Pithiviers station, a place of memory to “transmit” and “question”

Outside, Pithiviers station (Loiret) still looks very much like it did 80 years ago. The interior has been redesigned to accommodate a permanent exhibition. A museum is dedicated to the Loiret internment camp, and to the 16,000 Jews who transited there between 1941 and 1943, with a paroxysm of horror in July 1942. “The memory of the Vel d’Hiv families, nearly 8,000 men, women and children who arrived here after July 16 and 17, 1942“, says Olivier Lalieu, curator of the permanent exhibition at Pithiviers station. Six convoys left Pithiviers station for the Auschwitz-Birkenau camps.

Among the faces passed by the station of Pithiviers, those of the parents of Jean-Louis Maslowski, son of Jewish deportees. They survived the death camps. “It’s a hell of a feeling“, he confides. The site, free and open to all, will have a strong educational vocation. “The will is truly to explain, to transmit, to tell, and above all to question“, comments Jacques Fredj, the director of the Shoah Memorial, who manages the place.