Mémorial de la Shoah

The Mémorial de la Shoah stands in the Marais on the site of the Mémorial du Martyr Juif Inconnu, first opened in 1956, and was rebuilt and expanded into its current form in 2005. The Wall of Names in the entrance courtyard lists the roughly 76,000 Jews, including around 11,000 children, deported from France between 1942 and 1944, most of them through the Drancy transit camp to Auschwitz. Inside, the permanent exhibition traces the rise of Nazism, the Vichy regime's collaboration and internment policies, the roundups including the July 1942 Vel' d'Hiv raid, and the network of French rescuers later honoured as Righteous Among the Nations, whose names are inscribed on a separate wall of honour. The crypt holds a symbolic tomb and an eternal flame, while the lower level houses one of Europe's largest Holocaust archives, drawn in part from the wartime documentation effort of the Centre de Documentation Juive Contemporaine. The building combines a restrained, largely windowless limestone exterior with an interior sequence of low-lit corridors and display cases that curators designed to move visitors chronologically from pre-war Jewish life in France through deportation to liberation and memory. Because the site functions as both memorial and archive rather than a conventional museum, exhibits favour original documents, photographs, and testimony over reconstructed scenes, and temporary exhibitions in an adjoining space regularly address related genocides and contemporary antisemitism. Admission to the permanent exhibition remains free, reflecting the institution's stated mission of remembrance and public education rather than tourism revenue.