The Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris France is Europe’s primary Holocaust research and remembrance center, dedicated to the 76,000 French Jewish victims, including 11,000 children, deported to camps like Birkenau, Sobibor and Auschwitz between 1942 and 1944. The memorial was inaugurated in 2005, it features a permanent museum, archives, a wall of names, and a crypt. Many of the rooms were dark showcasing detailed history of the atrocities of the Nazi regime.
Shoah is another name for the Holocaust. During the Shoah (1940–1944), approximately 77,000 of the 350,000 Jews in France were deported and murdered, mostly in Auschwitz. While the French Vichy Regime collaborated with Nazi occupiers in persecuting, registering, and interning Jews. The Vel’ d’Hiv roundup which resulted in the arrest of 13,152 Jews in Paris by French police, including 5,802 women and 4,051 children being sent to Dracy.
About 75% of the Jewish population survived, a high rate for occupied Europe, due to the efforts of local, religious, and underground organizations. Children were hidden in non-Jewish homes. Jewish underground organizations, alongside non-Jewish efforts, played a crucial role in saving lives.
In all, the Shoah in France victimized close to 80,000 Jews. Three thousand Jews died in French-run internment camps like Gurs and Drancy.
I was fascinated by a series of stations where oral histories could be heard from survivors of the Shoah. I listened to several interviews with Larissa Cain. She was born in 1932 in Poland to family with deep rooted Jewish traditions. Her mother and father belonged to a community deep rooted in Zionist ideals. She spent her early childhood in Warsaw, surrounded by books, languages, and a strong sense of community. Her parents ran a candy shop in the Jewish quarter. This small shop helped keep the family from absolute starvation. The family was confined to a small two-room apartment shared with seven other people, they faced extreme conditions: hunger, disease, and relentless oppression.
In July 1942, the first deportations to Treblinka began from the ghetto. The Nazis came to the building and started searching floor to floor. There was not enough time to get dresses so her mom held Larissa and they sat quietly on the bed in the top floor. Though young Larissa knew to stay quiet. Her life depended on it. For some unknown reason the Nazi soldier stopped on the floor below them and went back down the steps without searching the top floor. This arbitrary moment of impatience meant their survival on that day. Her mother was later arrested in her workplace and disappeared. She would never see her mother again.
Larissa is a survivor of the Nazi established Warsaw Ghetto. She is one of the few children to survive the Warsaw Ghetto destruction. She was rescued by the Polish Resistance at the age of 10. She lived hiding until the end of the war. Her father also escaped the ghetto, but their paths diverged. She never saw him again.
I don’t know if this was a purposeful design, but it is very hard to exit the memorial. Iron bars block all the obvious exit and entry points. I finally had to ask a member of the staff where the exit was. It was to the right just past the wall of names of those murdered by the Nazis engraved in granite. But even so I could not figure out which door to use. There was a green security light on one of the doors and I remembered having to wait for a green light to enter. I opened that door and discovered that I was entering a guard booth. The guard was annoyed that I had invaded his space. He angrily pointed to another unmarked door.