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The history of the Second World War in France, is that of a paradox where our nation, land of enlightenment and human rights, land of welcome and asylum, was also for a time, a collaborationist State that one day accomplished the irreparable in delivering its protégés to their killers (i). This paradox of a France both fervent for liberty and collaborating with a murderous régime, is situated in Bobigny with more acuity than elsewhere. Not only because my city harbors on its territory this old train station that was one of the main sites of the deportation in France, but also because Bobigny is historically a land of welcome of immigrant populations. Bobigny counts today more than 40,000 residents and 80 different communities. It is located to the northeast of Paris, less than 10 km as the crow flies from the opera house, but it is a singular territory by comparison with the capital. At the dawn of the 20th century, Bobigny was a small rural town with at most 2,000 residents. The influx of new immigrants after 1910 led to a steep increase in population, followed by a demographic explosion between the two world wars. Bobigny was covered with small, modest housing developments and simultaneously assumed major urban functions that the big city cannot and sometimes does not want to receive on its territory. It is also in the 1930s that the three sites that have now become historical monuments were developed: the print shop of the magazine l’Illustration, Avicenne Hospital and its Muslim cemetery--built for a population that public authorities did not wish to treat in the same hospitals as French people-- and the old station of the Outer loop that was used between July 1943 and August 1944 for the deportation of 22.403 Jews, most of whom were exterminated at Auschwitz. In the early 1990s my predecessors, Georges Valbon and Bernard Birsinger strove to preserve the “passenger building” from demolition and helped restored the dignity of the site by allowing the scrap metal company that had exploited it for decades to relocate. Following in their steps I work today to meet the difficult objective of developing a project of memory and history that will restore this emblematic site of the Shoah. It seems to me also that as an elected official of this city I have a responsibility to ensure that the site is developed as a living memory, where the ethical and political questions inherent to the imprescriptible crime of the Shoah can be raised. Having taught history in a lycée in a neighboring city I know that teaching this facet of our heritage is no easy task and I am aware that the Shoah raises the question of identity. But I also know that trips to the sites of the extermination of the Jews of Europe, for example Auschwitz, with young people from different cultural horizons, can be an extraordinary opportunity to advance the process of getting to know the Other and stimulate encouraging intercultural encounters. I thus make the vow that the public and private partners of the City will mobilize in favor not only of an unavoidable debt to history but equally in favor of a necessary duty of hope that will favor an intercultural dialogue in a perspective of pacification and why not…let us dare to dream…of peace.
Catherine Peyge, Mayor of Bobigny
(i) Speech by Jacques Chirac at the Commemoration of the Rafle du Veld’hiv in July 1995 |
A message from the mayor 
