Drancy Internment Camp

We visited the Drancy camp today, with its Memorial (displayed here) and Museum.  Its buildings (visible left and right) were constructed as a social housing complex  in the 1930s and dubbed as the "Cité de la Muette" (city of silence), because of its then rural location 10 km outside Paris.  In the 1940s the buildings were taken over by the Nazis as the main detention center where Jews and other "undesirables" were held before being deported.  Between 1942 and 1944 some 63,000 Jews were shipped to the extermination camps in Eastern Europe (of the 76,000 deported from France).  The monument (sculpted by Shelomo Selinger) is dedicated  (upper right) to the "martyred Jews of France, victims of Nazi barbarism".  Our tour was at least two hours, led by the lady in the blip; the  Memorial de la Shoah  arranged a bus from Paris--there were at least thirty of us).  Other links to Drancy are here and here.  The object behind the lady's head is a boxcar of the kind used for rail transport to the camps.