The National Day of Remembrance for Victims of Deportation

Deposit of a wreath by Jacques Fredj and Serge Klarsfeld © Marilou Tremil

The National Day of Remembrance for the Victims of the Deportation, which honors the memory of all the deportees and pays tribute to their sacrifice, took place on Sunday, April 24, 2016. This day aims to remind everyone of this major historical drama and to raise public awareness about the world of internment and deportation so that such events do not happen again.

A little before 4 p.m., the procession arrived at the Shoah Memorial for a ceremony which began on the forecourt with a laying of wreaths by Anne Hidalgo, Mayor of Paris, Jean-Marc Todeschini, Secretary of State to the Minister of Defense, in charge of Veterans and Memory, the associations of former deportees, Jacques Fredj, director of the Memorial and Serge Klarsfeld, lawyer and historian, at the foot of the bronze cylinder bear the names of the Warsaw ghetto and the camps of Auschwitz, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Birkenau, Buchenwald, Chelmno, Dachau, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Sobibor, Struthof and Treblinka.

Deposit of a wreath by Anne Hidalgo © Marilou Tremil

Followed by honors for the dead and a minute of silence, then, the procession moved to the crypt of the Memorial for a signature of the golden book and a recollection in front of the black marble star of David, symbolic tomb of the six million Jews who died without burial. Jacques Fredj, director of the Memorial, continued with a presentation of the Wall of Names where are engraved the names of 76,000 Jews deported from France during the Holocaust and before which everyone gathered again.