Mémorial de la Shoah

 

 Yesterday I went to the Mémorial de la Shoah.  I have been meaning to go for a long time, but I always had an excuse because I knew it would be disturbing and that it would leave me feeling sad and as if I had had the wind knocked out of me.  My visit did leave me feeling sad and exhausted, and I was glad I went and I encourage others to go.  The memorial is free.  No photos are allowed.  I bought a Livret d'Accompagnement Pour les Enfants for three euros in the gift shop.  This book, which I am not sure is available in English, provides information and questions for families and gives an appropriate tour through the museum for 8-12 year olds.  I hope to return with my family.

There is a small room filled with all of the carefully arranged index cards filled with information about the Jewish families in France.  Information taken down by the French and information that would lead to the sorting, and eventual killing of thousands.  I spent more than two hours in the museum and there was still more to see.

There are many powerful video interviews of survivors.  The memorial opened in 2005 and is well done and up to date.  As uncomfortable as it is, it is so important to remember these atrocities and to make sure that our children are aware of this history.  My sister visited the Memorial of the Shoah, the Jewish History Museum, and the D-Day Beaches while she was here with her teenagers.  I think North American tourists especially should visit these places to more fully understand World War II.

There are currently visiting exhibits on the Destruction of Greek Jews (March-August 1943) and an exhibit of photos from the ghettos.  "For the first time in France, the exhibition presents about 500 photographs of ghettos.  Through an historical analysis of photographs from collections preserved all over the world including pictures from many different ghettos, the exhibition relates the history of the confinement and slow death of several hundreds of thousands of Jews in the ghettos from 1939 to 1944."  Many of the photos captured lovely moments with family during a horrific time.  Others, showed the mass burial of those who were continually dying of starvation inside the ghetto.  There were many images of the factories where Jews were used as forced labor and paid with inadequate food vouchers.  The Jews in the ghettos were not killed until late in the war because they were profitable.

In yesterday's New York Times, there was an article about the mass killings that took place away from the death camps.  

"Monday, the 69th anniversary of the day Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz, was observed as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Yet a third or more of the almost six million Jews killed in the Holocaust perished not in the industrial-scale murder of the camps, but in executions at what historians call killing sites: thousands of villages, quarries, forests, wells, streets and homes that dot the map of Eastern Europe."

As the survivors of the Holocaust disappear we are still, literally, unearthing the horrors.