Remembering Drancy, a Major Holocaust Memorial Site Outside Paris
Victor Pérahia vividly remembers watching as two young friends were deported from Drancy, a French transit camp just a few miles north of central Paris, to the Nazi death camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau.
“They left on the same convoy, and I was beside myself to see them go”, he recalls of the day in 1943. “I even asked my mother ‘can’t we volunteer to go with them’? She said it was better that we didn’t."
His voice trembles. "But when they left, I was heartbroken. I cried abundantly. When I think that they were sent directly to the gas chambers — all the children were as soon as they arrived at Auschwitz — it tears me up inside. They were my friends, and I loved them.”
Pérahia, now 87 and one of France’s last living Holocaust survivors, was only 10 when he witnessed Josette d’Acosta and Henri Cohen depart that day in packed buses for the nearby town of Bobigny. They were 10 and 11 years old, respectively.
It is safe to assume their fate was similar to that of the vast majority of Drancy’s some 65,000 Jewish deportees, forced to board crowded, suffocating train cars designed for cattle rather than human passengers.
The cars were supplied by French national rail service SNCF — with tacit or direct approval from the collaborationist government led by Philippe Pétain at Vichy.
Few, if any, of the deportees knew what horrors awaited them at their destinations. Pérahia and another survivor I interviewed for this piece, Yvette Lévy (née Dreyfuss), say those held at Drancy were generally told they were being sent to “work in Germany”.
Both French citizens and Parisian residents, Pérahia and Lévy are among the few remaining survivors still able to recall firsthand the horror and inhumanity of Drancy.
It was here that France, in collaboration with Nazi Germany, detained over 75,000 Jews from France, Poland, Germany and other nationalities between 1941 and 1944. They also held prisoners of war and French Resistance fighters.
A bit of history
From 1940 and the German Occupation of France, a former residential complex outside Paris known as "La Cité de la Muette" was requisitioned to house prisoners of war.
But it was quickly converted to serve primarily as a detention site for Jews, following a decision to begin rounding up Jewish citizens and residents from 1941. French police forces in Paris and around France carried out the "request" willingly, first primarily arresting foreign residents.
The transit camp was designed to hold about 7,000 people, but at its peak it detained some 70,000 within its walls. It was known for its inhumane conditions, squalor, and cruel guards who often used corporal punishment. Young Jewish children were immediately separated from their families and deported.
A total of 77 convoys carried passengers from Drancy to concentration and death camps in Eastern Europe, representing a strong majority of the some 76,000 Jewish citizens and residents in France who were deported as part of Hitler's “Final Solution”. More than 11,000 children were among the deported; most did not survive.
Unlike the vast majority of Drancy’s detainees, who were deported within weeks, Pérahia and his mother Jeanne spent nearly two years at the French camp.
The story of how they averted being sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and its machinery of death is a remarkable one. We will return to it later, along with Yvette Lévy’s own story of survival.
A Moving Tribute, Often Overlooked
On an overcast, windy day in early March, I head to Drancy. As a travel writer, I’ve written about Parisian history and culture for many years. It's often struck me that Drancy has always seemed to garner too little attention — even from tourists with an interest in the history of France’s role in the Holocaust.
I’m slated to meet with with Alix Quéré, Education Manager at the Drancy Site for the Mémorial de la Shoah (France’s Holocaust Memorial organization). The organization’s sister site, in the Marais, is already well-known, attracting over 280,000 visitors in 2018.
Part of my objective in meeting Quéré is to learn what the Mémorial de la Shoah is doing to promote and keep alive the memory of Drancy, particularly since so few of its victims remain alive to tell their stories.
After a short metro and bus ride from central Paris to the northern suburb, I arrive at the site and survey it: a muted, austere cluster of buildings constructed in a brutalist style, and arranged in a semi-U formation.
The buildings of the former detainment camp remain intact, but have since been refurbished to serve as low-cost housing in the quiet suburb.
The double rows of barbed wire that once surrounded the site are long gone, as are the guards, composed both of members of the German Gestapo and the French military police (gendarmerie).
