Hey All,
I will make a slight interruption of my retelling of my
second break for a second. Brace yourselves, this one might be heavy. Yesterday I had the opportunity thanks to a lab
which I finished early to venture out into the northern suburbs of Paris to
knock a few things off my ‘to see’ list which has recently turned into a bit of
a time crunch with only a month left and final exams still to come.
I ventured out into the suburb of St. Denis known more for
its unruly rugby and football (that's soccer to Americans) fans than for a
hugely significant historical site in
France, la Basilique Saint-Denis. The basilica is a large church built in the
Gothic style, as nearly every large church in France (before Gothic was called
as such it was known as “French style”). It was named after the first bishop of
Paris, St. Denis who, according to legend he beheaded by the Romans on the hill
in the 18th arrondissement now known as Montmartre, after which he
picked up his head and walked away to the spot where he wished to be buried. The
church was built upon the site several centuries later. Dagobert I started the
tradition of being buried in the church in 639 with nearly every king until the
revolution being buried here as well.
Each king is honored by a marble carved statue of their
likeness on top of a cask. Dogs are depicted underneath the feet of each king
to both symbolize royalty and add a base to stabilize the above weight.
Imported from his original burial at St. Genevieve, Clovis I, the king who
united all Frankish tribes together and found what would become France, is the
oldest king to be interred there. The later kings have more ornate tombs, with
statues showing them in royal regalia ruling the state atop while statues
depicting them in simple cloths peacefully lying are in the center of each.
Detailed statues of King Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette
(with heads attached) lead the way down into the sub-level of the basilica.
There one finds six black slabs with the names of later kings such as Louis
XVIII are in the middle and old marble slabs against a wall list the names of
all kings that have their remains in the church.
One ignorant of their history may not realize that all of
the tombs throughout the basilica are, in fact, almost completely empty. In the
years succeeding the French revolution, the basilica of Saint-Denis was
ransacked and the bodies of every French king taken out and buried en masse in
two pits then filled with acidic lime so that they would decompose entirely
(you could say the revolutionists had a grudge against the monarchy). When Louis
XVI and Marie Antoinette were executed they were also refused the right to be
buried at Saint-Denis, instead interred covered in lime with other victims of
the guillotine.
Napoleon commissioned work to restore the church, but with
mixed results. One of the rebuilt spires proved too unstable and was demolished
in the mid-nineteenth century giving the church its slightly awkward one spire
look it has still this day. After Napoleon’s decline the members of the Bourbon
dynasty sought restore their ancestors to their rightful place inside the
church. They retrieved the bodies of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, but the
other kings buried all together were impossible to distinguish. Thus they were
all entered behind the stone plate that bares their names.
Already having a cheerful day full of dead French monarchs I
headed further into the northern suburbs to a place where most visitors and
even some Parisians have never heard of, the Drancy concentration camp.
As part of the occupation of Paris beginning in 1940, German
officials and their counterparts in the Vichy government identified a newly
built apartment complex in the northeast of the city as an ideal spot for a
prison camp to hold Jews and other ‘undesirables’ as they were systematically
driven out of the city by the French police. The perimeter of the complex was
fitted with searchlights, barbed wire, and guards. The Drancy camp was
estimated to have a capacity of 700 people, but at its peak held more than
7,000 at a time. Over a history of just over two years slightly less than
100,000 people were held here. Drancy served as the main internment camp in
France and exported 75,000 Jews from the city and surrounding areas, at least
67,000 directly to Auschwitz.
Taking a tram for twenty minutes from the nearest RER
station I walked for about fifteen minutes down a road lined with a few pawn
shops and abandoned buildings. Down a side street for about five minutes was
the complex, stripped of any barbed wire or machine gun nests, looking so insignificant
as to allow the average passerby to walk past without a second glance. The
presence of cars and laundry hanging from the windows told me that the
buildings of the camp were indeed still occupied by residents today, though
being the middle of a weekday in a far suburb of Paris the streets were all but
deserted and the air eerily silent.
In the center of the complex was a small manicured park
which might have been the only thing well maintained in the area. Facing the
street was a memorial to the lives lost. In the center of the park was a boxcar
of 1940s style on a mock set of railroad tracks. The car was painted all brown
except for a Jewish star and the words “Hommes 40” and “Chevaux 8” meaning the
car had the capacity of 8 horses or 40 men. In reality, more than 100 men at a
time filled the cars as they headed across all of German and into Poland. In
the corner of the boxcar was the logo of SNCF, the state-owned French transport
company operating the TER and the TGV that I have ridden many a time. Indeed
SNCF was responsible for transporting nearly every holocaust victim to their
deaths though obviously by the orders of German occupiers and against their
will. Over four years of occupation, over 1,700 SNCF workers were killed or deported
for resisting Nazi orders.
Supposedly there was a history conservatory in the park but
I could only find signs pointing to one. Getting slightly chilled by both the
history and the rain starting to fall I walked back to the entrance. I walked
by a plaque commemorating an escape tunnel dug over the course of three months
in secret. It reached a length of 100 feet before being discovered and its
creators killed. The bottom of the plaque had a quote: “Il manquait 3 mètres pour atteindre la liberté” or in English, He lacked 3 meters to attain freedom,
the tunnel had just ten feet left to dig. Passing by the entrance to the park I
watched an older lady and a younger man shielded from the rain with an umbrella
quietly place a quite massive bouquet of fresh flowers at the base of the
memorial. I passed by them silently reflecting in front of the monument without
saying a word. It was a moving sight to see that seventy years after the fact
the prisoners of Drancy, and therefore the victims of Auschwitz were still mourned.
The last thing I glimpsed at on my way out was a marble tablet explaining the
significance of the site with a single phrase written at the bottom, “N’oublions jamais.”: Never forget.
Luckily my journey on the SNCF-run RER took me safely (though
ten minutes delayed) back to Cergy. I had missed François Hollande arriving at
the Palais de l’Élysée to take over the office of the president from Sarkozy, making
the walk from his limo in the pouring rain. Grabbing a baguette at the bakery
in the Préfecture I headed back home.
Photos that go with this post are on top. If you view them
on Flickr you should be able to read the captions I have written including any
translations.
-Adam
Edit: Flickr isn’t letting me post to my blog right now, so you
can follow this link to the photoset:
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