The Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation is a memorial to the 200,000 people deported from Vichy France

Vichy France

Vichy France, Vichy Regime, or Vichy Government, are common terms used to describe the government of France that collaborated with the Axis powers from July 1940 to August 1944. This government succeeded the Third Republic and preceded the Provisional Government of the French Republic...

 to the Nazi concentration camps

Nazi concentration camps

Nazi Germany maintained concentration camps throughout the territories it controlled. The first Nazi concentration camps set up in Germany were greatly expanded after the Reichstag fire of 1933, and were intended to hold political prisoners and opponents of the regime...

 during the Second World War. It is in Paris, France on the site of a former morgue

Morgue

A morgue or mortuary is used for the storage of human corpses awaiting identification, or removal for autopsy or disposal by burial, cremation or otherwise...

, underground behind Notre Dame

Notre Dame de Paris

Notre Dame de Paris , also known as Notre Dame Cathedral, is a Gothic, Roman Catholic cathedral on the eastern half of the Île de la Cité in the fourth arrondissement of Paris, France. It is the cathedral of the Catholic Archdiocese of Paris: that is, it is the church that contains the cathedra of...

 on Île de la Cité

Île de la Cité

The Île de la Cité is one of two remaining natural islands in the Seine within the city of Paris . It is the centre of Paris and the location where the medieval city was refounded....

. It was designed by French modernist architect

Architect

An architect is a person trained in the planning, design and oversight of the construction of buildings. To practice architecture means to offer or render services in connection with the design and construction of a building, or group of buildings and the space within the site surrounding the...

, writer, teacher, and town planner

Urban planning

Urban planning incorporates areas such as economics, design, ecology, sociology, geography, law, political science, and statistics to guide and ensure the orderly development of settlements and communities....

 Georges-Henri Pingusson

Georges-Henri Pingusson

-Biography:Georges-Henri Pingusson was born 1894 in Clermont-Ferrand. 1920-1925 he studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris.He built hotel Latitude 43 and several villas in the south of France...

 and opened in 1962.

Pingusson intended that its long and narrow subterranean space convey a feeling of claustrophobia

Claustrophobia

Claustrophobia is the fear of having no escape and being closed in small spaces or rooms...

.

In the year of its opening, a brochure produced by the French survivors' group "Reseau de souvenir" described the memorial as a crypt

Crypt

In architecture, a crypt is a stone chamber or vault beneath the floor of a burial vault possibly containing sarcophagi, coffins or relics....

, "hollowed out of the sacred isle, the cradle of our nation, which incarnates the soul of France -- a place where its spirit dwells."

Fragments of two poems by French poet and French Resistance

French Resistance

The French Resistance is the name used to denote the collection of French resistance movements that fought against the Nazi German occupation of France and against the collaborationist Vichy régime during World War II...

 member Robert Desnos

Robert Desnos

Robert Desnos , was a French surrealist poet who played a key role in the Surrealist movement of his day.- Biography :...

 are inscribed on the walls. The first consists of the last stanza of a poem written by Desnos, himself a deportee, pseudonymously and published "underground" in Paris, on Bastille Day

Bastille Day

Bastille Day is the name given in English-speaking countries to the French National Day, which is celebrated on 14 July of each year. In France, it is formally called La Fête Nationale and commonly le quatorze juillet...

 1942, "The Heart that Hated War".

I have dreamt so very much of you,

I have walked so much,

Loved your shadow so much,

That nothing more is left to me of you.

All that remains to me is to be the shadow among shadows

To be a hundred times more of a shadow than the shadow

To be the shadow that will come and come again into

your sunny life.

A circular plaque on the floor of the underground chamber is inscribed: "They descended into the mouth of the earth and they did not return." Along both walls of the narrow chamber are 200,000 crystal

Crystal

A crystal or crystalline solid is a solid material whose constituent atoms, molecules, or ions are arranged in an orderly repeating pattern extending in all three spatial dimensions. The scientific study of crystals and crystal formation is known as crystallography...

s with light shining through meant to symbolize each of the deportees who died in the concentration camps.

A "flame of eternal hope" burns and The Tomb of the Unknown Deportee bears the inscription: "Dedicated to the living memory of the 200,000 French deportees sleeping in the night and the fog, exterminated in the Nazi concentration camps."

At the exit to the chamber is the injunction, engraved, found at all sites memorializing the victims of the Nazis: "Forgive but never forget."

External links

• Photograph of Memorial
• "A Teacher's Guide to the Holocaust", The Florida Center for Instructional Technology, College of Education, University of South Florida, 2005]
• Paris.org.
• Bernard I. Kouchel, "Resources For Tracing Victims and Survivors of the Holocaust From France"
• http://arts-plastiques.ac-rouen.fr/grp/sculpture_commemorative/martyrs_deportation_paris.htm Dossier des Groupes de Reflexion et de Production