Since its inauguration in July 2023, the Mémorial de l'ancienne gare de déportation de Bobigny has put transmission at the heart of its project and actions.

Thematic programming

Each year, the memorial offers a themed scientific and cultural program, featuring a variety of events such as scientific conferences, concerts, theatrical performances and even literary encounters.

This program is also an opportunity to get involved locally, by taking part in the Hors-Limite literature festival or organizing meetings at the Elsa Triolet media library in Bobigny, for example.

Temporary exhibitions

To renew and enrich the visitor experience, the memorial at the former deportation station in Bobigny has added two temporary exhibition spaces:

• An outdoor space with twenty exhibition panels, designed to host a new exhibition every year, to further historical knowledge of the elements and people whose story is told on the site of the Bobigny deportation station.
• A ten-panel exhibition structure inside the former goods hall. This space makes it possible to adapt existing exhibitions for programming at the memorial, enabling the local public to benefit from the content.

A place of commemoration

The memorial at the former Bobigny deportation station remains a place of homage, and ceremonies are an important part of its activities. Organized by the municipality, associations or the memorial itself, various ceremonies punctuate the year.

In order to interest new generations in these commemorations, and to ensure that the need for these tributes is passed on, the memorial places pedagogy at the heart of these ceremonies, even giving students the opportunity to take charge of the ceremony with readings or creations.

Passing on through art: a major challenge at the Bobigny deportation memorial

In its method of transmission, the memorial gives art a fundamental place. In the permanent exhibition, this is reflected in the place given to the poem Préface en Prose by Benjamin Fondane, philosopher and poet deported to Auschwitz without return by convoy 75, which left the Bobigny station on May 30, 1944.

The choice of an aesthetic of emptiness is at the heart of the memorial's scenography, and is also one of the driving forces behind the invitation to the former Bobigny deportation station to develop links with artists in order to program experiments in expressing the Deportation without relying too heavily on objects of historical mediation.

Since its inauguration, music has occupied a special place at the memorial at Bobigny's former deportation station, echoing the music written in the death camps on the rails of deportation, hearing traditional Judeo-Spanish songs in commemoration, a language that was all but murdered in the Shoah... Music is a formidable vehicle for transmission because it is a universal language that transcends time and de-intellectualizes the relationship with history to make it sensitive.

Hosting artists and artistic residencies is an approach that the memorial wishes to continue developing, to enable as many people as possible to benefit from it and to receive, through their own means, the memorial message conveyed here: “If the echo of their voice falters, we shall perish”.

Visits to the site of the former deportation station

The memorial at the former Bobigny deportation station is open to the public.
Access is free and open to the public.

From Tuesday to Friday, the memorial is mainly open to schoolchildren (CM2 to Terminale), who can take a 1.5-hour guided tour, completely free of charge. Various partnerships also enable the memorial to reach out to more specific audiences, such as groups from the Protection Judiciaire de la Jeunesse or students from Sorbonne Paris Nord University.

In order to offer teachers and their students an experience tailored to their needs, the Bobigny deportation station memorial offers combined visits with other places of remembrance. For example, with Mont-Valérien, to learn about the different forms of repression and persecution implemented in occupied France, or with the Mémorial des martyrs de la Déportation, which highlights the differences between deportation for the repression of political opponents and deportation for the persecution of Jews.

Last but not least, the most popular combined tour is with the Drancy Shoah Memorial. It retraces the journey of the 22,500 people interned at Drancy before being deported from the Bobigny railway station.