To never forget this “unspeakable crime” and its six million Jewish victims… A Holocaust memorial was inaugurated on Sunday in Lyon, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp.
The work, entitled “Rails of Memory”, is made up of 1,173 meters of railway rails, to symbolize the 1,173 km separating Lyon from the former Auschwitz camp, in Poland, where a million Jews were were murdered by Nazi Germany.
Numerous convoys to the death camps
Designed by two Parisian architects, Quentin Blaising and Alicia Borchardt, it was installed in a square near the Perrache station, from which many convoys left during the Second World War towards the death camps. “This space could not be anywhere other than here,” declared in front of several hundred people gathered for the ceremony, Jean-Olivier Viout, president of the Association for the construction of a Shoah memorial in Lyon.
The work is not limited to evoking the memory of the “6,100 men, women and children of our region exterminated for the sole reason that they were Jews”, but more broadly pays homage to the six million victims of the Shoah, a number “to hammer, and to hammer again constantly,” added the magistrate who, in 1987, was a member of the prosecution at the trial of the head of the Lyon Gestapo, Klaus Barbie.
Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyon”
“Anti-Semitism is a pernicious poison that must be fought forcefully,” said the environmentalist mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet. A “part of the unspeakable crime of the Shoah took place in our city”, even if the deportations there “occurred in virtual invisibility”, he stressed. Lyon was “smeared in blood” by “the incredible cruelty of its executioners”, including Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyon” but also the leader of the militia Paul Touvier, he recalled.
Faced with the “sense of horror and irreversible loss”, the new memorial is firstly addressed “to the sensitive”, “it strikes our conscience”, continued the mayor, saluting his predecessor, Gérard Collomb, who died in 2023 , “without whose will none of this could have succeeded”.