Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation
The Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation is a memorial to the 200,000 people deported from Vichy France to the Nazi concentration camps during the Second World War. It is in Paris, France on the site of a former morgue, underground behind Notre Dame on Île de la Cité. It was designed by French modernist architect, writer, teacher, and town planner Georges-Henri Pingusson and opened in 1962.
Pingusson intended that its long and narrow subterranean space convey a feeling of claustrophobia.[1]
In the year of its opening, a brochure produced by the French survivors' group "Reseau de souvenir" described the memorial as a crypt, "hollowed out of the sacred isle, the cradle of our nation, which incarnates the soul of France -- a place where its spirit dwells."[2]
Fragments of two poems by French poet and French Resistance member Robert Desnos are inscribed on the walls. The first consists of the last stanza of a poem written by Desnos, himself a deportee, pseudonymously and published "underground" in Paris, on Bastille Day 1942, "The Heart that Hated War".
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- I have dreamt so very much of you,
- I have walked so much,
- Loved your shadow so much,
- That nothing more is left to me of you.
- All that remains to me is to be the shadow among shadows
- To be a hundred times more of a shadow than the shadow
- To be the shadow that will come and come again into
- your sunny life.
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A circular plaque on the floor of the underground chamber is inscribed: "They descended into the mouth of the earth and they did not return." Along both walls of the narrow chamber are 200,000 crystals with light shining through meant to symbolize each of the deportees who died in the concentration camps.
A "flame of eternal hope" burns and The Tomb of the Unknown Deportee bears the inscription: "Dedicated to the living memory of the 200,000 French deportees sleeping in the night and the fog, exterminated in the Nazi concentration camps."
At the exit to the chamber is the injunction, engraved, found at all sites memorializing the victims of the Nazis: "Forgive but never forget."[3]
[edit] References
- ^ Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation | Paris Sights
- ^ Katherine Conley, "The Myth of the 'Dernier poeme': Robert Desnos and French Cultural Memory", Acts of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present, eds. Mieke Bal, Jonathan Crewe, and Leo Spitzer. Dartmouth, 1998, pp. 134–35. [1]
- ^ Rick Steves.com
[edit] External links
- Photograph of Memorial
- "A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust", The Florida Center for Instructional Technology, College of Education, University of South Florida, 2005]
- Paris.org.
- Bernard I. Kouchel, "Resources For Tracing Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust From France"
- [2] Dossier des Groupes de Reflexion et de Production
