On Sunday night, French Interior Minister Claude Gueant, prominent thinker Simone Veil, and other political and religious leaders started reading aloud 24 names out of 76,000 Jews who were deported from France during the Nazi era, at the Shoah Memorial in Paris.
The reading of names of men, women and children deported from France between March 1942 and August 1944, mainly to Auschwitz, began Sunday at around 7:30 p.m. in front of the "Wall of Names" Holocaust memorial. It will continue until shortly before 19:00 on Monday.
Of the 76,000 Jewish deportees, only 2,500 survived.
"For 20 years, this reading is everyone's business and everyone's story," said the organizers that include the Memorial of the Shoah, the Jewish Liberal Movement of France (MJLF), the Association of Sons and Daughters of Jews Deported from France (FFDJF) and the Consistory of Paris.
"This reading is not only an act of memory. It is a proof of love," said Andre Chomand, who was deported with eight of his family members to concentration camps. "Only my father and I have survived the deportation," he said in a speech before the reading. "I was not yet 16. In the camps, everything was done to make life more difficult, to humiliate us," testified a former deportee, standing along with his son.
After lighting six candles to symbolize the "six million Jews murdered", kids and celebrities began reading the name of convoy No. 67, which left on February 3, 1944 from Drancy to Auschwitz, with 1,197 deportees , including 188 children, on board.
