Several hundred people gathered for these ceremonies. A large delegation of the Jewish community from Orleans was present, represented by Eliane Klein, CRIF’s regional delegate. Joseph Zrihen, Vice-President of CRIF, took part in these highly emotional and reverent memorial ceremonies. The following is an extract from Eliane Klein’s speech.
Some people in France are surprised, to say the least, that over 60 years after the Shoah we continue to commemorate the terrible events which took place here in Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, and in so many other camps on French territory, as a prelude to the planned deportation and murder of millions of human beings in the death camps in Poland.
This is not a morbid protest event, but a necessary undertaking for us all. What brings us here together each year is a privileged moment in a place where our collective memory is invested, where we bear witness to our loyalty to those who went missing, without burial and without a cemetery where we can stand in silent remembrance of them.
It is an opportunity to reflect on this unique, immeasurable crime committed on European soil, a mass crime that took place in the silence of the nations and with the active complicity of France’s Vichy government. It is also an opportunity to affirm our determination to pass on the history of this tragedy as faithfully as possible.
(…) It is also fundamental that we learn to listen to the survivors: “Who, in this world, is able to answer the terrible obstinacy of the crime if not the terrible obstinacy of the witness?” (Albert Camus). I pay tribute to their courage, to their amazing will to live and testify. And this is all the more important that there is a “memory without words, that of hundreds of thousands of children, adults, and old people who were sent directly to the death camps: Birkenau, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor » (Dr Richard Prasquier).
(…)
Today’s remembrance participates, in a small measure, in this fight for the respect of human dignity and the fundamental values that constitute the foundation stone of our nation.
English
Français