Mémorial de la Shoah

« Si le monde savais, nous étions liberés ! … La liberté refleurira… »

David and I spent two hours that easily could have been three or four this afternoon at the Mémorial de la Shoah: the Holocaust Memorial. It’s interesting that the French use the word « Shoah » to describe the event, which literally translates to “catastrophe”.

The wall of names, reminiscent of the Vietnam memorial where I’d otherwise be home, stands to preserve the legacy of those who perished at the hands of the Nazis during the Holocaust.

The Holocaust, selon moi, is one of those things/events in history you think you’ve been told about a hundred times, that you think you know all about, Yes, yes, the Holocaust, it was terrible, inhuman. But I was reminded that not only do we (or at least I) easily forget the magnitude of exactly how terrible and inconceivable a genocide like this was, but we assume we’ve been told all that there is to know – which can never really be true. I was surprised at how much I learned today, and we only made it to two and a half floors’ worth – there are still three more. In a nutshell, I was just overwhelmed, being reminded by placards, paragraphs, posters, videos, and pictures how horrible a human being, and worse, a group of human beings, can become, and what they can do to one another – and could not begin to imagine how it must have been for those who experienced it first hand, and how something like this (in terms of a genocide) could ever be forgotten, denied, or worse, repeated again in history.

Just a few interesting things I learned during the visit:

The memorial acknowledged that at the beginning, there wasn’t a lot of aid or support for the Jews from France, that the Vichy government delivered Jews under 16 years of age to the German occupiers, and that the responsibility and culpability of the Vichy gov’t wasn’t recognized until 1995, finally, by President Chirac. I just found it interesting how frank and forthcoming the museum was about France’s shortcomings in this.

There were operations (notably Operation 1005) after the war devised by the Nazis (or what was left of them and their supporters, I guess?) to destroy proof of the mass destruction of Jews, such as planting a forest to camouflage a concentration camp site, or using a machine like this one to further break down the remains of the burned corpses that were left.

Le Mémorial des Enfants – 2500 photos of children deported from France, 1942-1944.

Daily rations in the Warsaw ghetto, 1940, after the occupation and regrouping of Jewish communities into centralised ghettos:

Allemand (German): 2,613 calories
Polonais (Polish): 699 calories
Juif (Jewish): 184 calories

The quotes at the very top come from an interview with a Jewish woman who survived the Holocaust. She had said with hope, when the horror began, “If the world knew, we would be free! Liberty will flourish again…”