the Shoah Memorial inaugurates a brand new digital work | EUROtoday

Published on : 04/28/2024 – 06:41

5 minutes

“On this wall are engraved the names of nearly 76,000 Jews deported from France between 1942 and 1944, as part of the Nazi plan to exterminate European Jewry, with the collaboration of the Vichy government.” In January 2005, President Jacques Chirac and Auschwitz-Birkenau camp survivor Simone Veil inaugurated the Wall of Names on the Shoah Memorial in Paris.

For virtually twenty years, these stone slabs of Jerusalem have turn into a spot of contemplation for the households of deported Jews, who died with out burial. But this lengthy listing doesn’t symbolize all of the Jewish victims in France. Not all of them misplaced their lives attributable to racial deportation throughout World War II.

“Since the inauguration of the Wall of Names, we have received quite a few comments telling us that the Wall was great, but that we also had to mention the others. We were told that a monument for them was missing,” explains Karen Taïeb, head of the Shoah Memorial Archives.

These different Jewish victims of the Shoah died in internment camps in France, notably in Beaune-la-Rolande, Compiègne, Gurs and Drancy. Others have been shot as hostages or summarily killed by the Nazis and their proxies. Added to this are those that have been reported lacking or who dedicated suicide, in addition to those that have been deported for acts of resistance or who died in battles for Liberation.

List the names of those victims

To pay them professional tribute, the Shoah Memorial first needed to listing these victims, as Karen Taïeb describes. “We did not have lists established for these people unlike those who were part of the deportation convoys. As for the internment camps, we had to search the departmental archives to complete lists that Serge Klarsfeld (Editor's note : a lawyer and historian specializing in the Shoah) had already published. We have been working on it for two years.

The Memorial has also been able to count on the requests made by families since the inauguration of the Wall of Names: “We had saved all of them since 2005, saying that they’d be helpful to us when one thing may very well be achieved.” To date, 4,000 names of men, women and children have been collected.

A virtual monument

These destinies will therefore appear on a new monument. But unlike the stone wall which appears at the entrance to the Memorial, this one is digital. This virtual work is intended to be scalable. In 2019, the Wall of Names had to benefit from a major renovation. At the time, 6,200 corrections had been made, 379 names removed and 226 names added.

Nearly 80 years after the end of the Second World War, historians have not finished identifying all the victims. “We couldn't afford to have a brand new monument with names engraved as a result of it's analysis work that’s ongoing. We are consolidating the information and we’re verifying it. We are searching for new data. We usually are not but capable of say that we now have the names of all of the individuals who might discover their place on this monument”, specifies the head of the archives.

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Karen Taïeb is currently looking more specifically at the fate of the Jews who died in the fights for the Liberation of France. “This is the class which is at present the least nicely documented. These are Jews who received concerned and who misplaced their lives. Some, for instance, went from the resistance to the two^e Free French armored division, however we now have few parts.”

Names and faces

On the brand new digital monument, guests will be capable of uncover on a display screen the names of those Jews who misplaced their lives exterior of the Final Solution convoys, but additionally a few of their faces. “These photographs that are displayed will also raise awareness among people and encourage them to bring us new information and new documents,” emphasizes Karen Taïeb.

This work, inaugurated on April 28 on the event of the nationwide day in reminiscence of the victims of deportation, symbolically took its place within the crypt, the saint of the saint of the Memorial. “We chose this location because we did not want to make it a second-class monument,” insists the pinnacle of the archives. “We had to find a dignified place. I hope that the families of these victims will find the respect that we wanted to give them. Their identities were in our database. They were not forgotten, but it was not The same”.