A beautiful heritage day at the Memorial!

Journées du patrimoine au Mémorial de la Shoah 2016

This year, the Paris Shoah Memorial has chosen Sunday, September 18, as the European Heritage Day in France, to present to the public part of its national collection "Confiez-nous vos archives" carried out over two years by the institution’s documentalists, in partnership with the Passerelles service of the United Jewish Social Fund (FSJU) and thus exhibit the most remarkable pieces acquired during this tour throughout France.

Many of you came this Sunday, September 18 to see these unpublished objects, photos, and documents, such as this dress in very good condition with its yellow star collected in Lille, an armband and a badge worn by a nurse from the Vel d'Hiv, collected in Tours, or this magnificent violin of an Auschwitz prisoner assigned to the camp orchestra, collected in Angers. A meeting followed in the auditorium of the Memorial to make an inventory of the collection in the presence of Andrée Katz, director of the Bridges department of FSJU, witnesses and donors Laure Quinones, Alain Aisene and Frédérique Gilles, by professor Anne Grynberg and Céline Simon, psychoanalyst.

As explained by Lior Lalieu-Smadja, head of the Memorial’s photo library and in charge of collecting it for the journalists at Rue89: "It is an infinite work, which can only come from families, and also from departmental archives (...) there is a form of urgency, because we are losing all this: it is the end of the first generation, the one born before the war ended. That’s why we try to convince people to give their documents, and in any case we scan them or photograph the objects.”

Relive this beautiful day in photos!