Unless you stop to really examine the site and the memorial that stands in front of it, the former Drancy camp can be easy to miss. Little aside from the monument itself betrays the site’s history of persecution and human suffering.
This is partly owing to the fact that the buildings continue to serve as housing for local residents. But as you slow down to take a closer look the drab, seemingly unremarkable complex, a monument comes into dramatic view.
Created by Franco-Israeli sculptor and Holocaust survivor Shelomo Selinger in 1976, the memorial consists of three hand-carved sculptures in pink granite. Selinger is also the artist behind the “Mémorial de la Résistance” (Resistance Memorial, 1987) in the nearby suburb of La Courneuve.
Two lateral, curved slabs at either side of the central sculpture are meant to resemble the gateway to the camps. One is inscribed with a verse from the Torah’s Book of Lamentations: “Behold and see, if there is any pain like my pain.”
The central sculpture depicts 10 interlacing figures, rendered in wrenching poses that suggest prayer, agony or death. One facet strikingly suggests a mother holding her child, capturing the terror and grief of parents forcibly separated from their children after arriving at Drancy.
At the bottom of the central sculpture, disembodied heads and flames allude to the murder of Jewish victims.
In an artist’s statement presenting the memorial, Selinger said he designed it in an effort to “transmit to future generations the emotions felt by survivors of Nazi camps” — ones, he added, he relived in creating the piece.
In 1943, Selinger and his father were deported from Poland, his country of birth, to the Faulbrück concentration camp in Germany; his mother and one sister were sent to another camp.
They were all murdered, while Selinger survived nine different camps over a period of two years. In 1945, when Soviet soldiers came to liberate the Theresienstadt camp in what is now the Czech Republic, they discovered Selinger lying atop a pile of corpses, greatly weakened but still breathing.
Learning of the artist’s incomprehensible suffering and loss gives his memorial tribute to fellow victims at Drancy an even deeper sense of weight and importance.
***
After I've surveyed the memorial site for a few minutes, Quéré arrives and offers some in-depth context on the monument and its significance.
“Historical places from the Holocaust in France — most of these don’t exist anymore, but this one has remained almost exactly identical [to its appearance during the war],” she notes.
“You really realize what it must have been like to be detained in such a place, surrounded by barbed wire and guards…It also shows that in France, the Shoah didn’t start someplace [far away] in Europe, but only a few kilometers from Paris”.
Quéré notes that Selinger effectively designed his memorial monument to underline Drancy’s role as a sort of “antechamber” to the death camps. She points toward seven steps leading to the raised platform and granite sculptures.
These, she says, allow visitors to access the monument and leave flowers, or hold commemorative events. But they also reference Dante’s seven circles of hell.
The cattle car: a potent reminder of French collaboration
Stretching just beyond Selinger’s 1976 monument in the direction of the buildings that once served as the detainment camp, a symbolic track leads to a train car. This part of the memorial was only inaugurated in 1988. In 2009, it was defaced with swastikas and antisemitic slurs, to widespread condemnation.
Quéré explains that this car in particular — designed to transport horses rather than people because “Nazis didn’t consider Jews to be human beings” — wasn’t necessarily used to deport the detainees of Drancy to the death camps.
But she says there’s ample documentation evidencing that Nazis requisitioned trains cars of the same model and period to shuttle thousands of people from Drancy to the death camps.
Around 70 to 80 people at a time were forced into the cramped cars, suffering “absolutely atrocious conditions” during journeys that lasted several days.
France’s national rail company SNCF provided the cars, in full cooperation with Nazi Germany. It was only in 1995 that the government recognized the responsibility of the French state in the atrocities, including in the “Velodrome d’Hiver” roundup of July 1942, which saw French police arrest over 13,000 Jewish men, women and children and detain them in a stadium in west Paris. The vast majority were non-French citizens, or stateless.
The victims were temporarily held in squalid, cramped conditions at the stadium before being transferred to transit camps in France, primarily Drancy. Over 4,000 of them were children. Almost all of the detained would be subsequently deported to death camps.
