Join Wellesley’s French House in welcoming Phil Nord for his lecture “Le Mémorial du Martyr Juif Inconnu and Jewish Memories of Deportation.”

A memorial to the six million murdered Jews of Europe was inaugurated in Paris in 1956. It is now known as the Mémorial de la Shoah but then it was called the Tombeau du Martyr Juif inconnu. This memorial was one of the very first of its kind anywhere in the world, and its construction was completed in the mid-1950s when, according to received wisdom, a general silence about the fate of European Jewry in the Second World War was said to prevail. How and why was this memorial erected; how is to be interpreted; and why was the memorial built in France?

Philip Nord is Rosengarten Professor of Modern and Contemporary History Emeritus at Princeton University where he taught from 1981 to 2021. He is the author of several books on the history of modern France, including most recently France 1940: Defending the Republic (2015) and After the Deportation: Memory Battles in Postwar France (2020).

Please register in advance.