Mémorial de la Shoah: The Wall of Names
Why is it significant?
Stand in the forecourt and let your eyes adjust to the walls of pale stone around you. They are covered, from the ground up, with names in small, close letters... about seventy-six thousand of them.
Key Facts
| Place | Mémorial de la Shoah: The Wall of Names |
|---|---|
| Address | 17 Rue Geoffroy-l'Asnier, 75004 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.85490, 2.35610 |
| Part of Walk | Princes, Rebels and the Pletzl: The Marais of Paris, from Hôtel de Ville to Bastille |
| Generated | Generated |
Stand in the forecourt and let your eyes adjust to the walls of pale stone around you. They are covered, from the ground up, with names in small, close letters... about seventy-six thousand of them. In the middle of the courtyard stands a great bronze drum engraved with the names of the death camps and of the Warsaw ghetto.
These are the Jews deported from France between 1942 and 1944: men, women and more than eleven thousand children. Most were sent to Auschwitz. Only about two and a half thousand came back. The names are arranged by year of deportation and then alphabetically, so that whole families stand together on the stone, parents and children side by side, exactly as they were taken.
The memorial is older than its wall. In 1943, in the middle of the war, Isaac Schneersohn founded in Grenoble, in hiding, a centre to collect evidence of the persecution, so that the crimes could one day be proved. That archive became one of the most important in Europe on the Holocaust, and in 1956 the Memorial to the Unknown Jewish Martyr was inaugurated here. In the crypt below lie ashes brought from the camps and from the Warsaw ghetto. The Wall of Names was added in 2005, when the memorial reopened as the Mémorial de la Shoah.
Walk round to the side, into the narrow lane called the Allée des Justes, the alley of the Righteous. Another wall there carries thousands of names of French men and women honoured for hiding and rescuing Jews at the risk of their own lives: farmers, priests, teachers, neighbours who opened a door. About three quarters of the Jews living in France survived the war, and many of them owed their lives to people like these.
Take as long as you need here. Then, when you are ready, walk down to rue de l'Hôtel-de-Ville and follow it east. At its end, the street opens onto a garden and a building that looks as if it has stepped out of a medieval book of hours.