The Mémorial de la Shoah names the Jews deported from France, one by one, on three walls of pale Jerusalem limestone. You pass a security check at the gate and step into a walled forecourt where those walls run along the paving, cut with more than seventy-five thousand names. They are grouped by the year of deportation and run alphabetically inside each year, so the wall is read year by year. Seven bronze reliefs of the persecution face them across the stones.
One level down, a crypt holds ashes from the camps and the Warsaw ghetto, and the exhibition on that floor is built from documents, photographs, film and objects. Those documents are the reason this place exists. In April 1943, while the deportation trains were still running, Isaac Schneersohn and Léon Poliakov began collecting the paperwork of persecution in Grenoble — a secret archive assembled during the thing it was recording. It survived the war. The same group later built a tomb here for the murdered Jews of Europe, on a quiet Marais street a few minutes from streets the round-ups had emptied of their Jewish families. Researchers are still adding names, so the wall you stand in front of is not a finished one.