Of the 6 million Jews who died in the Holocaust, 2 million were shot.
A part of history that students from Champollion University in Albi looked into as part of an educational program designed in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attacks.
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We wanted to think, in the human sciences, about these processes of mass killings,” explains Sandrine Victor, professor of history at the origin of this initiative with two colleagues from sociology and geography.
Every year since 2017, around twenty undergraduate students in these three fields go to field seminars in Eastern Europe and share stories, through conferences, exhibitions, podcasts, etc.
The last two trips to Poland, in the footsteps of the Shoah by bullets, gave rise to a comic book, “I have not forgotten…” (to be published on February 21 by Editions du Rocher), written by the Albigensian journalist Pierre -Roland Saint-Dizier, left with the students.
Thanks to a partnership with the Yahad-In Unum association, they were able to meet the last witnesses to these massacres, children or adolescents at the time of the events, and return to the scene.
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“We had done research work upstream.
But the reality of things... Despite the strong testimonies and the emotion, we had to maintain a researcher's posture, to transmit these stories", explains Marie Bigorre, from the trip to 2023. "There is a sort of incomprehension in the face of these events”, supports Sandrine Victor, who points out the importance of thinking about the mechanisms.
“I think that comics are a good tool for tackling these questions, by telling the great History through stories,” concludes the screenwriter.