I know this post might not appeal to a lot of you, but Tammy and I are both very passionate about learning as much as we can about the Holocaust and teaching it to our kids. So every time we travel in Europe we try to search out any Jewish museums, synagogues, Holocaust sites, etc. Since this is our third time in Paris, we want to make sure to see all the things we haven't seen before (which in this case includes a lot of Jewish sites). Then if we have time after that list is completed, we'll head to some of our favorite haunts that we've been to before.
Today started out with a lot of frustration because, sadly, the increase in anti-Semitic acts over the last few years has caused all of the Jewish sites to respond with LOTS of security. We spent a couple of hours this morning making metro connections and getting out to two different synagogues, only to find that they are no longer open to the public. You can only see them if you go to Shabbat (Sabbath) services. At the Great Synagogue, which is sort of like the king of synagogues in Paris as well as the administrative offices for other Jewish organizations, they even had a policeman posted at each entrance to restrict access. We shouldn't have been surprised by this, because none of the synagogues in Strasbourg or Colmar were open to the public either, but I guess we hoped it would be different at these famous Paris synagogues. (And it doesn't help when we don't speak French at all. We could've asked more questions or even called and spoken to someone, but no one at either synagogue spoke English.) So anyway, we were tired and frustrated after those two rejections, but then we decided to skip the synagogues from now on and head to two museums that we knew for sure were open. I don't have a lot of pictures for you, though, because neither museum allowed photography.
First up was the Musee d'Art et d'histoire du Judaisme. After finding it, we then had to maneuver through the security measures, which included an x-ray of our bags and a walk through a metal detector. The guard was very serious, and it seemed a lot more formal than even going through airport security. We've not experienced this kind of thing at other Jewish sites in Europe, so we were a bit surprised.
These two photos are of the little introduction to the exhibits, and I was allowed to take photos here but nowhere else.
The photo below is part of the list of names that records all 70,000+ Jews who were deported during the Holocaust, of which only about 2,500 survived.
The museum itself was really great! It had 13 rooms that covered the history of Judaism from the destruction of the Temple by the Romans and the diaspora up to modern day. It was really interesting for me because, like I said before, my area of expertise in the Holocaust is really about central and Eastern European Jews. I haven't studied a lot about French Jews and their experience. So this was very enlightening. It was also nice because there was only one room focused on the Holocaust. The other 12 rooms were all about other aspects or time periods of Jewish life. I really loved this museum and thought it was very well put together.
It was interesting to add this information about French Jews to my catalog of knowledge about other Jewish groups. Sadly, in nine of the 13 rooms, the artifacts in the exhibits came from Jewish communities in other countries because the artifacts from French Jews are really in short supply. This is because they were expelled from France in the 1300s because they were (falsely) blamed for causing and spreading the Black Death. They weren't allowed back for any extended period of time until the late 1700s. So most of the French Jewish artifacts are only from the 19th and 20th centuries. Sadly, this is the history of most Western European Jews. They were expelled from England and France in the 1300s, from Spain in 1492 by Ferdinand and Isabella (monarchs who sponsored Columbus), then from Portugal and Germany, and they just kept moving further east. That's why, by the time of the Holocaust, six million of the 10 million jews living in Europe were located in Poland and the Soviet Union.
After this great museum, we headed to the Shoah Memorial which commemorates the French Jews killed in the Holocaust. It has been in Paris since the 1950s, but it's just been recently renovated and expanded so that it looks like some of the other really artistic Holocaust museums we've been to. Luckily, since we've been to quite a few Holocaust museums and memorials before, we knew what to expect in terms of the emotional toll it would take. That's why we planned all of these Jewish sites together in a couple of days, so we could get through the really depressing things first and then have the last three days to enjoy the other parts of Paris.
FYI - The word "Holocaust" is commonly used in English speaking countries, whereas the Hebrew word "Shoah" which means "catastrophe" is used in France and many other European countries. Although, I have noticed that many Jews in the U.S. are starting to use this term at museums as well.
Security at the Shoah Memorial was even tighter than at the first museum. We couldn't even get in to the security area until the guards buzzed us in. The doors were very heavy when we pushed them open, and there's a heavy iron fence around the whole museum complex. It's so sad that the Jewish community here (and in other places) still has to worry about attacks and provide such strict security measures.
The pictures I have are of the outer courtyard area, and that's it. We weren't allowed to take any pictures at all once we entered the building. So, the outer area has two parts: one is the big courtyard with the inscription on the main facade of the building and the round art piece with names of death camps and other infamous concentration camps on it.
The second part of this outer area is a lower courtyard where the Wall of Names is located.
