The Lyon Shoah memorial will indeed see the light of day.
The association leading the project presented the selected work at the beginning of February which will be installed at Place Carnot in Lyon near Perrache station.
The project “The rails of memory”, by the Parisian firm Blaising Borchardt Studio, was selected from 96 applications from 25 different countries.
An artistic gesture, chosen by a jury made up of architects and historians which had to meet five criteria:
“Be visible, readable, lasting, secure, accessible, have an educational approach and be a space of contemplation and commemoration”
.
For Jean-Olivier Viout, president of the association leading the project, the final choice was
“unanimously ratified”
by the jury.
“It is a modern and welcome work which corresponds to the location of Perrache.
Personally I am extremely satisfied.
It’s a very nice project and a strong gesture
,” continues the man who was attorney general of Lyon and deputy attorney general Pierre Truche during the Barbie trial in 1987.
Capital of the resistance and headquarters of the Gestapo
“We are in a place of contemplation, of silence, because a place of memory which has stopped time and bears its weight. This place, 80 years ago in a few weeks, was going to be the place of the interrogations of Jean Moulin who began his path towards death here. This place requisitioned by Klaus Barbie, to make it the headquarters of his Gestapo, where so many men and women simply guilty of being Jews experienced here the first stage of their sacrificial destiny towards the final solution
,” declared Jean- Olivier Viout in early 2023 during the launch of the architectural competition.
Lyon, both capital of the resistance and headquarters of the Gestapo.
It was also during the Barbie trial that French justice placed the Shoah among the crimes against humanity for the first time.
Made up of 1,173 meters of crisscrossed railway rails - to recall the 1,173 km which separate Lyon from Auschwitz - the work will also carry the message
“in memory of the six million Jewish victims of the Shoah.
Including one and a half million children (1933-1945).
6,100 came from our region
.
The association is still in negotiations with the SNCF so that it can supply the rails.
The memorial, financed by the Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes region (€150,000), the metropolis and the city of Lyon (€75,000 each), the city of Caluire-et-Cuire (€10,000) and many anonymous people, should be inaugurated January 27, 2025 for the international day dedicated to the memory of the victims of the Holocaust.