’s darkest days, January 23, 1942, when French police, in collaboration with German troops, forced 30,000 residents out of the district.
The Germans then dynamited much of the district, which had been a center of resistance, Over 2,000 of the residents, many of them Jews or foreigners, were transported through a series of camps and ended up murdered in Nazi death camps. The plaque was placed by a group of survivors in 1962.
The plaque reads “To the memory of those disappeared, interned, deported or dead in the Nazi camps, victims of the tragic evacuation of the Old Port neighborhood (23 January 1943)