A Place of Holocaust Memory: Drancy from the Interwar Period to the Present
- Date: 24 January 2023, 13:15–15:00
- Location: English Park, 7-0016
- Type: Seminar
- Lecturer: Renée Poznanski
- Organiser: Hugo Valentin centrum
- Contact person: Tomislav Dulic
The seminar will deal with Drancy, an avant-garde architectural project in the 1930s which included the first skyscrapers in the Paris suburb.
Drancy became a camp for Jews during the German occupation, following a massive round-up of Jews in August 1941. It began as an internment camp for men before women and then children joined them almost a year later. The implementation of the Final Solution in France was then on the agenda and Drancy turned into a transit camp for tens of thousands of Jews before their deportation to the extermination camps in Poland.
Its status also changed during the war years, from a French-operated camp to a Nazi camp ruled by the Germans, with all the usual attributes found in other Nazi camps.
Today the site has been returned to its pre-war purpose and the inhabitants of these buildings cohabit with various monuments located on the site: they honor the memory the Jewish victims of the Holocaust in France, of which Drancy stands as the main symbol.