ReportingThe buildings of La Muette, a city where tens of thousands of Jews were once locked up before their deportation, are now social housing. Most of the 500 inhabitants, in great difficulty, ignore the history of the place, despite the presence of the Shoah Memorial.
Nothing has changed. Or almost. Barbed wire and watchtowers have disappeared, the five towers and bars were destroyed in 1976. For the rest, the city of la Muette, in Drancy, in Seine-Saint-Denis, still stands. Everything is there: the huge four-storey building in the shape of a horseshoe that housed the dormitories, the bare lawn where the latrines were once installed, the cellars that served as dungeons, the unfinished tunnel dug by prisoners determined to flee.
We want to imagine the Nazi camps far away, in eastern Europe. We want to believe them destroyed or sanctified, places of memory frozen, visited. And yet, it is there, very close, about ten kilometers from Paris, that one of the darkest pages in the history of France was written. It is here that German officers and French gendarmes locked up 80,000 Jews before sending 63,000 of them – out of the 75,000 deported in France – to the concentration camps, mainly in Auschwitz-Birkenau.
The Drancy Shoah Memorial – a museum and a documentation center, located just in front of the city – wanted to reflect the fate of this “garden city” that nothing predestined for such a bleak future. “La Muette recalls how the Nazis inscribed their policy of deportation in urban areas, such as the Warsaw ghetto”, underlines Jacques Fredj, director of the Memorial.
On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the construction of the city and the 80th anniversary of the opening of the camp, the exhibition “The forgotten skyscrapers of la Muette (1931-1976)” tells, until March 6, 2022 , the evolution of this “large group”, requisitioned by the IIIe Reich in 1940 to lock up French and British prisoners of war there before being transformed, from August 1941 until the summer of 1944, into an internment camp, then transit, for the Jews. “La Muette was the hub of the deportation to France”, recalls the historian of architecture Benoît Pouvreau, of the cultural heritage service of the general council of Seine-Saint-Denis and co-curator of the exhibition. All under the guard of French gendarmes, then housed in the towers.
History page
The time has passed. Life has resumed its course. Some 500 people now live in these walls. The poorest exclusively: many foreigners who have just arrived, and also patients from the Ville-Evrard psychiatric hospital. “It is the only camp not demolished and still inhabited in France”, specifies Karen Taieb, in charge of the Memorial’s archives and co-curator of the exhibition. The ground floor is occupied by associations and businesses; the floors, by tenants. The dwellings, 369 in total, are damp, leaks are frequent, and the twenty-two stairwells are crumbling. Everywhere, the paint is peeling, the walls are crumbling, the front doors are broken. And dirt, floor to ceiling.
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