The first archive centre in Europe, the Shoah Memorial continues its collections to pass on the memory of the Jews of France, Europe and North Africa to future generations. Even today, the Memorial searches for all documents from 1880 to 1948: photos, letters, newspapers, personal papers, objects, identity cards, visas, passports, drawings...
To support the Shoah Memorialin its mission of transmitting and raising awareness about the prevention of crimes against humanity, you can bring your family archives to the Shoah Memorial in Paris every Tuesday afternoon. If you live in the provinces, the Memorial team also come to meet you to collect and preserve your family archives.
Lior Lalieu, responsible for the photo library service, is the one who organizes and holds the weekly photo permanence of the Shoah Memorial. She answers our questions about the importance of collecting family archives. Even today, we can discover unpublished documents.
Shoah Memorial: Every Tuesday afternoon, you organize a collection of archives at the Shoah Memorial in Paris (open to the public and without prior appointment). How does this work in practice?
Lior Lalieu: To get to know the donor’s family history, we always ask our interlocutor for his date and place of birth. Through this information, we are already able to direct our questions, to better understand his story. You don’t have the same history if you were born in 1946 or if you were born in the early 1970s. Today, most donors travel not to tell their own stories but to share with us the story of their parents or grandparents.
At the launch of this permanence, the volunteers were survivors and they received other survivors. Today, volunteers are often their children.
Every week, we encounter a variety of profiles: some come with more questions than answers: many wonder about the circumstances of their deported relative’s arrest. Others have undertaken research on their family history and are submitting their findings to us. The people who entrust us with their family archives hope that the memory of their loved ones can continue to live after them, after us.
Shoah Memorial: What documents is the Shoah Memorial actively searching for?
Lior Lalieu: At the Memorial, we work on the long term. In general, we seek to acquire photographs to document the Holocaust in France, the Final Solution and its implementation in France: internments, raids, deportations. Which hardly ever shows up.
Today, we can still discover things. Last year, photographs of the burning Warsaw ghetto taken by a Polish firefighter in 1943 were uncovered. We are not safe from finding a photo album of the Drancy internment camp, many testimonies report that photos were taken there.
The photo permanence also welcomes non-Jewish people who were in class with rounded up Jewish children. They entrust us with their class photos but also the notebooks of their classmates who did not return to school in September 1942, notebooks that they had kept for decades.
Shoah Memorial: After the collection, how does the work of the photo library continue?
Lior Lalieu: After the meeting with the donor, his history and archives, we distribute the various documents between our different services (library, archives and photo library). In the photo library, we will associate each image with a variety of keywords (and situations) to make them accessible to as many people as possible.
For example, we collect all the images illustrating the occupations carried out by Jews in the 1930s or all the photographs showing people wearing a yellow star between June and July 1942. The last step is to highlight this fund, put it online, and catalogue it.
Shoah Memorial: Where are you with the project launched in 2012 "A face on a name"?
Lior Lalieu: Since its launch, we have managed to collect 21,200 photographs thanks to the permanence, and also thanks to the reading room. As soon as someone engages in research in the reading room, our teams ask them if they have any photos. Since its inception, the Shoah Memorial has acted according to a mission: to give each name, a face, a story, a biography. We continue to work on the identification of these people whose names come from the archives of the Gestapo, the executioners. We are working to humanize these lists of names, to bring them out of anonymity and oblivion.
Shoah Memorial: More than 80 years after the creation of the CDJC (the ancestor of the Shoah Memorial), what are the plans for the photo library? What are the emergencies at a time when the last witnesses disappear?
Lior Lalieu: In 2005, we launched a collection campaign entitled: Les derniers témoins. It is 2023 and we continue to interview the last witnesses; there are still survivors, hidden children ready to testify, whose stories must be recorded. That is why our teams in Paris and in the provinces continue to travel to take their word.
Shoah Memorial: Why should you deposit your family archives at the Shoah Memorial? In what way does entrusting one’s archives help the transmission of the history of the Holocaust?
Lior Lalieu: Since the collection was set up twenty years ago, our fund-raising has continued to grow: today we have 50,000 family photos. At the same time, the demand for archives continues to grow: the more the catalogue is enriched, the more families can, through their research, rebuild themselves and find each other. We have already had the case of a woman, born in July 1944, who at 80 years old discovered the face of her deported father of whom she had no trace or the case of cousins who discover the existence of the other thanks to their respective gifts. There are so many stories to tell...