Quéré notes that there was no train station at the time in Drancy. Deportees were first loaded into buses that took them to the Le Bourget and Bobigny train stations, before being shuttled in efficient, regularly timed convoys to Auschwitz-Birkenau and other camps.
These were precisely the sorts of buses that the young Victor Pérahia, whose recollections open this piece, saw his friends board on the morning of their deportation in 1943.
Survivors' Voices: Suffering, Loss and Endurance
In reporting on the history of Drancy, it seemed more than essential to include the voices of those who lived to tell personal accounts of its barbarism. Few survivors remain, but I was lucky enough to speak with two of them. What follows is an edited account of telephone interviews I conducted with both in April.
In the case of Victor Pérahia, I was unable to reach him by phone for an agreed second interview. As a result, I have drawn from other credible sources and public interviews to complete the account of his experiences at the Bergen-Belsen camp and beyond.
Victor Pérahia, 87
Born in Paris in April 1933, Pérahia lives in the French capital and has owned an art gallery, La Galerie Pérahia, since 1982. It’s only relatively recently that he has spoken in public about his wartime experiences surviving Drancy and Bergen-Belsen, both through press interviews and educational events targeting young people in particular.
He’s also written a book recounting his experiences, entitled Mon enfance volée (My stolen childhood) and published in 2001.
When we speak by telephone in April 2020, Pérahia says he’s holding up well despite the strict lockdown. France has only recently issued stay-at-home orders to combat the COVID-19 pandemic.
He speaks with an almost professorial eloquence and systematic detail, lacing his personal story of suffering, loss and survival with more general facts surrounding the unthinkable events of 1940 to 1945.
He recounts a generally peaceful and uneventful childhood in Saint-Nazaire, on France’s west coast. His parents, Robert and Jeanne, owned and operated a market stall selling women’s clothing; his older brother, Albert, was born in 1931.
But from his earliest years, he notes, antisemitism was already in the air. Adolf Hitler was elected Chancellor of Germany in 1933; his propaganda against Jews began to have a marked effect in France.
“In the markets, there was a certain animosity [toward us]…some considered us ‘dirty Jews’."
In 1940, France is occupied by German forces, and life as a Jewish family begins to change. Beginning in 1940, a slew of discriminatory laws target Jews, limiting the sorts of professions they’re allowed to exercise and monitoring their activities. From June 1942, Jewish citizens and residents are required to wear a yellow star of David inscribed with the word “Juif” across the front.
The life of the nine-year old Victor is turned upside-down on the night of July 15th, 1942. His brother Albert is hiding with his grandparents in Paris when Victor and his parents are arrested at home by Gestapo officers.
“At 8 in the evening, my father wasn’t home yet. My mother and I were sitting at the table when we saw five Germans get out of a car, and come knocking at our door. They entered forcefully, and since they didn’t see my father, asked my mother "Where is M. Pérahia?'"
"She sensed that this wasn’t for the good of her husband, so she said 'He’s not coming home tonight'. And the German officer says to my mother 'Go find him, we’ll give you 15 minutes to come back and we’ll keep the child with us. If you don’t come back within that time, we’ll take your child with us and you’ll never see him again.'"
Victor pauses. “My mother was very afraid and she was crying…she left and came back 15 minutes later with my father.”
The family was told that they were being taken in as part of a simple procedure to verify their identity cards.
“But it was then that we knew we were being arrested,” Victor recounts. “They told us that we’d be back home in 48 hours. It wasn’t true, but to simplify things we wanted to believe it. We gathered a few belongings and the truck [they took us in] circled around Saint-Nazaire to round up other Jews.”
After spending the night in a temporary detainment center, Victor and his parents are transported by train to the city of Angers, where, he says, they are held in a requisitioned seminary alongside some 1,500 other Jews, all rounded up in Western France.
What happens next is something that continues to deeply haunt Pérahia.
“We were assembled in the courtyard, waiting to know what was going to happen to us, when a German officer came in. He told us in French ‘You’re currently grouped by family, but] you’re going to be separated. The men go on one side of the courtyard, and the women on the other. Women with children will be staying here.’”
