"Pardonner, mais ne jamais oublier"- Forgive, but never forget.

On a Thursday afternoon with gray skies, rain drops, and a brisk February wind, traversing the crowds of tourists past Notre Dame, I found a lovely garden with a sign indicating that I had indeed made it to my final destination, the Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation. A woman, who seemed more like a retiree turned volunteer than a guard, informed me of the respect which must be shown upon entering—“Les portables doit-etre discrets…Allez-y.” Cell phone off, proceeding ahead, down the steps I went into a concrete grotto decorated with a triangular black installment. Initially the set up of the memorial lead to disorientation; however, as I turned around prison bars caught my eye. Not knowing what to expect before arriving at the memorial, for a second I thought that the black installment was all the memorial had to offer and voila the prison gates were an alternate sortie, but I was sorely mistaken.

Popping my head in the doorway I was pleasantly (or should I say, unpleasantly) surprised to find myself in what can best be described as a gateway to another world, the world of a deportee. The beauty of the other Parisian memorials and monuments which I have become so accustomed to had met its match, being replaced by a dark, drab and claustrophobic space which rivals the Catacombs for eeriness. The writings on the walls, in sharp form and intensity of message, further mentally dragged me into the world of the deportee. The inscriptions told the story which the rest of the memorial could not do through its physical structure alone—200,000, deportees, swallowed, never to return. The words of poet and deportee Robert Desnos and intellectual lines from Sartre bring the memorial full-circle in setting a mood of despair.

After feeling as if the memorial had sucked all of my Parisian joie de vivre for the day, I was able to have a cathartic moment upon looking at the corridor of 200,000 carefully placed crystals which are lit in commemoration of the deported. And at the end, the famous flame which so often burns at tombs of the Unknown Soldier worldwide has taken on a remarkably new role, burning brightly as the flame of the Unknown Deportee, the flame of those innocent men, women, and children who never returned. And so perfectly planned by its architect and designer, my last impression from inside the memorial was of the caption so popular amongst Holocaust (in this case deportation) memorials, but this time en français—“Pardonner, mais ne jamais oublier.”