The memorial stands in the station square, and it is there for a precise reason: from these tracks, on 21 November 1943, 329 foreign Jews were loaded into cattle wagons and sent to Nice, then to Drancy and finally to Auschwitz. Almost all of them were refugees who in September had crossed the Maritime Alps from Saint-Martin-Vésubie and whom the SS had shut in the former Alpine barracks, on the edge of town. On 15 February 1944, from the same siding, another twenty-six Italian Jews were sent away.
What to see
The work, unveiled in 2006 to a design by the architects Manuel Giuliano and Andrea Grottaroli, is a reinforced concrete slab standing in for the service platform of the freight wagons: a piece of railway, not a rhetorical monument. On the slab stand twenty upright figures, who are the survivors. Fixed to the ground are three hundred and thirty-five metal plaques, one for each of those who did not come back, and each carries a first name, a surname, an age and the code of the country of origin. To walk among them is to read, one after another, the names that the deportation lists had reduced to a number.
Visiting
The square is open air and always accessible, with no ticket. A few steps away, in the former church of Sant'Anna, the MEMO4345 museum tells the same story at length, and the visit makes sense in that order: first the plaques, then the biographies. It is worth walking there from the station, which is still in use, because the distance between the train platform and the memorial is the one the deported people covered.
Our editors' tip
The ages on the plaques are the part that stays with you. These are whole families, children included, and the countries of origin describe a Europe that had already moved two or three times before arriving here: Poles, Germans, Austrians, Hungarians, who had passed through France and were then pushed back over the mountains. If you have time for one gesture only, look for the plaques with the same surname repeated: those are the family units, and they read in a row.