In this blogpost , I will be discussing the deportation memorial , watching transatlantic , and the experience of being in Marseilles with these two perspectives.
We watched a tv show called Transatlantic which highlighted the story of Jewish people and others facing persecution from the Nazi government. These people were forced to leave their homes and come to Marseilles, a port city, as refugees. The TV show is a dramatization of real stories of people who worked with refugees to help them get to America and other places. Seeing the TV show and then coming to Marseilles was a life changing experience. I was walking in the same streets that had done so much harm to such vulnerable populations.The French government also played a role in these injustices. These people who were escaping persecution had been running for many months but they were not allowed to be in France because of the government . The Nazis had taken over Marseille at one point and mass deportations also took place in Marseilles where people were sent to concentration camps or displaced to other locations. People were deported and many died in their exhausting journeys.
On our walk to the museum of deportations , we stumbled across the memorial and saw a statue that shocked us all. On a granite bench , a copper man (now turned green from years of weathering) was lying with his mouth open in distress. The sculpture reminded me a lot of the artwork titled “the scream. “ The man was severely malnourished and starved. This was the deportation memorial. There were many plaques around the deportation memorial and they showed the history behind why the memorial was there. The first writing was on the bench in golden lettering and it was a quote by Charles De Gaulle.The memorial is titled, memorial of deportation, of the internment and of the resistance. There were many underground operations in Marseilles to help in the resistance against the Nazis. The memorial is said to be made for the martyrs, the people who died due to deportation, and it was inaugurated in 1983. Another plaque says that this memorial is for the people who died at the camps. The French republic was [paying homage to the racist and anti semitic persecution and crimes against humanity committed by the French government. This memorial was very touching and saddening. There were also interesting parallels that were being drawn for me when viewing this history of Marseilles. We visited the immigration museum first, and that talked about immigration and the condition of refugees right now in France. This memorial was built to honor the lives lost due to a state that did not care for the lives of people from other countries. Looking at the conditions of refugees in France right now, it seems that much progress is still needed. The government should learn from its mistakes and actively updated its policies to humanize refugees and it seems that refugees now are not being treated with much better conditions.
Revolutionary Cities 