Gare de Bobigny

Bobigny, July 18, 1943. A convoy of 1,009 Jewish people - men, women and children - leaves the Bobigny railway station, bound for Auschwitz-Birkenau. Numbered 57, it was the first of 21 convoys to leave Bobigny for the killing centers.

A new station for the deportation of Jews

Since the summer of 1942, most of the convoys had been departing from the Bourget-Drancy station, but this change of departure station was decided by SS Captain Aloïs Brunner. He arrived in France on May 9, 1943 to intensify the deportation policy. There appear to have been several reasons for the decision to move from Le Bourget-Drancy to Bobigny. Firstly, the “passenger” part of the traffic no longer operates there. Secondly, the station has a long siding, which vehicles can access directly. Secondly, it's isolated in the middle of fields and allotments, to the west of the village, making it more discreet. Finally, it is further away from Le Bourget airport, again threatened by bombing in the summer of 1943. What's more, the station is as close to the Drancy camp as Le Bourget, and trains were already passing in front of it.

The Bobigny site was fairly straightforward: it comprised a passenger building (in use until 1939), where 4 railway families lived during the war, a goods shed and tracks.

From July 1943, a convoy left Bobigny roughly every 15 days. During this period, several convoys were overloaded, exceeding the already substantial volume of 1,000 deportees. On November 20, 1943, 1201 people were deported. 1152 on January 20, 1944, 1203 on February 3. 3 convoys reached 1,500 people, the largest on March 16, 1944 with 1,504. The conditions of confinement in the wagons were such that some of the deportees died before reaching Auschwitz. Among these departures, one convoy stood out: the all-male 73 of May 15, 1944, headed for the Baltic states, where the deportees were used to clean mass graves before being eliminated themselves.

The last convoys

The June 6 landings and the Allied advance on French territory did not call into question the priority given to the deportation of Jews. On July 31, 1944, a convoy of 1,300 deportees, including 300 children, left the Bobigny train station. This was Brunner's last major convoy. On August 17, he fled with 51 Jewish hostages to the Compiègne camp. There he joined a convoy of 1,204 people who left France the following day for the Buchenwald concentration camp. On August 18, the Drancy camp is liberated.

Aloïs Brunner, linchpin of the genocide

The Bobigny convoys tell the story of persecution according to Aloïs Brunner, a Nazi who had already organized the deportation of Jews from Austria and Greece. Brunner wished to regain control and sideline the French administration, which he deemed ineffective. He was thus able to reproduce the procedures already implemented in Germany and other countries. He systematized the deportation of Jews, until then “non-deportable” because of their nationality, as well as spouses of “Aryans”. He attacked the children's homes of the Union Générale des Israélites de France, which provided refuge for Jewish children who had lost their parents. The last convoys included a significant proportion of children from these homes.

Resistance and solidarity

However, Brunner did not succeed. The Jewish survivors of 1942 organized resistance and solidarity. This limited the number of arrests envisaged by Brunner, which explains why the convoys never resumed the pace they had at the Bourget-Drancy station.

Although Brunner never succeeded in restoring the deportation rate of 1942, the Bobigny station nonetheless remains the second largest deportation station for French Jews after Le Bourget-Drancy, with a total of 22,500 people deported, including 10,222 women and 2,952 children.

From 1954, the Lautard scrap metal company set up operations on the site of the Bobigny railway station, leased from the SNCF, and gradually took over the entire site. As the freight business declined, the SNCF no longer had any use for the site. However, railway workers continue to live in the former passenger building.

In 1984, filmmaker Henri Jouf shot a short film in the station entitled Bobigny, Gare de la douleur, in which a station manager discovers the station's past and hears the voices of the deportees among the scrap metal. The memory of the place began to take shape.

In 1987, however, the year of the resounding Klaus Barbie trial, the SNCF plans to demolish the station building. Alerted by the Association Fonds Mémoire d'Auschwitz (AFMA), founded by survivors Georges Wellers and Henri Moraud that same year, Georges Valbon, Mayor of Bobigny and President of the Seine-Saint-Denis General Council, wrote to the French Prime Minister, proposing a museum of rail resistance and deportation.

On Sunday October 10, 1993, the first ceremony was held on the site of the former deportation station, at the initiative of the AFMA. The ceremony was supported by the municipality of Bobigny, which placed a plaque on the passenger building.

In the wake of the classification of the cité de la Muette in Drancy, the idea of protecting the former station as a historic monument is gaining ground. Encouraged in 2002, validated by the regional commission for heritage and sites in January 2003, it wasn't until early 2005 that the listing order was published, followed by an extension of protection in 2009. In the meantime, the scrap dealer left the site in 2005.

In 2005, the City of Bobigny commissioned architect Anne Bourgon to redevelop the former Bobigny deportation station. In 2008, the exterior of the protected passenger building was restored. A long process involving the SNCF and the town, under the guidance of a scientific advisory board, began, culminating in the creation of a memorial space. In 2011, a milestone was reached: the SNCF made the land available to the town, recognizing the railway group's involvement in the deportation. In 2012, to coincide with the opening of the Drancy Shoah Memorial, part of the site was redeveloped as a landscaped area, and hosted its first outdoor historical exhibition.

On July 18, 2023, the Memorial at the former Bobigny deportation station was inaugurated by the city of Bobigny and its partners. It is based on a sober staging and a site that has been generally preserved to represent the emptiness and at the same time what took place here. It serves as an educational facility, a public reception area and a space for meditation and ceremony.