SECCIÓN ACADÉMICA

monument to commemorate the VdH roundup. Located in the 10th Arrondissement of Paris, the Memorial to the Victims of VdH is a few streets apart from the place where the velodrome used to be and 220 meters away from the Jardin mémorial des enfants du Vél’ d’Hiv’ (a public square made in honour of the children arrested during the roundup). “The fact that the site of the Vél d’Hiv’ today consists of a diffuse ensemble of elements […] is testimony to the somewhat improvised evolution of the site. This monument is the result of […] an accidental accumulation of minor commemorative events since 1946”.15

The Memorial was inaugurated on July 16, 1994. It consists of a bronze sculpture which depicts two couples: one shows a woman holding a child; the other, a man hugging a pregnant woman, a girl playing with a doll, and an old lady waiting for something beside some suitcases. The real-sized fgures are raised on a curved concrete platform, that represents a cycle track and were designed by Walter Spitzer, an Holocaust survivor. Unlike other monuments, like the Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna or the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, the design of The Memorial was selected behind closed doors by a group comprising survivors’ organizations and governmental authorities. The inscription below it commemorates “crimes against humanity committed under the de facto authority of the so-called government of the French State”16. It is important to note that it continues distinguishing between the French Republic and Vichy, denying any political continuity among them. The memorial does not question the morality of the post-war Republic.

Since 1994, the memorial has become the center of the roundup’s annual commemoration, an event that is currently part of the national calen- dar. Actually, the VdH is the emblem of Vichy’s complicity with the Nazis. However, this recognition is not universal. In 2017, during the presidential elections, Marie Le Pen, leader of the National Front, declared that Vichy was “not France”. Her opponent, Emmanuel Macron said her comments were “a serious mistake”.17 The differences between them represent the lines that continue dividing France. The VdH memorial remains a focal point of unresolved dialogue.

M Morial De La Shoah

The space that later became the Drancy internment camp was created by the architects Marcel Lods and Eugène Beaudouin as a modernist urban complex in 1925. It was designed to provide comfort to working-class families; however, the Great Depression stopped the project. The buildings remained empty until 1938, when they were rented by the Republican Guard, and after the German troops occupied France, the complex was confscated and transformed into a detention center for “undesirable people”. With time, it “became the major transit camp for the deportations of Jews from France”.18

During the VdH roundup, 37% of the people detained were sent directly to Drancy before being killed in Auschwitz. “Approximately 70,000 prisoners passed through Drancy between August 1941 and August 1944, […] the overwhelming majority were Jews”.19 One-third of them were French citizens that occupied and experienced Drancy as the anteroom of the extermination camps.

17 Agence-France Presse, “Marine Le Pen denies French role in wartime roundup of Paris Jews”, London, The Guardian, April 9, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/world/201 7/ apr/09/marine-le-pen-denies-french-role -wartime-roundup-paris-jews, retrieved April 2, 2018.

18 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum “Drancy Camp Established”, https://www. ushmm.org/learn/timeline-of-events/1939-1941/drancy-camp-established, retrieved April 15, 2018.

19 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Drancy”, https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/es/ article.php?ModuleId=10005215, retrieved April 7, 2018.

After the liberation, in the context of a housing crisis, part of the complex was reoccupied by social tenants; the rest was used by the army. The buildings became property of the Ministry of Defense in 1973 and three years later it was demolished. The only segment remaining is an U-shaped apartment complex. Although Holocaust survivors started organizing commemorative ceremonies at Drancy in 1946, the rest of society preferred to look away. As a result, these painful reminders of French dark history were subjected to national forgetfulness. The country would only emerge from its amnesia in the 1970s; however, it was a slow process.

In 1973, the French Association of Jewish Deportees sponsored a competition for a memorial to the victims of Drancy. It was won by Shelomo Selinger, an Holocaust survivor, who inaugurated the sculpture in 1976. This memorial was placed in front of the U-shape building and it is composed of three blocks that form the Hebrew letter shin, a symbol of God in Judaism. In addition, the main block has ten fgures that match “the minimum number of males […] required to constitute a representative ‘community of Israel’ for liturgical purposes”,20 called a minyan. On the front, there is a couple that represents suffering along with dignity and a head that remains below them shows a man with a tefllin (a bow worn during prayers). These sculptures are located seven steps away from the memorial and they represent the elevation of Drancy’s victims’ souls. However, during its inauguration in 1976, and despite the symbolism represented in the memorial, “[…] the then minister for veterans, André Bord, refused to acknowledge the complicity of Vichy and glossed over the fact that the victims were Jews”.21

During 1988, a railcar, similar to those used for deportations, was added to the memorial, behind Selinger’s sculpture connected by a train track. Additionally, inside this railcar, there is a small exhibition about the Drancy internment camp. Five years later, the Union of Jewish Students installed a plaque that blamed “the French State of Vichy” for the deportations of “thousands of Jews, Gypsies, and foreigners”.22 Despite all of this, it was clear that Drancy remained ignored by the majority of French society and, after the journalistic work of Maurice Rajsfus during 1995, it was undeniable. The writer interviewed different people that lived close to the memorial; he concluded that only a small fraction of them knew something about the camp.23

Until recently, the French government has denied any responsibility for the implementation of the Final Solution. However, things started to change when, on the ffty-third anniversary of VdH Roundup, Chirac recognized that “France […] on that day, committed an irreparable act”.24 It took seven years until the remaining block of the Drancy transit camp became classifed as an historical monument; seventeen until the Mémorial de la Shoah opened its doors. Designed by the Swiss architect Roger Diener, the new building is located opposite Selinger’s sculpture. Inside it, people can learn about the process of deportation and how everyday life was in the camp. Through its semi transparent facade, “the outside observer can always see what’s [fnally] happening inside: the work of memory”.25

Conclusion

Because collectives sometimes have contested notions over the past, me-

22 Loc. cit.

23 Ibid., p. 15.

24 Conan and Rousso, op. cit., p. 40 morials become focal points of unresolved dialogue. Two examples of these conficts were presented in this academic paper. The frst one was the Monument commémoratif de la rafe du Vel’ d’Hiv, that stands for a series of raids in which French civil servants detained 13,152 Jews. Regarding this memorial, it is important to note that, after the war and despite the efforts of the survivors, the VdH almost disappeared from the national memory. The French population tried to forget collaborationism and that attitude remained predominant until the 1990s. However, the roundup continues being a source of division in French society, along with the far-right continuing denial of any responsibility for the deportations.

25 Scott Sayane, “At Holocaust Center, Hollande Confronts Past”, New York, New York Times, September 21, 2012, p. A8.

The second case, the Mémorial de la Shoah in Drancy, experienced a similar history. After the French troops surrendered during World War II, a “zone libre” was established in the South of France, where the national police detained thousands of Jews. The majority of them were transported to Drancy, an unfnished urban complex that became the last stop before the death camps. Thus, as in the case of the VdH case, Holocaust survivors organized commemorative ceremonies at Drancy while the rest of the French society ignored them. This attitude only started to change at the turn of the twenty-frst century, for example, in 2012, when the Mémorial de la Shoah opened its doors. This recognition was a way in which national memory could start to confront its painful past.