Memory

The French Government is particularly committed to the principles and aims of the Stockholm Declaration and is determined to constantly develop and enhance its approach to education, remembrance and research into the Holocaust. As home to Europe’s largest Jewish community, France is particularly involved in remembrance work, as well as in combating every form of antisemitism nationally and internationally.

The organization Yahad-In Unum and the Roma association Roma Dignity undertook an investigative work with the Roma who lived through the tragedy of the genocide between 1941 and 1944 in Estern Europe. The records published here offer a historical and legal perspective of the politic led by the Nazis against the Roma.

After the catastrophe, the Liberation of Europe and the end of the Second World War raised feelings of tremendous joy, hope and relief. But returning to normal life hardly seemed possible for the European Jews who survived the Nazis’ attempt to totally destroy them, abetted by their local accomplices. 

After a campaign by the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, the Drancy Shoah Memorial opened to the public on September 23, 2012. A historic place where memory is transmitted, this branch of the Paris Memorial presents the the former internment camp’s history.

Imaginary feasts explore the most amazing documents: notebooks filled with cooking recipes written by prisoners and deportees in Nazi concentration camps, in the Soviet Gulag and in Japanese war camps. Philosophers, historians, psychoanalysts, neurologists, etc. analyze and try to understand what those extraordinary 'imaginary feasts' written in the heart of the concentration system-meant. 

The Rivesaltes camp was successively internment, deportation and transit camp. 60,000 Spanish republicans, Jews, gypsies and harkis were "regrouped" there between 1939 and 1964, the date of its official closure. Today it is a high place of remembrance of internment in France.

In the suburb of Drancy lies an unadorned block of low-income housing. What do the residents know of the site's dark history? What would they say if they knew their home was haunted - by 80,000 ghosts? This documentary explores the building that in 1940 became the central internment camp for Jews during the Nazi occupation of France.

This is the story of a trip across Eastern Anatolia, a part of Turkey that Arnaud Khayadjanian has never been to, although his forefathers used to live there. We explore places the Armenians came through during their deportation in 1915. 

Jacques Saurel was born in Paris into a Jewish family that had recently emigrated from Poland. During the war, Jacques’ father was a prisoner-of-war, which for a time spared his family. However, in February 1944, Jacques, his brother, elder sister and mother were interned at Drancy for three months. They were deported with the status of “hostage” to Germany’s so-called “star camp” of Bergen-Belsen.

Jacques Samuel, a French Alsatian Jew, spent the war in a family that was part of the Jewish Resistance. The pious, music-loving young man recorded what they all went through in a journal: the exodus, the refuge, the collective life on a farm school run by the Éclaireurs israélites de France (EIF), and the trek over the Pyrenees towards Spain in a desperate bid to reach Palestine, which ended in tragedy.