IN PICTURES – Discover the new Shoah memorial site at Pithiviers station

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Trains have not passed through Pithiviers station, in the Loiret, for decades, now it is visitors who will go there. The station is now a place of remembrance of the Holocaust. After 4 years, and two years late, the museum is finally finished, it will be inaugurated this Sunday, July 17.

Only the exterior walls still resemble a station, the interior is uncluttered and allows visitors to circulate in the large spaces of the station. © Radio France
– Leo Limon

A memorial, managed by the Paris Shoah Memorial, which pays tribute to the 16,000 Jews, including 4,700 children, interned between 1941 and 1943 in the Pithiviers and Beaune la Rolande camps as well as to the 8,100 Jews deported by the train stations from these two cities on board 8 convoys bound for the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps between June 25 and September 21, 1942.

The museum deciphers the different stages necessary to understand this place, from the history of the Pithiviers station to that of the occupation and then the deportation.
The museum deciphers the different stages necessary to understand this place, from the history of the Pithiviers station to that of the occupation and then the deportation. © Radio France
– Leo Limon

“The objective of this building is to develop a place of memory unique in France. It is an extraordinary chance to be able to testify to what happened in this station“explains Jacques Fredj, historian and director of the Paris Shoah Memorial.

Archive images, portraits of victims and testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust punctuate the visitor's journey.
Archive images, portraits of victims and testimonies of survivors of the Holocaust punctuate the visitor’s journey. © Radio France
– Leo Limon

A memorial voluntarily aimed at young audiences and schoolchildren adds Jacques Fredj: “_it is a priority for us today, in view of the rise of anti-Semitism, racism, attempts to falsify history that we have witnessed during the presidential campaign and the explosion of conspiracy theories”

Some station windows are covered with portraits of deportees killed in the Auschwitz Birkenau camps
Some station windows are covered with portraits of deportees killed in the Auschwitz Birkenau camps © Radio France
– Leo Limon

And next Saturday and Sunday, the new memorial site at Pithiviers station will be open to the public for the first time.


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