Pithiviers Train Station - Mémorial de la Shoah

Gare de Pithiviers - Mémorial de la Shoah

Between 1941 and 1943, during the German occupation, around 16,000 Jews were detained in the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande internment camps in the Loiret department. The train stations of the two towns thus served as a hub for their deportation from France. The memorial at the former Pithiviers train station, inaugurated in July 2022, commemorates the history of these two transit points and the central role they played in the persecution and murder of the Jewish population in France.

History

The Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande camps in the Loiret department were set up by the French army for German prisoners of war at the beginning of World War II. After France surrendered to the German Wehrmacht in June 1940, the Germans occupied northern France, including the Loiret department. The Wehrmacht initially used both camps to imprison French prisoners of war. From 1941 onwards, however, the German authorities converted both camps into transit camps for the internment and deportation of the Jewish population in France.

On May 14, 1941, the first Jewish prisoners arrived at both camps: 3,700 men who had been arrested in Paris on the same day in the »rafle du billet vert« (English: »green letter raid«). On July 16 and 17, 1942, at the instigation of the Gestapo, the French police arrested over 13,000 Jewish children, women and men in the capital as part of the infamous »rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver«. While single adults were taken directly to the Drancy internment camp, families were crammed into the velodrome for days before being gradually transported to Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Between June and September 1942, a total of eight transports departed directly from the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande train stations for Auschwitz.

After the summer of 1942, the remaining prisoners in the Pithiviers camp were transferred to Drancy and Beaune-la-Rolande. Until its liberation in August 1944, the Pithiviers camp was used to detain political prisoners who had been arrested in the region, including communists. The Beaune-la-Rolande camp, on the other hand, continued to be used as a transit camp for Jewish deportees in conjunction with Drancy until its closure in July 1943. Both camps were demolished in the post-war period.

Pithiviers, 1941, View of the Pithiviers internment camp, Bundesarchiv, Bild 183-S69236, CC BY-SA 3.0

Beaune-la-Rolande, 1941, Prisoners in the Beaune-la-Rolande internment camp, Bundesarchiv, Bild 101I-250-0939-04A, CC BY-SA 3.0

Victims

A total of 25 percent of the Jewish population in France fell victim to the Shoah. Around 76,000 Jewish children, women and men were deported from France to German concentration and extermination camps, including more than 11,000 children.

Around 16,000 Jews were detained in the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande internment camps, including 4,700 children. 4,400 of these children were killed in Auschwitz.

With the defeat of the French army in June 1940 the country came under German control. Northern France was governed by the German military administration, whilst the south was initially unoccupied. A government under German influence was established in the spa town of Vichy in the south of France. At the beginning of the Second World War, there were around 300,000 Jews living in France. The exact number is not known as there were no records of religious affiliation in France. The first anti-Jewish laws were passed in northern France at the end of 1940. The Jews were forced to register with the authorities, excluded from society and stripped of their possessions. These policies were followed by systematic arrests by the French police. Jews without a French passport were the main targets of the German SS and police as well as the French authorities. In an attempt to deter growing French resistance, the German military commander General Otto von Stülpnagel (1878–1948) started to have those not involved in the resistance shot and to have Jews in particular arrested. Those arrested were among the first to be deported to the death camps in occupied Poland from March 1942 onwards. A total of 75,000 people were deported to their deaths in the course of over seventy deportation operations. Most of the French Jews survived, mainly in hiding in the south of the country. Around 600,000 people died in France as a result of war and persecution, including 270,000 civilians. There continues to be little distinction drawn between the different groups of victims. However, since the late 1980s there has been increased research into the murder of patients of care homes and clinics. It is now estimated that around 50,000 people fell victim to these operations. Both northern and southern France experienced persecution, collaboration and resistance during the occupation. After the war, remembrance of both the campaign of the »Résistance« as an expression of French patriotism and the suffering associated with the »Déportation« provided a way of bridging the differences between the Gaullist conservatives and the Communists affiliated with Moscow. Consequently, many museums and memorial sites are dedicated to the resistance or remember the deportations, for example the »Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation« (Memorial to the Martyrs of the Deportation) in Paris, inaugurated in 1956, and the »Centre Européen du Résistant Déporté« (European Centre for Deported Resistance Fighters), which opened in 2005 at the memorial site at the former Natzweiler concentration camp. Since the early 1990s a number of sites of memory have been established, such as the Maison d’Izieu (Izieu Home) memorial near Lyon, which remembers the deportation of 44 Jewish children, the national memorial site at the former camp at Gurs as well as a memorial centre in Oradour sur Glane – a village destroyed by the SS in 1944. The central memorial site dedicated to the victims of the Holocaust is the »Mémorial de la Shoah« in the centre of Paris, which was opened in 2005. French presidents have since then acknowledged shared French responsibility for the Holocaust in France. The memorial site in Caen,commemorating the Normandy landings of 1944, was opened in 1988 and extended in 2002, is the most-visited memorial site outside Paris. The annual national commemorations marking the victory over Nazi Germany take place here. In addition, there are numerous regional museums in France, where the exhibitions focus on the themes of persecution, resistance and deportation.

Remembrance

Founded in Orléans in 1991, the Cercil (»Centre d’Étude et de Recherche sur les Camps d’Internment dans le Loiret«, in English »Study and Research Centre on the Internment Camps in Loiret«) played a leading role in uncovering the history of the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande internment camps. On January 27, 2011, the »Musée-Mémorial des enfants du Vel d’Hiv« (English: »Memorial Museum to the Children of Vel d'Hiv«), which is affiliated with the Cercil, was inaugurated in the centre of Orléans in the presence of former President Jacques Chirac and Auschwitz survivor Simone Veil. The museum commemorates the children who were arrested in the »rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver«, detained in the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande camps and subsequently deported to Auschwitz. Since 2018, the museum has been attached to the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris.

Following a partnership agreement signed in May 2017, the Mémorial de la Shoah and the French national railway company SNCF decided to renovate the former Pithiviers train station and to establish another memorial site there. The memorial site was inaugurated on July 17, 2022, exactly 80 years after the »rafle du Vélodrome d’Hiver«, and houses a permanent exhibition on the history of the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande train stations.

Pithiviers, 2012, The Pithiviers train station before its renovation, Wikimedia Commons / Lunon92, CC BY-SA 3.0

Pithiviers, 2024, View of the permanent exhibition 1, Nadia Haddad / Mémorial de la Shoah

Possibilities

Permanent exhibition on the history of the Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande train stations, guided tours, workshops

Open

July and August: Wednesday to Sunday, 2.00 p.m. to 6.00 p.m., guided tours on Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays
Rest of the year: Sunday, 2.00 p.m. to 6.00 p.m., guided tour on the first Sunday of the month at 2.30 p.m.
Closed on January 1, April 26, May 1, June 9, July 14, August 15 and December 25

Contact

https://gare-de-pithiviers.memorialdelashoah.org/

accueil.pithiviers@memorialdelashoah.org

+33 2 38 72 92 02

Place de la Gare
45300 Pithiviers, France

Pithiviers, 2024, View of the permanent exhibition 2, Nadia Haddad / Mémorial de la Shoah

Pithiviers, 2024, View of the permanent exhibition 3, Nadia Haddad / Mémorial de la Shoah

Pithiviers, 2024, Back view of the Pithiviers train station, Nadia Haddad / Mémorial de la Shoah

Pithiviers, 2024, Front view of the Pithiviers train station, Nadia Haddad / Mémorial de la Shoah

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