Tribute to Hélène Mouchard-Zay, founding president of the CERCIL – Memorial Museum of the children of the Vel d'Hiv, died on Monday, March 2 in Orleans, at the age of 85 years.

Hélène Mouchard-Zay, founding president of the CERCIL – Memorial Museum of the children of the Vel d'Hiv, died on Monday, March 2 in Orléans, at the age of 85.

Hélène Zay was born on 27 August 1940 in Rabat, Morocco, 10 days after the arrest of her father Jean Zay, Minister of National Education and Fine Arts from 1936 to 1939. Condemned by the Vichy regime because he resisted and was denounced as a Jew, Jean Zay was assassinated by the militia on 20 June 1944. Hélène only knew her father in prison. She met him for the first time at the age of 9 months, with her mother Madeleine and her older sister Catherine.

Returning to live in Orléans at the Liberation with her family, Hélène passed the agrégation de Lettres classiques and became a teacher at the end of the 1960s, first in secondary school then at the University of Orléans.

From 1989 to 2001, she was a delegate and then deputy in charge of education, youth and human rights under the socialist mayor of Orléans Jean-Pierre Sueur.

The year 1990 marks a turning point. Newly elected, Hélène takes the measure of the ignorance, even indifference with which the fate of the Jews in the camps of Pithiviers and Beaune la Rolande are perceived. At the same time, the desecration of the Jewish cemetery in Carpentras marks a real shock, testifying to the persistence and violence of anti-Semitism.

With Eliane Klein, Hélène founded in 1991 the Centre d'études et de recherches sur les camps d’internement du Loiret (Cercil), creating a first exhibition in 1992 inaugurated in Orléans by Simone Veil. The CERCIL aims to write and promote a comprehensive history of these camps in the context of the anti-Jewish policy of the Third Reich and the Vichy regime, from their opening in May 1941 until the arrival of the Vel d'Hiv families, focusing on the tragic fate of the 4,115 Jewish children, "paroxysm of the final solution in France" according to Serge Klarsfeld; the CERCIL which also includes the history of the camp for nomads in Jargeau.

Hélène will be the director and then president of the Cercil – Memorial Museum for the children of the Vel d'Hiv, from 1992 to 2019, notably leading the creation of the Museum in 2011 in a former school in the center of Orléans.

In order to ensure the sustainability of CERCIL, it initiates its integration within the Shoah Memorial, established in 2018.

At the same time, Hélène is committed to perpetuating the memory and work of her father, who entered the Panthéon in 2015, contributing notably to the edition and publication of his writings.

Hélène was vice-president of the Cercle Jean Zay, member of the board of the Association des Amis de Jean Zay, and president of Mémoires Plurielles, intended to bring together a network of associative and institutional actors likely to promote the memories of migration in the Centre region.

Hélène will return several times to the close links between her personal story and the journey of collective memory, between her determination to fight against forgetting and to do justice to the memory of her father and her struggle to honor that of the children of the Vel d'Hiv.

Hélène Mouchard-Zay will carry in all her fights an absolute fidelity to the humanist and republican values, to education and culture.

Hélène Mouchard-Zay was Commander of the Legion of Honor.

Invited on September 16, 2018 at the Shoah Memorial for the Hazkarah, Hélène Mouchard-Zay returned to the meaning of her commitment: "Knowledge of history, though indispensable, is not enough, nor are commemorations, however moving they may be: for emotion can vanish as quickly as it has come. There is no vaccine against fatal recurrences. Only education, which patiently learns to think for itself, to deconstruct stereotypes, to analyze complex situations in order to escape manipulation, is able to prevent future disasters. It is necessary to educate, patiently, stubbornly, in order to give young people the intellectual weapons to resist all attempts at enlistment, to help them acquire moral strength to resist the temptations of selfishness, indifference, the cowardly relief of resignations, small or large.”

The Shoah Memorial salutes the memory of Hélène Mouchard-Zay, a great figure in the memory of the Shoah and a great humanist, a woman of conviction, dialogue and action, and presents to her husband Claude, their sons Jean and Daniel, and his family its most sincere condolences.