A Holocaust memorial was inaugurated in Lyon on Sunday, marking the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Over 6,000 Jews from the French city were killed between 1941-1945.
The work, entitled "Train Tracks of Memory" (Rails de la mémoire), is made up of 1,173 metres of railway tracks, symbolising the 1,173 kilometres separating Lyon from the former Auschwitz concentration camp, in Poland, where a million Jews were murdered between 1941 and 1945.
Auschwitz was the largest of the extermination camps and has become a symbol of Nazi Germany's genocide of six million European Jews, along with more than 100,000 non-Jews.
The camp was liberated on 27 January by Soviet troops who found 7,000 survivors. The date has been designated by the United Nations as Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Around 76,000 French Jews, including more than 11,000 children, were deported by the Nazis with the help of the collaborationist Vichy government.
The new Holocaust memorial in Lyon – designed by Parisian architects Quentin Blaising and Alicia Borchardt – stands in a square near the central station, from which many convoys left towards the death camps.
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Inscribed on the edge of the rails are the words : "In Memory of the six million Jewish victims of the holocaust, which includes 1,5 million children, 1941-1945. 6,100 came from our region."
The architects recycled old railway elements to construct the memorial, including the rails, the wooden sleepers and the ballast.
"The reuse of railway materials symbolises the resilience and ability of humanity to rebuild after periods of atrocity" they wrote in their brief.
Several hundred people gathered for the ceremony on Sunday, including Jean-Olivier Viout, president of the Association for a Holocaust memorial in Lyon.
He said it was important to remember the victims from the region but it should also be a "tribute to the six million victims of the Holocaust".
As a magistrate, Viout was a member of the prosecution at the 1987 trial of SS officer Klaus Barbie, known as "the butcher of Lyon".
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The mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet described the deportations that took place in Lyon as "unspeakable crimes".
Lyon was "smeared in blood" by "the incredible cruelty of its executioners", he said, referring to Barbie and the leader of the French militia, Paul Touvier.
"Anti-semitism is a poison that must be fought forcefully," Doucet told reporters, and thanked his predecessor Gérard Collomb, who died in 2023, for getting the memorial project off the ground.
(with AFP)
