Over two days and one night, a group of AJR members travelled to Paris to trace family histories, to stand where relatives once stood, and to bring home fragments of memory now made tangible. The itinerary was compact but intense: the Drancy memorial, the Memorial de la Shoah with time in its archives, and a walking tour of Le Marais that was cut short by an extreme heatwave and an unexpected Eurostar cancellation.
Drancy: Ordinary Place, Extraordinary Weight
Drancy’s unassuming facades belie the enormity of what happened there. For many participants, the visit to Drancy, site of the notorious Nazi internment camp, was the most visceral moment of the trip. One participant described the suburb as “such an ordinary place” — a reminder that sites of deportation and loss were often woven into the everyday geography of French towns and cities. Standing where relatives had been held, participants confronted the dissonance between the ordinary present and the extraordinary violence of the past. For some, the visit offered a painful but necessary closeness to family narratives that had previously existed only in documents and oral memory. Michelle Levey described the moment she stood in Drancy and learned more about her grandfather’s final days: “To stand in the Drancy camp where I discovered Josef Schwarz spent the last 8 days of his life, before being sent to his death in Auschwitz, was a powerful and heartbreaking moment. I feel a certain amount of closure that my grandfather’s photos, red cross messages and postcards are finally digitised on the Memorial de la Shoah’s website, for all time.”
Memorial de la Shoah: Archives, Discovery, and Closure
The Memorial de la Shoah proved to be more than a museum; it is a working space that reshaped several family stories. As one participant put it, “We were particularly impressed by the Shoah Memorial. We hadn’t expected it to be as large and as extensive and with clearly a well resourced documentation centre.” 3G Elissa Winston captured the personal impact of the archivists’ work: “The trip was so valuable in helping me to understand my great-grandfather’s experience. In particular, the archivist at the Musee de la Shoah found a piece of information about him which I hadn’t managed to find myself- it literally was the missing piece of the jigsaw!”
Archivists guided travellers through registers, transport lists and digitised photographs; in several cases the group left with new leads — names, dates, and even images — that will reshape family trees and prompt further genealogical work. One couple discovered a deportee who shared a birthplace and surname with their great-grandparents, a coincidence that turned the archive into the starting point for new research rather than a final answer.
Le Marais: A Walk Interrupted
The walking tour of Le Marais began as a study in layered histories: Jewish life, wartime traces, and the contemporary vibrancy of a neighbourhood that has long been a centre of Jewish Paris. The heat, however, made the streets unforgiving. The group’s exploration was curtailed by extreme temperatures and then complicated further when Eurostar cancelled the return train, turning a tidy two-day trip into an unexpected logistical challenge. Even so, the curtailed walk offered moments of reflection: storefronts and plaques that mark vanished communities, synagogues that still hum with life, and the small, everyday traces that connect past and present.
Company, Conversation, and the Work Ahead
Beyond the sites themselves, participants emphasised the value of travelling together. “It was [also] a pleasure meeting the other travellers … and it was interesting to hear about their family histories and personal stories,” one participant observed. The group was made up of AJR members of all generations.
Simon Burne (2G) said, “Sandra and I found the Paris trip profoundly meaningful. It was well organised, and the group were excellent company,” also noting that the experience had opened new avenues for genealogical research. For many, the trip was not an endpoint but a catalyst: digitised photographs, newly found names and archival references will now be followed up, cross-checked and woven into family narratives back home.
Looking Forward
Short trips like this one are deceptively powerful. In forty-eight hours the group moved from curiosity to discovery, from public memorials to private reckonings. The Memorial de la Shoah’s documentation centre turned out to be a resource that changed how participants understood their families; Drancy’s quiet streets forced a confrontation with the ordinary settings of extraordinary crimes; and even the disrupted walk through Le Marais became part of the story — a reminder that memory work is lived, sometimes messily, in the present.
For descendants of survivors, such journeys are never merely historical excursions; they are acts of remembrance, research and responsibility — small pilgrimages that return with new evidence, new questions and, for some, a measure of closure.
Debra Barnes – Head of Next Generations