There are four or five of these long stone walls with the names inscribed on them. It's very sobering, to say the least. It's just such an overwhelming waste of human life because of prejudice and hatred that people refused to control.
This museum was really well put together. The informational plaques were thoughtful and specific, and the videos and photos were detailed but not overtly graphic. I was really quite impressed by the whole thing. I'm so sorry that I couldn't take pictures of the exhibits and share them with you.
We stayed in each museum for two to three hours, so it was about 5 PM by the time we started out for our final stop of the day - the Vel d’hiv monument. If you've read the Holocaust novel, Sarah's Key, you are familiar with the The Rafle du Vel’d’Hiv, or the Vél’ d’Hiv Roundup. This was the mass arrest, deportation and slaughtering of Jews living in Paris during the Holocaust. On July 16-17, 1942, some 13,152 Jews (most of whom were immigrants to France) were arrested and held in Paris’ Vélodrome d’Hiver (Vel’ d’Hiv for short), which was an indoor winter track used for popular bike races.
"There, the prisoners were held captive in abject conditions (the Superdome environment during Hurricane Katrina is a modern-day comparison, though the circumstances at Vel’ d’Hiv were of course much more despicable and grave). After five days, the arrested Jews were first separated from their families, then shipped off to the Drancy internment camp, and then finally sent to extermination camps - most of the victims were killed upon arrival to Auschwitz." You can read about this in more detail on your own if you'd like; I don't want to go into more specific detail here because it was just too terrible and inhumane to talk about in a quick little blog post.
During the German occupation of France, over 70,000 Jews were deported and as I said before, only about 2,500 survived the camps. The worst part about this whole sequence of events in Paris is that the French government and police were essentially the ones making the plans and running the arrests and deportations. Some of it was not even requested by the Germans. The French were so willing to give up the Jews that they took it upon themselves to make it happen, even before the Nazis started requiring minimum number of deportees. (Please understand that I'm talking in generalities here. There were thousands of French citizens who eventually felt terrible for what was happening to the Jews and started hiding them, taking the children in, or helping them escape. In this way, thousands of French Jews were saved from deportation; however, the overwhelming majority of French citizens didn't care and were more than happy to see their Jewish neighbors hauled away.)
This was a very hidden and ignored part of French history until 1995 when then-President Chirac made a public apology in front of the former site of the Velodrome and admitted that it wasn't just the temporary and illegal French Vichy government who did this to the Jews; it was the French people themselves. This was a huge step forward in admitting complicity and starting the process of making amends. It's interesting that it took France so long to do this, and really it prevented the country from moving forward after the war in many ways. Whereas Germany has wholeheartedly admitted everything from the second the war ended, and their country has made great strides in education and tolerance. I'm not saying that there is no racisim or anti-Semitism in Germany today, because there definitely is, but they weren't trying to hide or justify anything. They accepted the blame and tried to start doing better. In my opinion, Japan and France would've done well to follow Germany's example. (Don't even get me started on the horrible atrocities committed by the Japanese during WWII that were never acknowledged until recently.)
So anyway, we made it to the memorial, and luckily we'd read about it ahead of time because it is totally underwhelming. I mean that in the sense that something this terrible that was committed against thousands of people deserves to be honored in a more public way, rather than being hidden in a sketchy park above the street where no one would see it unless they were specifically looking for it. The memorial itself, although only about five feet tall, is moving, and beautiful, and tragic, as it should be; I just wish it were bigger and in a more public space so people would have to be reminded of it every day as they passed to and from work or home.
The sculpture is a collection of several figures, about 6-7 total, who are all in different poses of grief and trying to comfort one another. There's a mother holding a child with the husband looking over her shoulder. Another shows a couple holding each other as their child sits in front of them with a lack of food and water. And then the last person is off to the right and it's a woman who's so weak she's lying on her suitcase to prop her up. The sculpture evokes so much emotion, and it was very difficult to look at.
These last two pictures are off the internet because the lighting is better, and you can really see the faces on each figure much more clearly than in mine. Also, and this is part of what frustrated me so much, the memorial is in an unsavory part of the city, in a somewhat isolated small park, and we didn't feel comfortable staying any longer to get more close-ups. So we took our few pictures and then headed back down to the busy street where we felt a little safer in the company of all the people on the street.
So that was our first full day in Paris and we are emotionally drained, as you can imagine. Tomorrow we're headed out to Drancy, a suburb of Paris, where the Jews were held in a transit camp until they were deported to Auschwitz or another death camp. I think this will be our last Holocaust related site, so after that we'll be able to lighten things up and really enjoy the city.
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