Pérahia sounds tearful as he continues recalling that day. “And so it was then that I had to say ‘adieu’ to my father. [He] was deported directly from Angers on convoy number 8 to Auschwitz-Birkenau, and never came back. That was the last time I saw him, in the seminary courtyard.”
Of the 827 deportees in the convoy, only 14 survived. Pérahia’s father was not one of them.
When I ask him whether he and his family had an inkling of where they might be sent, Pérahia responds: “We couldn’t image what was going to happen to us. How could one imagine that you could murder people in cremation ovens and gas chambers, when we were living during a period that we thought was civilized?”
He pauses. “But my father had a certain gravity about him when he spoke to me for the last time. Maybe he sensed that it was the last time we would see each other.”
Victor explains that at the time of his family’s arrest in mid-1942, children were not yet being deported. This was a decision, he said, that would be taken later by the leader of Vichy France, the Marshall Pétain, and his Prime Minister Pierre Laval.
A Long, Clandestine Stay at Drancy
After being forcibly separated from his father, Victor and his mother are sent to another temporary detainment camp in Lalande, near Tours, in central France. They stay for only 15 days before being transferred to Drancy, on September 15th, 1942.
They would remain there until May 1944.
“My mother and I were scheduled to be deported from Drancy on the next convoy….as soon as there were enough people [to deport, they sent them away], mostly to Auschwitz.”
But Victor’s mother found a way to prevent their ending up at the death camp. Drancy, he explains, imprisoned several different categories of detainees, including those considered only “half-Jewish” and prisoners of war, as well as Jews of certain nationalities who benefited from treaties barring their deportation.
The transit camp also detained the wives of prisoners of war, who were partly protected under the Geneva convention and lived in “relatively acceptable” conditions at Drancy.
According to Pérahia, they and their children were treated as “hostages” of sorts by the Nazis, who believed they might serve a purpose at some point, “perhaps in order to exchange them”. They were, accordingly, not sent to concentration camps.
While Victor and his mother fell into none of these "exempt" categories, the latter prevented their deportation by speaking with one of the wives of a political prisoner, and gathering details around her husband and his activities.
Adapting these biographical details, Jeanne Pérahia was able to forge an identity for herself and the young Victor, convincing the authorities at Drancy that they were the wife and child of a prisoner of war. As a result, they remained at the camp for around 20 months.
Daily life at Drancy
Describing daily life at Drancy, Pérahia looks back at a world that was both rife with fear and strangely mundane.
He begins by recounting the machine-like regularity and bureaucratic efficiency with which new arrivals were “processed” at Drancy, then expediently deported.
“Every day there were newcomers, and sometimes they were people we knew, or even members of our family. There were uncles of my mother’s, who we were pained to see arrive, and very upset to see leave.”
Hidden among the prisoners of war, Victor and Jeanne formed daily routines at the camp. “I was in the same room as my mother. But children all took their meals together on the first floor, in the cafeteria.”
He explains that his memories of Drancy are “those of a child, one who played and visited every day with other children. Unfortunately, the children who arrived didn’t stay long.”
Daily life at the detainment camp had a certain banality about it. “There was an interior organization a bit like in a small city. The canteen prepared the soup. There were administrators who planned deportation lists. There were plumbers and electricians who came to make repairs,” he recalls.
“When we first arrived at Drancy, we suffered from hunger, under the administration of the French gendarmerie (military police.) But in 1943, the Germans decided to take over control of the camp, and the gendarmes were left to simply guard it. Paradoxically, under the German administration we saw conditions improve on that side. We suffered less from hunger — the food was more varied and abundant.”
He goes on to describe the process by which detainees scheduled for deportation were temporarily sequestered in specific areas of the complex.
“There was a small staircase reserved for future deportees. When a convoy was planned, the administrators referred to the lists of those scheduled to depart, and displayed a list in each stairwell. The people who were on the list were grouped together for deportation, and there was barbed wire separating the different stairwells from one another."
On the morning of deportations, a bus arrived in the camp and transported detainees to the Bobigny station, where they were transferred to cattle cars.
