By
Angela Doland, Associated Press | January 20, 2005
PARIS -- With name
after name engraved on pale stone walls, a new monument
in the city's Jewish quarter pays tribute to the 76,000
Jews rounded up in France during the Holocaust and sent
to Nazi death camps.
France marks the
60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death
camp in Poland with memories, a monument -- and a
national outcry over a remark by far-right leader
Jean-Marie Le Pen that the Nazi occupation of France
during World War II ''was not particularly
inhumane."
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A
wall of photos at the exibition of some of the
76,000 people deported from France to Nazi death
camps in WWII, at the Holocaust memorial in
central Paris' jewish quarter Wednesday Jan 19,
2005. The renovated Holocaust memorial will be
inaugurated by French President Chirac on Jan.
25, 2005 (AP Photo/Jacques
Brinon)
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The ''Wall of Names," shown to reporters yesterday ahead
of an inauguration by President Jacques Chirac next week,
is part of a renovated Holocaust memorial that has been
transformed from an archive center and
expanded.
A simple plaque is
the monument's heart-wrenching companion piece. From the
sea of 76,000 names, it says, only 2,500 people
survived.
To arrive at the
list, 10 specialists spent 2 years gathering information
from Gestapo documents and research from French
families.
Under columns for
each year of the deportations, the engravings list the
victims alphabetically and include their dates of birth.
Some unidentified victims are referred to as ''a
child."
The wall is meant
to remind visitors of the millions of individual
tragedies in the Holocaust, officials said.
''In the list of
all 76,000 names, there is also 'a name plus a name plus
a name,' " director Jacques Fredj said.
The memorial also
is a reminder of a dark period of French history,
France's wartime collaboration with the Nazis.
In 1995, Chirac
became the first president to acknowledge that France was
responsible for systematically persecuting Jews during
the war. In one case, 13,152 Jews were rounded up in a
bicycle stadium in Paris in July 1942 and sent to death
camps.
Fredj mentioned
Chirac's acknowledgment, and the work of a commission to
help compensate Jews for assets seized during the war, as
a sign that France was coming to terms with its past. The
memorial's renovation was funded partly by the
government.
The revamped
memorial, which will host conferences and exhibits, opens
Jan. 27, 60 years to the day Auschwitz was
liberated.
But the occasion
has been marred by an outcry over the most recent remark
by Le Pen, 76: that the Nazi occupation wasn't so bad. Le
Pen was quoted as telling a magazine this month: ''In
France at least, the German occupation was not
particularly inhumane, even if there were
blunders."
Le Pen has been
convicted of racism or anti-Semitism six
times.
Justice Minister
Dominique Perben has said Le Pen must face the law for
his remarks, and prosecutors have opened a preliminary
investigation.
France has been
troubled by a surge in anti-Semitic attacks in recent
years. The government counted 194 racist and anti-Semitic
acts in 2004, an increase from 112 acts during 2003.