Three walls of Jerusalem stone, in the Marais, carry 75,568 names cut into them. They are the Jews deported from France between 1942 and 1944, 11,400 of them children. The wall stands in a courtyard open to the street, before the ticket desk: you can read it without going into any museum.
The Mémorial de la Shoah is at once a monument, a museum and a research centre, and it is free, with no booking. If you can choose, I would suggest Thursday, the one day it stays open until 21:00: in the last hours the museum empties. Bear in mind, though, that it is closed on Saturdays, because that is Shabbat.
In this place the numbers matter more than anything else, and I have taken them one by one from the pages of the Mémorial, because the ones in circulation elsewhere are almost always rounded.
A note on the photographs on this page. The building of the Mémorial dates from 1956 and its monuments, from the Mur des Noms to the star in the crypt, are works by twentieth-century artists: in France freedom of panorama excludes commercial use, and this site is a commercial use. You will therefore find no images of those walls here: there is the street they stand on, and one historical object displayed inside. The photograph above shows the rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier, and on the corner you can read the name of the side street: allée des Justes parmi les Nations.
What does a memorial that is also an archive hold?
Let’s go!
1. The parvis, before you go in
You begin in the courtyard, and it is worth stopping there rather than walking straight across it.
On the axis of the parvis, the forecourt before the entrance, stands a bronze cylinder cut with the names of the Warsaw ghetto and of the camps: Auschwitz, Belzec, Bergen-Belsen, Birkenau, Buchenwald, Chelmno, Dachau, Majdanek, Mauthausen, Sobibor, Struthof, Treblinka. On one wall of the courtyard are seven reliefs representing the persecution of the Jews, made in 1982 by Arbit Blatas, who was born in Kaunas in Lithuania. They are not an isolated work: the same cycle of seven bronzes exists in four countries, and the one in the Venice ghetto was unveiled on 25 April 1980. Blatas was not working on somebody else’s subject: his parents were deported from Lithuania in 1941, his mother died at Stutthof and his father survived Dachau.
2. The Mur des Noms
The wall was unveiled on 27 January 2005 by Jacques Chirac and Simone Veil, deported to Auschwitz at sixteen, and it carries the names of 75,568 Jews deported from France, with the year of the deportation.
The figure is not a round one, and the reason it is not deserves telling. Between May 2019 and 27 January 2020 the wall was entirely remade on the basis of families’ reports and of new archive sources: 6,200 corrections were made, 379 names were removed and 226 were added. A wrong name on a wall like this is not a typing error, and that is why the work was done again from the beginning.
Why does a list of names say more than a figure?
Because the names are grouped by year of deportation, and walking along the wall you see the shape of the event instead of its total: the panels for 1942 are by far the densest, and inside those columns the surnames repeat, because families left together.
3. The Mur des Justes
On one side of the courtyard is the second wall, a more recent one, with the names of more than 3,900 men and women who protected or saved Jews in France.
The title of Righteous Among the Nations is not awarded by the Mémorial: it is awarded by Yad Vashem, in Jerusalem, since 1963, after an examination of testimony and documents. Worldwide Yad Vashem had recognised 28,707 people as of 1 January 2024, from fifty-one countries, and the wall in Paris carries the French ones. The number is still growing, because cases are opened as the evidence comes in.
Warning: if you read the figure of 2,693 Righteous elsewhere, it comes from an old page. The Mémorial today gives more than 3,900.
4. The crypt
Where do you mourn someone who has no grave?
You go down into a dark room holding a large star of David in black marble. It is the symbolic tomb of the six million Jews who died without burial, and «symbolic» is only half true.
Under the star there are real ashes: ashes taken from the extermination camps and from the ruins of the Warsaw ghetto, buried on 24 February 1957 in earth brought from Israel by the Chief Rabbi of France Jacob Kaplan, according to Jewish tradition. The crypt also holds the Livre du Souvenir, with the names of the dead, and parchment scrolls recording the martyrdom of the Jewish communities of Europe.
5. The fichier juif
There is a part of this place that resembles no other museum room, and it is to gather it that the Mémorial came into being before the war was even over.
