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What if we wereafraid of being locked up?" says Yassmina, a 3rd grade student in Lyon Mermoz in front of a small cell in the former Natzweiler-Struthof concentration camp. A meagre low rectangle of ceiling of barely 1 m², where an adult can not stand and in which the girl and two of her friends entered to understand the infamy of the living conditions of this place located on the current French territory, 50 km from Strasbourg.
On Wednesday, 120 students from colleges in the metropolis of Lyon took the train to visit this place of memory, accompanied by Jean Levy, 90, witness of the Holocaust and regional delegate of the association of daughters and sons of Jewish deportees in France. A school trip organized by Greater Lyon instead of the trip to Auschwitz set up since 1995 for middle school students from the metropolis. A first in France at the time. A modification of the program that was controversial at the beginning of the year, the LR majority in the department accusing the metropolis of canceling the trip to Poland for ecological reasons, in order to avoid air travel.
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In the current context in France, where anti-Semitism and racism are there, it is important to have our history in mind. That's why I see very well the interest of this trip today. And it must not be contrasted with that of Auschwitz. Ideally, we should do both in a complete educational path, "says today Bruno Bernard, the president of the metropolis of Lyon, whose community will evaluate at the beginning of summer the relevance of renewing this trip to Struthof.
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Largest French concentration camp
It is therefore finally in Alsace that the young students came to complete the memorial journey begun a year ago for the most part. From 1941 to 1944, 52,000 prisoners aged eleven to seventy-eight and of 31 nationalities were imprisoned in the only concentration camp on French territory. 52 subcamps scattered around used this enslaved labor for the benefit of the German war industry. 22,000 people died there, making Struthof one of the deadliest camps in the SS concentration camp system.
The Natzweiler-Struthof camp. Justin Boche / Le Figaro
This Wednesday, slaps and thinnings follow one another on the Vosges mountains. In an unreal atmosphere, and under the incredulous eye of the students, evanescent smoke rises from the roofs of the barracks with each clearing. "Don't worry, it's just water," reassures Maxime, the guide who accompanies the students of Henri-Longchambon College (Lyon 8th). The Struthof, perched at 800 meters above sea level, was created by the SS to exploit a pink granite quarry. A camp built in terraced hillside in place of an old ski resort where it was between -40 ° C in winter and 40 ° C in summer. At the top, the gallows between the barracks looks into the distance, like an old ally, the chimney of the crematorium oven used to make disappear the bodies of murdered prisoners, who died of fatigue or disease. "If the shower water was hot, it was because a body had been burned. Is it preferable to freezing water?" asks the guide. The ashes of the dead were then thrown with the garbage of the camp into a pit where Ossa humiliata or humiliated bones are inscribed today.
The Ossa humiliata or humiliated bones Justin Boche / Le Figaro
Experiments and gas chamber
From 1941 to 1944, the Struthof was also a place of medical experimentation on prisoners who had become guinea pigs of Nazi medicine. Below the camp, the SS installed a gas chamber in the former village hall of an inn restaurant. From June 1943 to August 1944, forty prisoners, Roma, prisoners of common rights and homosexuals were victims of experiments on a combat gas. Four of them, all Roma, died. In August 1943, Professor August Hirt, director of the Institute of Anatomy of the Reich University of Strasbourg, whose French activity was transferred to Clermont-Ferrand, decided to bring 86 Jewish deportees from Auschwitz to create a collection of skeletons of Jewish people before their "race" was annihilated. Remaining anonymous until the mid-2000s, these victims were identified thanks to the notebook of a French doctor, assistant to August Hirt, found in the United States by the journalist Hans-Joachim Lang.
The students of Henri-Longchambon College (Lyon 8th) in front of the crematorium barracks of the Natzweiler-Struthof camp. Justin Boche / Le Figaro
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All this sadness, it touched my heart, "says Mohamed, a student at André-Lassagne College in Caluire-et-Cuire. For the past year, these 120 students have visited various places of memory, from the Jean-Moulin memorial in Caluire to the Shoah memorial in Paris and the Izieu house in Ain. At Struthof, all say they experienced for the first time in situ this story that they have traveled through in books and exhibitions for a year. Pilgrims among the shadows, in the words of Boris Pahor, an Italian-Slovenian writer locked up in Struthof during the war. "Today I learned, I saw, I understood," said Jade, also a Caluire student. And Maryam, Imyli, Yassmina, a schoolgirl at Henri-Longchambon adds: "It disturbs to see this in reality. Sometimes you don't believe it. We were upset. We felt sad for the resisters. It's touching their story. It turns out, in years it can happen? We wonder how a human could do these things to another human. Can you imagine, your little brother getting killed?
»A "necessary" and "indisputable" trip for Richard Zelmati, president of Crif Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes: "It isextremely interesting to know what happened on French territory. It is all the more so when, as during this visit, the discovery includes a pedagogical aspect, with the supervision of schoolchildren and the collection of their impressions".
It is now up to them to be "the transmitters of memory" and the "citizens of tomorrow" so that "this does not happen again", insists Jean Levy tirelessly: the witnesses of witnesses, witnesses.
