“Today, we give them a burial”, Lyon finally has its memorial for the victims of the Shoah

The Cimetière de la Mouche, a Jewish cemetery in Lyon, finally has its first Holocaust memorial. After thirty years of work and research, the names of more than 6,000 Jews from the region, deported and murdered in particular at Auschwitz, have been registered.

The moment is imbued with emotion, the white walls on which appear so many names, it is sometimes all that is left to remember a life.

For more than 30 years, a desire to build a memorial for the victims of the Shoah has been waiting to materialize. Representing the daughters and sons of deportees, Serge Klarsfeld explains that since the trial of Klaus Barbie, other projects have been carried out, this one took a little longer. “This memorial I like it a lot, especially because there is a historical reading of each victim. There is information on each person, their place of birth, their age, the place where they were arrested, and this changes a little from other memorials on which the victims are more or less anonymous because their name and their first name sometimes their age but there is no truly historical reading.”

According to the historian, the memorial is precise and allows an overview of the events that took place in the region.

“With just the name, first name and age, we are not quite in the presence of a person. There, there is a frame, we know what the person’s journey is and the memorial becomes alive .”

It’s a way of saving the victims from oblivion.

Serge Klarsfeld

President of the association “Sons and daughters of Jewish deportees from France”

For decades, he and his wife Béate pursued the Nazis but also collected every detail, however small, allowing them to find and keep in memory the trace of an existence struck down by the Nazis.

“It is a work of about fifty years, a work which allows to be able to make memorials on any region of France.”

Among these 6,078 names, those of Eliette and Lucien-Moise Bloch, Claude’s parents, all three rounded up together in Lyon in 1944. Unsteadily, Claude, the last survivor of Auschwitz residing in Lyon, scans the monument , leaning on his cane.

With a white, trembling hand, Claude touches the inscriptions.

Silent, he reads and rereads the names of his parents, beloved, cherished names, recalling his roots, parents without whom he had to learn to live.

His grandfather died under torture in Lyon, his mother deported to Auschwitz never returned. “It’s a memory that I have of them like that“, in his voice are heard the words of an inconsolable child.

Today they are given a burial.

Alain Sebban

President of the regional Jewish consistory

Until then, the 6078 Jews of the region murdered during the Second World War had no grave, no burial. The cemetery of the fly is the oldest Jewish cemetery in Lyon. “We are the only big city in France that did not have a memorial for the Jews murdered during the war, says Alain Sebban, president of the consistory. To die and not have a grave, for the parents, the family, the friends who cannot collect themselves, it is something terrible.”

Another memorial is to be erected in downtown Lyon, Place Carnot, in memory of the 6 million Jews who died during the Second World War.