The Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation

There is an extensive roster of famous holocaust memorials throughout the world.  Many of them share innovative modernist architecture and are as aesthetically elegant as they are haunting.  The Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation is an exemplary model; erected in 1962, it pays tribute to the 200,00 French citizens who were deported by the Nazis from Vichey, France. While the vast majority, with some estimates as high as 80%, of these deportees were Jews persecuted for their religion, the Nazis rounded up thousands of individuals who were deemed social miscreants by the Third Reich, including homosexuals and Romani gypsies.

The structure of the Memorial was designed by Georges-Henri Pingusson, a French architect, poet, teacher and urban planner. His intention was to construct a space that evoked the narrow passages on trains which shipped deportees to concentration camps. The Memorial is situated on the beautiful Île de la Cité, an islet located in the Seine where the location is “hollowed out of the sacred isle, the cradle of our nation, which incarnates the soul of France — a place where its spirit dwells” (Bal, Mieke “Act of Memory: Cultural Recall in the Present”).

The floorplan of the Memorial is shaped like an arrowhead — one enters through a descending staircase that opens into a courtyard. This atrium is starkly minimalist, with light colored masonry and an open sky overhead. The only decorative motif  is an iron-work grid, redolent of prison bars, with menacing, triangular spikes that jet aggressively inwards — an architectural element that is intended to arouse feelings of imprisonment and despair.

The interior corridor narrowly herds one down a passageway that begins with a circular plaque with the words inscribed: “They descended into the mouth of the earth and they did not return.” The entire Memorial is rife with chilling and poetic inscriptions. Past the plaque, both sides of the chamber are ornamented with 200,000 crystals to ennumerate every life exterminated during the Nazi occupation of France. At the end of the hall, a flame of light shines radiantly over the tomb of an unknown deportee. Beginning with the bleak, claustrophobic architecture, the design of the Memorial leads its visitors toward a path decorated with poetry and light, emanating a spiritual message of quiet hope and pious remembrance: “Forgive but do not Forget” reminds the inscription at the end of the corridor.

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