From Drancy to Bergen-Belsen
Having concealed their Jewish identities for nearly two years, Victor and Jeanne are deported from Drancy as prisoners of war in May 1944, arriving at the Bergen-Belsen camp in Germany.
In other press interviews, Pérahia recounts terrible suffering at Bergen-Belsen and the Theriesenstadt work camp in today's Czech Republic, telling the French magazine Geo “I was only 12 years old, but I wanted to die.”
“At Drancy”, he said, “I had my liberties taken away…at Bergen-Belsen, I was aware that I had entered a world of human cruelty.”
“We suffered from terrible hunger, but it wasn’t the worst form of suffering I endured. For me, the worst sort of suffering at Bergen-Belsen I endured was from the cold. During the winter of 44–45, temperatures dropped to 15 or 20 degrees below zero. It was a terrible winter, and we didn’t have good shoes or clothes.”
He describes how the camp was hit by a Typhus epidemic in early 1945, owing in part to terrible hygiene conditions. Evidence suggests that Anne Frank, who was also detained at Bergen-Belsen, died of the illness there in 1945, along with some 17,000 other detainees.
“Other people were dying and left in place where they died,” he told Geo. “The victims of typhus…terrorized me…I had the impression that the dead were watching me as I lived my last moments of life”.
“All this suffering and death made it so that…we were no longer human beings. We had only our instinct to survive left, a will to resist and avoid death.”
Bergen-Belsen was liberated in April 1945. But Jeanne and Victor had been transferred just a month earlier to the Theriesenstadt camp, crammed aboard a cattle wagon and deprived of food and water.
Victor caught typhus aboard the train and says he was soon so weakened that he began to lose the will to live.
***
When he and Jeanne Pérahia are finally liberated by Russian “Red Army” troops near Berlin in April 1945, both are severely weakened and ill. They make their way back slowly to Paris, arriving on June 29th. Like other survivors, they’re temporarily hosted at the Hotel Lutetia.
They later reunite with Victor’s brother, Albert, and with his maternal grandmother, Sarah Passy; both survived the war in hiding. His maternal grandfather, Saloman Passy, was deported to Auschwitz via Drancy in 1944. He never returned.
Yvette Lévy, 94
Yvette Lévy, a 94-year old survivor of Drancy and Auschwitz-Birkenau, lives in Paris near the Gare de Lyon train station. A Commander of the National Order of Merit and an Officer of the French Legion of Honour, she has offered her testimony as a Holocaust survivor for decades, participating in countless outreach activities aimed at young people.
When we speak in April, she reports being in good spirits despite not being able to venture outside due to the lockdown orders in France.
Friendly and inquisitive, she asks several questions about my background before we turn to her story.
Yvette Dreyfuss was born in Paris in June 1926. She, her two brothers, and her parents — both natives of Alsace— move to the nearby suburb of Noisy-le-Sec in 1937.
She describes a generally contented and stable early life. She had two brothers, one two years her elder and the other two years younger.
Before the war, she says, “I was never ashamed to be Jewish." At the time, French Jews were referred to as “Israelites” and were well integrated into the wider community, she notes.
But from 1940, Jewish citizens and residents alike are targeted by a new raft of antisemitic laws under the Vichy government, coordinated by a Paris-based bureau called the General Commissariat for Jewish Affairs.
Lévy describes how she and her family were first forced to register with local police as Jews, then were legally banned from various professional and leisure activities.
“They took away our radios and our bicycles, our telephones. When we took the [Paris] metro we had to ride in the back car. We couldn’t shop in the mornings anymore, only after three in the afternoon. You couldn’t be a doctor or a lawyer, and all the [Jewish] public servants were fired,” she tells me.
“Starting in 1941, 1942, we weren’t even allowed to cross a public park, or go into a department store, anymore”.
She recounts having to wear the yellow star reading “Juif” from 1942, and experiencing a sense of deep alienation in realizing that her family was “no longer like everyone else.” The family survives on rations, and severe hunger becomes a daily reality alongside the antisemitic restrictions.
