80 years since the liberation of the Auschwitz camp: a Holocaust memorial inaugurated in Lyon to never forget the “horror”

“Anti-Semitism is a pernicious poison that must be fought with force,” said Lyon's Green mayor, Grégory Doucet. MAXPPP – Nicolas Liponne

To never forget this "unspeakable crime" and its six million Jewish victims, a Holocaust memorial was inaugurated 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 tracks, 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 on a square near the Perrache train station, from which many convoys left for the death camps during the Second World War.

“This space could not be anywhere else but here”, declared Jean-Olivier Viout, president of the Association pour l'édification of a Holocaust memorial in Lyon.

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Tribute to the 6,100 people exterminated and the 6 million victims of the Shoah

The work is not limited to evoking the memory of the “6,100 men, women and children from our region exterminated for the sole reason that they were Jewish”, but pays more broad tribute to the six million victims of the Shoah, a number “to be hammered home, and hammered home again and again”, 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 with force”, said for his part the ecologist mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet. A “part of the unspeakable crime of the Shoah took place in our city”, even if the deportations took place there “in near invisibility”, he stressed. Lyon was “smeared with blood” by “the unheard-of cruelty of its executioners”, including Klaus Barbie, “the butcher of Lyon” but also the head of the French militia, Paul Touvier, he recalled.

Faced with the “feeling of horror and irreversible loss”, the new memorial first addresses “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 come to fruition”.