ABSTRACT
In contrast to the British who consider Bergen-Belsen as the perfect example of a concentration camp, largely because they liberated it, the French have no collective memory of the camp and its image remains unclear to them. Several memorials were built in memory of the various Nazi concentration camps inside the Père Lachaise cemetery, near Le Mur des Fédérés where the last rebels of the Paris Commune were shot. The Bergen-Belsen memorial is the ninth and last. It was inaugurated only recently, on the 23 March 1994, thanks to the Bergen-Belsen Memorial committee whose president, Albert Biegelman, was deported to Belsen as a child, with his mother. Simone Veil was also present, both as ministre d'Etat and ministre des Affaires sociales (one of the highest-ranking ministers in the French government in charge of welfare and city affairs) and as a former internee of a camp to which she was transferred from Auschwitz, along with her mother and her sister, in January 1945. In their choice, the designers of the memorial settled on a replica of the existing memorial at the camp. On its base, one can read a double dedication: ‘They suffered and hoped. You fight for freedom’ and Their bodies were broken, but not their spirit’. Further inscriptions serve as a reminder of the various transfers from other camps: Neuengamme, Auschwitz, Buchenwald … According to its designers,
The lower part of the monument is closed by a tapering wall whose meaning is either to welcome or hold back; down its middle, a breach opens into nothingness. This breach is partly filled by a jutting obelisk rising towards hope. The rails and the footprints are symbolic of the arrivals. The names of the camps from which the deported came are engraved on the plaques affixed to the lower part of the wall supporting the rails.
