Dedicated on 12 April 1962 by General de Gaulle, then President of the Republic of France, the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation is a memorial to the 200,000 people deported from Vichy France. The site is located on the Île de la Cité behind Notre Dame as an underground crypt.
Designed by the architect Georges-Henri Pingusson, the vast, hexagonal, dimly-lit crypt opens onto the gallery covered by luminous rods representing the deported people killed in the camps and the ashes of an unknown deportee from Natzweiler-Struthof camp.
Either side of the crypt, two small galleries contain earth from the different camps and ashes brought back from the cremation ovens, enshrined in triangular urns.
All around, the names of the camps and excerpts from poems by Robert Desnos, Louis Aragon, Paul Eluard, Jean-Paul Sartre and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry are inscribed in red characters.
Every year, on the last Sunday of April, the Memorial is visited in honor of the National Day of Remembrance of the Victims and Heroes of the Deportation.
