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Rendezvous on the Seine
we are planning to take The Islands of Paris Walking Tour in October.....if anyone has already taken this excursion I would love to hear about it.
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We were just recently in Paris (not on this tour). If you do take this tour and have free time at the end, in addition to the normal highlights such as Notre Dame and the Sainte Chapelle, I would recommend the Deportation Memorial. It's below ground on the end of the Ile de la Cite behind Notre Dame overlooking the Ile St. Louis. This memorial commemorates the people who were sent to camps during WWII. Over 200,000 French citizens were deported. While in most other countries you think about Jews, handicapped people and other ethic subgroups, in France a large portion of those deported were part of the Resistance.
We stumbled across this memorial after visiting Notre Dame several years ago. It’s not well signed and is mostly underground so not readily apparent. It speaks to the French deportees and I cannot recall it mentioning the Jews. The Jews were overwhelmingly the ones being “deported”. And, just so it’s clear, deported means being sent to death camps. 75,000. Handicapped, ethnic minorities, resistance members a significant minority. And, it was the French government, the Vichy, in collaboration with the Nazis who engineered this. At one point they had 7000 Jews crammed into a sports stadium in Paris awaiting transfer. Barely room to sit, no food or water. The memorial is moving in its architecture, the use of light, the tunnels, the tomb of the unknown deportee. But it obfuscates what really happened in France-the wholesale killing of 75,000 mostly French, and German Jews who sought refuge in France, by the French government in collaboration with the Nazis.
I came across this memorial last month, too. Throughout the Marais (and maybe other areas, too), there are memorials on some of the buildings and "stumbling stones" in the pavement commemorating the deportees.