The Holocaust in Paris: A Spatial and Oral History of Drancy

An expansive spatial history of Drancy, the Parisian antechamber to Auschwitz, from the 1930s to the present day.

Drancy, a town in the north-eastern outskirts of Paris, is now synonymous with internment and deportation. From the summer of 1941 to the summer of 1944, 67,000 of the 75,000 Jews deported from France under Nazi occupation were at one time incarcerated in Drancy internment camp. Hesz-Wood challenges this perception and presents Drancy as bound to, but not defined by, this traumatic history.

Through a novel methodological approach-where a chronological spatial history is presented through an interpretation of oral histories-this discussion seeks to interrelate complex and contradictory narratives. Hesz-Wood explores the city from its initial conception in the 1930s by French architects Beaudouin and Lods as a model city, through eight decades of personal histories to understand how the once ground-breaking prefabricated social housing complex came to represent antithetic ideals-oscillating between a symbol of urban utopia and a place of incarceration and terror.

Stephanie Hesz-Wood is a PhD student at Royal Holloway University London, UK. She has appeared on BBC Radio Three’s Free Thinking (2021), discussing her research on Drancy alongside Michael Rosen, Martin Puchner, and Ludovine Broch, and contributed a chapter to the publication, Beyond Camps and Forced Labour (2021).