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From the summer of 1943 to the summer of 1944, the Bobigny train station, which at that time was an abandoned station on the Outer loop, became the boarding platform for the deportation of Jews interned at the Drancy camp, located a bit more than 2 Km from the station. The Bobigny station replaced the Bourget station that had been the main platform for deportation of French Jews since March 1942. In the space of 13 months, 22.407 men, women, and children of all ages were loaded into cattle cars at Bobigny and taken in convoys of sealed cars to Auschwitz where the immense majority was exterminated. After World War 2, the 3.5-hectare site was used for industrial purposes by a scrap metal company. Today it is an abandoned railroad site registered in the supplementary Monuments Historiques [Historical Monuments] Inventory in virtue of its use during the Second World War. It remains the sole example in France of a deportation train station still abandoned and conserved in a condition close to the original layout. This is what makes it a unique site. Having acquired ownership of part of the site, the City of Bobigny plans to restore it in all its dimensions - memorial, historical, and landscape. This project will be developed in parallel with the Shoah memorial planned for Drancy. We invite you to discover this project, a developing site consecrated to the preservation of a memory and a history that will take its place in a constantly evolving urban and social context.
 Railway between printing house of L’Illustration and fort d’Aubervilliers - © 2009 Anne Badrignans |
