A Holocaust memorial was inaugurated in Lyon to ensure that we never forget this “unspeakable crime” and its six million Jewish victims.
The work, entitled ‘Rails of Memory’, is made up of 1,173 metres of railway tracks, to symbolise the 1,173 km separating Lyon from the former Auschwitz camp in Poland, where a million Jews were murdered by the Nazis.
Designed by two Parisian architects, Quentin Blaising and Alicia Borchardt, it has been installed in a square near Perrache station, from which many convoys to the death camps set off during World War Two.
“This space could be nowhere else but here,” Jean-Olivier Viout, president of the association which created the memorial, told several hundred people gathered for the ceremony.
The work not only evokes the memory of the “6,100 men, women and children from our region exterminated for the sole reason that they were Jews,” but also pays tribute to the six million victims of the Holocaust. This number “must be hammered home and constantly reiterated,” added the magistrate who was a member of the prosecution at the 1987 trial of Klaus Barbie, head of the Lyon Gestapo.
“Anti-Semitism is a pernicious poison that must be vigorously combated,” said the ecologist mayor of Lyon, Grégory Doucet.
