for 15 years, the commune of Montreuil has been organizing trips to Auschwitz

While the war between Israel and Hamas continues and anti-Semitic acts are on the rise in France, the trip to Auschwitz organized by the commune of Montreuil has a particular resonance this year.

How can we fight against the resurgence of anti-Semitic acts in France in the context of the war between Israel and Hamas, and while the bombings continue on the Gaza Strip? In Montreuil, in Seine-Saint-Denis, near Paris, the town hall still focuses on education. For 15 years, the city has organized, with the Shoah Memorial, a visit to the Auschwitz camp with residents, many of them young people.

The journey is long to southern Poland. First a plane going from Paris to Krakow. Then 45 minutes by bus for these residents of Montreuil. Everyone goes down to the Juden ramp, the railway line where the convoys of deportees arrived. A few meters further, at the entrance to the camp, silence reigns. We are a few meters from the iron gate with the infamous inscription: “Arbeit macht frei” (“Work sets you free”). Mehlia has her chin raised, she can’t take her eyes off the inscription. The student stops for a moment before passing under the porch: “It’s weird to see it in person. Anyway, since this morning our blood has been freezing. I’ve got shivers down my spine.”

“If we had grown up in their time, maybe we would be there too”

The drama follows the Montreuillois on the other side of the gate, to the interior of the buildings with red bricks and tiles. Today, they are places of exhibition but before the deportees lived there. Maya and Galice, 14, find it hard to believe: “We’re in a bit of a trance state, where we don’t really realize it. We don’t have the impression that it’s possible for this to happen. Especially this room in which there are lots of portraits of children deported, killed. There are their names too. That immediately makes it much more concrete. I feel much more concerned than just now because we really have the names. If we had grown up with them time, if that happens we would be there too. How can they do that?” Between two ruins of gas chambers, a prayer in Hebrew from the secretary of the Jewish home in Montreuil, in the group with them.

“Everything we see in the textbooks, all these images, everything that has traumatized us a little, I am waiting to see it to also tell myself that I have not been lied to, that I am not being told stories throughout my life and it really happened.”

Fayaz, student in Montreuil

at franceinfo

Among the schoolgirls, Maya thinks that human beings have not evolved much since the Second World War. She speaks knowingly: “I have already seen people say very anti-Semitic things under the pretext of a joke, sending swastikas or things like that at the class group because they found it funny. Even though we had just work on it and that they had a minimum of awareness. Immediately I got quite angry because it’s scandalous to say things like that. There were people who defended him by saying ‘Leave him, he “It’s stupid, it’s not serious. It’s still very serious things to send photos of Hitler giving Nazi salutes, to send swastikas. It’s illegal.”

“Eventually everything can reappear, given what we are currently seeing”

Precisely with the war in the Middle East, this trip takes on another dimension according to Aurélien Chalifour, professor of history and geography: “We have very important terms that come up in the debate like the term genocide. What is a genocide, how can it be embodied? So it’s very powerful to see these notions which are key words for students in their third year program. How does it become something other than that, how does it become a political reality in which we can live?”

Faced with the rise in anti-Semitism, Anis, 20, cannot help but compare his visit to a booster shot that he considers necessary: “We are in a phase where we realize what is happening in the world, a lot of horrors that are increasing, a lot of hatred. We realize that ultimately everything can reappear given what we see Currently.” And he is not the only one to think so, upon leaving Auschwitz several of them said it: “History is only a perpetual beginning again.”

The commune of Montreuil has already been confronted with anti-Semitic acts but Patrice Bessac, the communist mayor, wants to believe that this trip contributes to the social cohesion of the city: “Not only does it make it possible to contain and fight against anti-Semitism, but it creates antibodies in our Montreal community. This creates, each year, 140 people who, with their eyes, have been able to feel the effects of anti-Semitism, racism and human violence pushed to the limit.”

To continue this work of reflection, the participants will soon visit the camps of Drancy, north-east of Paris, set up by the Germans, nearly 4,200 Jewish men were interned there.