To never forget this “unspeakable crime” and its six million Jewish victims, a Holocaust memorial was inaugurated this Sunday, January 26, in Lyon, on the eve of the 80th anniversary of the liberation of the extermination camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau. The work, entitled Memory Railsis 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 murdered by Nazi Germany.
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 “6,100 men, women and children from 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. “Anti-Semitism is a pernicious poison that must be fought forcefully”said for his part 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 “produced in virtual invisibility”he stressed.
Lyon was “smeared with blood” par “the incredible cruelty of his executioners”dont Klaus Barbie, “the mouthare they Lyon” but also the leader of the militia Paul Touvier, he recalled. Faced with “feeling of horror and irreversible loss”the new memorial is aimed first “to the sensitive”, “it strikes our conscience”continued the mayor, greeting his predecessor, Gérard Collomb, who died in 2023, “without whose will none of this could have succeeded”.
