The Monument

The Drancy Memorial stone blocks make the Hebrew letter SCHIN. The two lateral blocks symbolize the Gate of Death. The central block features 10 people - the required number for prayer (minyan) A man and a woman in the foreground stand for Suffering and Dignity Two overturned heads at the bottom symbolize death. Two flights of 7 narrowing steps lead to the Gate of Death. They symbolize the ascent of the victims' souls.

What is written On the 20 th of August ,000 Parisian Jews were brought to the camp at Drancy before being taken to the death camps Almost 100, 000 Jewish men, women, children and the elderly arrived on their way to be transported to Auschwitz Very few returned

What is written This monument is for the French victims of barbaric Nazis, do not forget what happened here Biblical quote from lamentations chapter 1 verse

What happened at Drancy From 1941 to 1944 the building at Drancy served as the main transit camp for French prisoners of the German S.S. Over 67,000 people, most of them Jews, were deported from Drancy to the death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau and Sobibor. Very few of the Jews survived the war.

A further 3,000 perished at Drancy from abuse, starvation, or disease. The last Auschwitz-bound transport left the camp on July 31, 1944, and the site was liberated 18 days later. It was not until 1995 that Nazi concentration camps were officially acknowledged by the French government.

The Problems with Drancy One problem with the Drancy memorial is that at a glance it is a hard memorial to interpret Another problem is that the Statue appears to be a clump of people and might be seen as undermining the Jewish and making them out to be an almost meaningless clump of people And another is that the memorial is not telling us about what the French did to help the Nazis in WW2 and maybe even tries to hide the fact that the French helped the Nazis

By Paul Le Vine 9c