Book Launch – The Silent City of Drancy

Join us as we launch Stephanie Hesz-Wood’s new book, The Silent City of Drancy: Social Housing & Holocaust Memory on the Margins of Paris. This event is held as part of the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership.

Revealing the ways architecture gives form to history and memory. Hesz-Wood tells the extraordinary story of a building in Drancy, a town on the north-eastern outskirts of Paris. Drancy’s name has become synonymous with the internment and deportation of Jewish people.

From 1941 to 1944, Drancy internment camp operated as an antechamber to Auschwitz: the beginning of a direct route from the suburbs of Paris to the death camps in the ‘East’. 67,000 of the 75,000 Jews deported from France under Nazi occupation were at one time incarcerated in Drancy. Few returned.

This book broadens perceptions of Drancy, revealing a place bound to, but not wholly defined by this inhuman horror.