Last fall, I was fascinated with the way in which Europeans are still coming to terms with their history. Only in recent years have the files of the secret police of the Communists and the Nazis been opened for review in the nations of the former Warsaw Pact (including the Slovak and Czech Republics).
In France, it is astonishing that it took 50 years after the end of World War II for the French government to officially acknowledge that the Vichy French government in that era had collaborated with the Nazis to send 76,000 French Jews to their deaths in the concentration camps of Europe.
In 2005, then-French President Jacques Chirac opened the new Shoah Memorial in Paris, an extraordinary museum of the history of the Jews in France and also of the Holocaust in WWII. Visiting the Memorial was a priority for me today.
The outside wall of the Memorial lists the names of the "Righteous among the Nations," persons in France who tried to help the Jews escape the Nazis. 
The entrance is on rue Geoffroy-l'Asnier. Those bars around the outside garden create a walled-in feeling of being in prison. Admission is free, but security is very tight, with x-ray screening of everything you are carrying, metal detectors, and hand-held wands to search everybody. Even the exit process was high-security, with guards and a two-step series of locking gates, presumably to prevent suicide bombers from slipping in the exit gates. Such a sad commentary on our times!
That outdoor garden has a cylinder engraved with the names of all the concentration camps, designed to evoke the chimneys of the camps. 
Sculptor A. Blatas created a series of reliefs on the wall depicting scenes of the persecution of the Jews by the Nazis.
This is the Wall of Names, with inscriptions for all the French Jews murdered by the Nazis. Cameras are not allowed in the large museum, on several levels, telling the story of the history of the Jews in France and the Holocaust throughout Europe. Extensive documentation with photos, films, artifacts, and documents are displayed very powerfully on several levels underground.
The Memorial is located on a side street just north of the Seine and south of the Marais district. The closest Metro stops are St. Paul and Point Marie.
The English-language web site: http://www.memorialdelashoah.org/getHomeAction.do?langage=en
NOTE: Click on any image in this blog to see it full-size.
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