From Drancy to Romainville, artists give voice to sites marked by the deportation of Jews

The graffiti occupies the entire gable of one of the buildings of the Cité de la Muette in Drancy, opposite the Shoah Memorial. Deep blue at the base, it lightens as it reaches the roof. Like tears in this blue page, messages emerge: “Long live France”, “Left for an unknown destination”, “Goodbye, and see you after the war”. XXL format reproductions of the inscriptions engraved in the plaster of the walls of the Cité de la Muette by Jewish prisoners before their deportation.

Although they are today inhabited by families, these U-shaped buildings were, from March 1942, the assembly and transit camp for Jews from France. From here, a few kilometers east of Paris, 67,000 people were deported, mainly to the Auschwitz Birkenau camp. “We are really on what we call a high place of national memory, a major site of the Shoah in France”explains Benoît Pouvreau, responsible for inventorying cultural heritage in Seine-Saint-Denis.

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The department has four other places of memory of the Second World War: the Romainville fort (internment and then transit camp for resistance fighters) and the Bobigny, Pantin and Bourget stations, from where 66 convoys left for the death camps.

“The origin of this project is part of an ambition to set up a major networked memory project (…) to make these sites known to the general public”explains Morten Salling, “Art Espace Public” project manager.

Broken destinies

At the helm, the artist Chemsedine Herriche relied on the messages found on all five sites: those engraved in the walls at Drancy or at Fort Romainville, but also those thrown from the trains leaving the deportation stations.

“Knowing what the families experienced, felt at that moment, is very touching and I said to myself that if it touched me as a human of our time, it would serve to retransmit (starting) from the intimate story to lead to the global story”explains Chemsedine Herriche to AFP in front of one of these graffiti.

In Bobigny, along the dual carriageway, yellow and green graffiti appears at the top of a mast on the site of the former deportation station, the windows of which are now bricked up.

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We can see the reproduction of the portrait of a young girl drawn by hand, by a deported Jew, next to the message “shooting star”. After the war, this industrial and railway site was gradually forgotten before being rediscovered as a place of memory in the early 1990s.

Another long-forgotten site: the Romainville fort and its “square of the shot” on which stand three bronze-colored works by Chemsedine Herriche.

Located in the commune of Lilas, the Vauban-type fort hosted thousands of resistance fighters, including many women, who were placed in solitary confinement before being shot at Mont-Valérien or deported to camps.

Here, the artist also used dozens of messages engraved on the walls of Stalag 17 by the prisoners, witnesses of their passage, their fear, their hope and their fight. As many broken destinies as the journey “Beyond Night” allows you to discover and read the graffiti.