Life in Noisy nevertheless remained relatively calm during the early years of the war, she says. “Compared to my other French Jewish friends, we didn’t have any problems…my school friends were all nice to me.
“My father was a [World War I] combattant and invalid…and he had [non-Jewish] friends who were also in the war. No one really treated me differently, except at school…one teacher in high school put me at the back of the class as if I didn’t exist,” she recounts.
“When school went back in session I didn’t go back, and my parents finally let me enroll in a business class [instead]. That’s how I learned stenography and other secretarial skills.”
In April 1944, the Dreyfuss’ home is destroyed by Allied air raids. Noisy-le-Sec was a target of Allied forces due to its strategic importance for Nazi rail transport operations in France.
The family hides in the cellars and survives the bombs. But Noisy is all but decimated, and Yvette says 60 neighbors in the building next to theirs perished in the attack.
After losing their home and almost all of their possessions in the bombing, the Dreyfuss family also fear arrest and deportation. By 1944 the risk of both had become high, as the Nazis pursued their “Final Solution” and French militia members regularly denounced their Jewish neighbors.
The family of six people takes refuge in an aunt’s empty apartment in north Paris and lays low for a time, sleeping on floors in two rooms. As an added precaution, Yvette’s parents soon send her to take refuge in an orphanage for girls on Rue Vauquelin, situated in a former rabbinic seminary in the Latin Quarter. Her two brothers are sent elsewhere to hide.
Clandestine Aid Efforts — and a Late Arrest
By 1944, Yvette is 17. Along with her older brother Simon, she has become an active participant in a clandestine Jewish aid effort that had branched off from the longstanding Jewish scout group, the Eclaireuses et Eclaireurs Israelites de France.
From July 1942, following the mass roundup of Jews and their detainment in the Vélodrome d’Hiver stadium, Yvette and her brother take part in the “Sixth”: a secret branch of the Eclaireurs scouts group formed to save Jewish orphans whose parents had been deported.
Following the roundups, the “Sixth” recuperated children wo had been left behind in their family apartments, transferring them to Parisian orphanages operated by the Union of French Jews (UGIF). They would later attempt to secure foster homes for them.
Yvette recalls her older brother taking her along to search for and rehome children in the 11th arrondissement of Paris, near the Bastille, in the aftermath of the “Vel d’Hiv” roundups. Children under the age of six were not generally detained or deported yet at that time, she explains.
“We found these young children and gave them false papers and documentation, then hid them with non-Jewish families and [members of the French Resistance movement].”
When she began to sleep overnight at the girl’s orphanage on Rue Vauquelin in 1944, Yvette herself became a beneficiary of the aid effort. Reserved for older girls, primarily ones whose parents had been deported, the clandestine orphanage operated by the UGIF accommodated around 30 young women aged 13–20.
“The Allies were only 40 kilometers from Paris at this point,” she recalls. Who could have imagined that we could be arrested then?”
But over the night of July 21st to 22nd, and on the orders of the Drancy camp’s commander Alois Brunner, the orphanage is forcefully raided by German officers.
“There had been an assassination attempt on Hitler and Alois Brunner couldn’t tolerate his god being targeted,” Yvette says. “So by pure cruelty, he decided to start rounding up Jewish children in the orphanages.”
Yvette and others, including hundreds of children who had taken refuge at other clandestine homes around Paris, are arrested and sent to Drancy.
Yvette’s two brothers, meanwhile, evade arrest through the help of a building concierge, who give them keys to a basement beneath a covered market in western Paris. They quickly learn of her arrest and inform their parents.
Drancy: Squalor and Fear
At Drancy, where Yvette will remain for only ten days before being deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the conditions are “inhuman”.
“We were [living] in squalor, extreme heat, the food was bad. It wasn’t joyful.” The bare concrete rooms where the children slept have no running water. The toilets are in the courtyard and are filthy, crawling with fleas.
Older children like herself, she says, are charged with the task of calming, disciplining, and generally caring for the younger children at Drancy. "They weren't allowed to go into the courtyard, nor play or cry."