The fichier juif is the body of card indexes compiled between 1940 and 1944: the files on the Jews arrested in Paris and in the Seine department and those on the internees of the camps of Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. With those papers the administration organised the deportations: they are the instrument of the persecution itself. The Mémorial received them on deposit in December 1997, after a long public controversy over what should become of them, and today they are digitised and open to consultation.
At the documentation centre, on the floor above, you can consult the archives, the library and the photographic collection. It is not a room reserved for scholars: you can go there to look for a person, and the Salle des noms answers enquiries from families.
6. The permanent museum, and why this place has existed since 1943
The museum section tells the history of the Jews of France during the Second World War, with documents, photographs, objects and filmed testimony. But the date that explains everything is another one.
On 28 April 1943, in the middle of the occupation, the industrialist Isaac Schneersohn gathered some forty people in secret in his flat in Grenoble and founded the Centre de documentation juive contemporaine. The aim, while the persecution was still going on, was to collect the evidence so that it could be used once the war was over. Those papers went to the post-war trials, and they are the same ones consulted upstairs today.
In 1950 Schneersohn decided to build a tomb and memorial for the victims: the Mémorial du Martyr Juif Inconnu, put up between 1953 and 1956 by the architects Alexandre Persitz and Georges Goldberg and inaugurated on 30 October 1956. In January 2005, for the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the enlarged building reopened under its present name, with the Mur des Noms and the museum.
In the museum section the front of a hut from the internment camp of Beaune-la-Rolande has been reassembled, one of the three camps whose card indexes are kept downstairs. It is of rough wood, with a double door and a band of glass above it, and it rises inside the room like a building inside another building.
The Mémorial nearly always has one or two temporary exhibitions on, and they are often the reason people come back: what is on at the moment I keep up to date in the table of exhibitions in Paris.
Practical information
Details checked on 28 September 2026 on the official site memorialdelashoah.org. Opening hours and closures change: check again before you go.
Tickets. Admission is free for individual visitors, and there is no booking. Groups do have to book. Opening hours. The Mémorial opens Sunday to Friday, 10:00-18:00, and on Thursday until 21:00. Warning: it is closed on Saturdays, because that is Shabbat. It also closes on 1 January, 1 May, 14 July and 25 December, and on some Jewish holidays, which move every year because they follow the Jewish calendar. Warning: on 28 September 2026 the official page listed only three dates, 2 and 8 April and 22 May, all of them already past, and it had not yet published the autumn holidays. If you are going between September and October, check the opening-hours page the day before. The documentation centre. It opens Monday to Friday 10:00-17:30, on Thursday until 19:30, and on Sunday 10:00-13:00 and 14:00-17:30. It is closed on Saturdays. With children. The museum provides a companion booklet with questions, designed to take children through the route while avoiding the harshest images, and markers indicate the documents suited to them. Getting there. The address is 17 rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier, in the fourth arrondissement. The stops are Saint-Paul and Hôtel-de-Ville on line 1 and Pont-Marie on line 7; buses 67, 69, 72, 76 and 96 also pass nearby. The other site. The Mémorial has a second site at Drancy, opposite the cité de la Muette, from which most of the convoys left: it can also be visited free of charge and has its own opening hours. How long it takes. The courtyard and the two walls ask for twenty minutes, the permanent museum at least an hour and a half.
Where to go from here
The museum that completes this visit is the mahJ, ten minutes on foot in the same quarter, the museum of Jewish art and history in the hôtel de Saint-Aignan, which gives a section to the Dreyfus affair and an installation to the people who lived in its building in 1939: the two museums complete each other, because one tells the story of a culture and the other of its destruction. Also in the Marais are the Musée Carnavalet, which tells the history of Paris, and the Musée Picasso. The other place in Paris where the Second World War can be visited in the rooms where it happened is the Musée de la Libération, at Denfert-Rochereau.
Photo credits: rue Geoffroy-l’Asnier by Chabe01 (CC BY-SA 4.0); hut from Beaune-la-Rolande by BrnGrby (CC BY-SA 4.0), from Wikimedia Commons.
