Drancy

I have been reading a beautifully written, riveting book about a sad and horrific subject, "Sarah's Key" by Tatiana De Rosnay. It's fiction but immaculately researched, and tells the story of a modern-day reporter in France who researches the round-up of Jewish men, women and children in Paris on July 16, 1942. A child named Sarah, not understanding why she was being arrested, or what an arrest would entail, locks her brother in a cupboard in the hope he will be safe there until she returns...

I'll stop there, because it's well worth reading and I can't continue about the book itself without spoiling the ending.

But one of the many facts to leap out at me while reading it was that Drancy, a block of apartment buildings seized by the Nazis and used as a last stop on French soil transit camp to Auschwitz, had been turned BACK into apartment buildings; that the lowest rents in the area could be had there; and that people were now LIVING in it, and had been for several decades!

Add to that, the complex is now called - fasten thy seatbelts here, please - "Cité de La Muette," which means "City of Mutes." City of Mutes?! Is that a sick reference to the fact that most of the poor souls transported from Drancy to Auschwitz perished and could no longer speak?

I looked all this right up on Google because I could not believe it, even though, as I said, the book I'd found it mentioned in was researched meticulously and I knew the author wasn't the kind of person who'd be making this up. NOBODY could make something like THIS up.

It's true.

People are living in Drancy. There are photographs on Google Images.

I've never heard of anything even remotely as dreadful as this.

I also can't help but wonder what that place with its awful, heartbreaking past history, where so many people were packed into unspeakable conditions and suffered, starved, were whipped, beaten and died, while others survived in misery only to be sent from there to Auschwitz, feels like to live in. I can not even imagine what kind of an imprint events like those could have had on the place. One thing I personally don't often like to do is go into an antique shop where so many items from dead people's homes wind up being sold. Most antique shops always feel so "heavy" to me. I usually go into and out of them lightning fast, and usually only if there's something that attracts me in the window, or I'm with someone who wants to go in. I avoid them, basically - the energy in them just creeps me out. Psychically there are other buildings where crimes were committed, or where people weren't happy for one reason or another, that are never the same afterwards, where something bad just seems to stay in the very air.

But THESE buildings in France, in Drancy/City of the Mutes, were used as a Nazi transit camp for THOUSANDS of French Jewish people.

I would be so curious, in spite of myself, to find out what that reinvented "apartment complex" is like to have as a home. To know what the "vibes" of such a place, with such a history, are like. Not that I'd ever want to live there myself; if I were to visit France, I'd want to see it, but not stay there.

I'd also love to know just what the Hell the French were thinking of when they reopened Drancy as cheap rental real estate. The very idea is barbaric and the reality of it can only be worse.

May God bless all of the Jewish people who passed through those walls.