Yvette never betrayed the names of her parents or brothers, claiming instead to be an orphan. She told the guards and administrators at the camp that her parents had died during the bomb attack on Noisy earlier that year.
“It saved my parents. It’s perhaps the best thing I’ve done in my life.”
Yvette and more than 1,300 other detainees at Drancy are deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau on July 31st, 1944, on convoy number 77. 324 of them are children.
They are told they are being sent to work in Germany. "But who would believe that young children of two or three years old would be able to work?" she asks.
Convoy 77 is the last to leave Drancy for Auschwitz-Birkenau, prior to the liberation of France by Allied forces just three weeks later, on August 25th.
The nightmare continues
Yvette recounts enduring three days of misery and terror during the journey eastward, with around 100 people crammed into each train car.
"We were dying of thirst, and only had a bucket to relieve ourselves. They wouldn’t even subject a cow or a horse to these kinds of conditions. The car was totally closed and only had tiny airholes.”
Arriving at Birkenau in occupied Poland during the night of August 2nd to 3rd, Lévy recalls witnessing — and suffering— new horrors. The train enters the camp directly, in close reach of one of the main crematories.
“We entered the camp, and after having our heads shaved, we underwent ‘general disinfection’ and were transferred to the Tziganes (Roma) camp.”
That night, the commanders of Birkenau sent all 2,897 Roma prisoners at the camp to the gas chambers. Lévy is still haunted by the murder of “men, women and children” that night. “Only a few hours later, we took their places.”
Over 800 of the 1,300 deportees of Convoy 77 were sent directly to the gas chambers, including most of the girls from the orphanage at Rue Vauquelin. Yvette, deemed fit enough to work, was instead placed into quarantine, amid typhus and scarlet fever epidemics in the camp.
She stayed for only three months at Birkenau. While she gave relatively scant details of her experiences there during our phone interview, which was only an hour long, she has offered in-depth accounts of her time at the camp elsewhere, including at this French site.
On October 23rd, she was sent to work at the Kratzau ammunitions factory in the present-day Czech Republic, selected “among 130 French prisoners who were still alive. Around 30 of them had become too thin and were sent to the gas chambers.”
There, she says, she survived through the mutual support of friends. She worked inside the factory, and so suffered less than some of the women there, who were forced to labor outdoors in glacial, subzero temperatures, without proper clothes or shoes.
Liberation, and a long journey home
Yvette would remain at the ammunitions factory until May 1945. On the 9th, the camps were liberated by Russian troops. But the suffering was far from over.
“No one helped to repatriate us. No one!,” she says. “Not the Red Cross, nor the French, nor the Americans. We had to get home on our own wits. We walked a lot. We slept under the stars and slept in dandelion beds. All we were given was a piece of paper saying we were Jews and we needed to return home to France.”
Lévy eventually managed to board a cattle wagon destined for Frankfurt. “But there was fresh hay inside, and an American soldier eventually brought us to the French border.”
There, she boarded another train packed with prisoners of war, and made it to Paris. She made her way to the Hotel Lutetia, where she began searching for her family members.
Yvette’s voice wavers as she recalls the moment she was reunited with her mother at the Lutetia. “Someone called my name over microphone, and I stood up and saw a woman I didn’t recognize. She was so thin. She didn’t recognize me either, because I’d lost 30 kilos.”
“But at some point I looked her in the eyes, and said “Maman?” She took me in her arms, and we cried a lot.
Lévy, who did not lose any close family members in the Holocaust, says she feels lucky for the fact. "I have friends who say ‘Ah, you’re not like us. Our children have never known words like grandma and grandpa.’ — as if it were my fault. I’ve found that difficult."
Postscript: Keeping the Memory of Drancy Alive
My exploration of Drancy continues at the documentation center, where Alix Quéré gives me an in-depth tour of its premises, and its collection of archives and documents related to the history of the camp and its victims. Photographs, survivors’ journals and poems, and in-depth timelines tell the story of the camp’s victims, from both individual and collective perspectives.
