Présentation du Mémorial des déportations

The Deportation Memorial, the policies of repression and persecution in Marseille during the Second World War, and the traces of a unique history. Located at the foot of Fort Saint-Jean, the Memorial to the Death Camps was inaugurated in 1995 on the 50th anniversary of the liberation of the camps. Reconfigured in 2019 as the Deportation Memorial, it is housed in a Second World War bunker built by the German army as part of a defensive barrier intended to prevent an Allied landing in Provence. The Memorial now recounts Marseille’s unique role during the Second World War: the main refuge city in the unoccupied zone, a transit city, a destroyed city and a strategically important port city. Above all, through films, testimonies and accounts of victims persecuted because they were Jewish or as political prisoners, resistance fighters or hostages, as well as through maps, it puts into context the genocidal deportation and repression policies organized in Marseille and its region. The preliminary exhibition presented since December 2019 extensively examines the tragic events of 1943 carried out by the Nazis with the collaboration of the Vichy regime: roundups, deportations and the destruction of the old neighborhoods on the north shore of the Vieux-Port. Free admission, subject to venue capacity Site attached to the Musée d'Histoire de Marseille Resistance Fighters, a Forgotten Generation On 9 December, the Deportation Memorial will inaugurate two new commemorative and artistic creations within its semi-permanent exhibition: the exhibition Resistance Fighters, a Forgotten Generation, about the Resistance to the Nazi occupier and the Vichy government as well as the hell of the concentration camp system, and an immersive artistic audiovisual creation, Resisting. Choosing to resist as early as 1940, at the age of 20, and accepting every risk at the cost of one’s life invites us to question their motivations and their attitude toward the danger and the physical and psychological suffering inflicted by their torturers. These two commemorative and artistic productions were conceived from a photographic and audiovisual series imagined and created in 2011 by Sand Arty, author-photographer. With the help of ONACVG Marseille (National Office for Veterans and War Victims) and AFMD (Friends of the Foundation for the Memory of Deportation), the author was able to find several resistance fighters, then nearly a hundred years old and living in the Marseille region, who had helped liberate our country from German occupation in the 1940s. ► To make sure you can enjoy the complete tour of all our exhibition rooms, we invite you to contact the Museum before your visit