One section that’s particularly arresting, and heartbreaking, is located on the basement level. Sections of walls from the former detention camp have been preserved, bearing markings and graffiti left by prisoners. Quéré explains that these markings were discovered within the walls following renovation works.
Some are from detainees who were only children. One set of careful, cursive inscriptions are from a 14-year-old Parisian boy named Martin Spindel, detained at Drancy in 1944 and deported to Auschwitz later that year.
The simple markings read “Martin Spindel, arrived on 27 III 1944 (March 27, 1944)/ Deported on 13 IV 1944 (April 13, 1944).
It is uncertain what happened to the young man following his deportation, but Quéré says he was most likely murdered at Auschwitz. I later learn that Spindel was on the same convoy as Simone Weil, the French politician and women's rights champion who passed away in 2017. A local elementary school in Drancy is named in her honor.
Drancy was only liberated in August1944, on the 19th — just days before the general Liberation of Paris. The German officials who oversaw the camp fled in the days prior to the arrival of Allied troops, burning documentation before they left.
According to several sources, fewer than 2,000 of the some 65,000 Jews deported from Drancy survived the Holocaust.
I return to the main memorial outside the former detention camp, mounting the platform in hope of capturing some decent video footage. The French tricolor flag flaps in the wind nearby.
A young man approaches, also yielding a camera and taking footage. He interrupts me. “Excuse me, Madame — What is this statue for?”
I explain to him who and what it commemorates. “Really?”, he asks. “I live in the area but only noticed this now. I had no idea that happened in Drancy.”
I agree with him that the memorial can be easy to miss. I point him towards the documentation center across the street — a building I myself hardly noticed when I arrived, since it’s not directly facing the memorial. Before we part ways, he says he’d be interested in visiting it sometime.
***
I’m left wondering how survivors of Drancy feel about the memorial and the buildings that remain intact behind it. Are they a source of continued trauma, or unease? Is it upsetting to know that people have since made lives in the same buildings that were once sites of such terrible suffering?
For Yvette Lévy, the answer is a clear "no".
She recalls attending meetings with Drancy’s then-mayor in the early years after the war, during which some posed the question of whether to demolish the site altogether.
“Do we leave the building intact, as it was during the events of the [war] era, or do we rehabilitate it and let it take on new life?”
Her answer is unequivocal. “I prefer life.”
***
As I conclude my conversation with Victor Pérahia, I ask him why he was compelled to begin offering his testimony as a survivor, decades after he experienced the horrors of Drancy and Bergen-Belsen. Over the past few years, he’s been interviewed numerous times by French and international media.
He also regularly visits with young French students, telling his story and taking their questions, including through educational sessions held by the Memorial de la Shoah at the Drancy site.
“After World War II, we believed that antisemitism was sort of finished, given everything we had endured. But you see it re-appearing in society, and it’s visceral,” he says.
“We thought it ended with the Shoah, but it hasn’t. It continues. So we have to be vigilant. We have children and grandchildren, and we don’t want them to know [the same thing that we’ve endured], owing to our Jewish religion.”
Meanwhile, Lévy says she serves as a witness on behalf of other victims of the Shoah — those who aren’t here to tell the tale.
“That’s how we started to testify….we promised those who weren’t lucky enough to come back that we would tell the story of what happened to them.”
Visiting the Memorial and Documentation Center at Drancy
Access to the memorial and documentation center (part of the Mémorial de la Shoah) is free for all visitors.
The Drancy site can be easily accessed from central Paris via metro and bus, or through a free shuttle that departs every Sunday at 2:00 pm from the Mémorial de la Shoah site in the Marais district, returning at 5:00 pm. See more information on opening times and transportation options here.
Address: 110–112 avenue Jean-Jaurès, 93700 Drancy
Tel: + 33 (0)1 42 77 44 72
contact@memorialdelashoah.org
About the Author
Courtney Traub is a freelance journalist and travel writer who has contributed stories for outlets including The Christian Science Monitor, Radio France Internationale, TripSavvy and WWD. She is founder and editor of Paris Unlocked, a travel guide for the culturally curious.
