Give Them a Face (France) portrait collection. Collection
Extent and Medium
over 4,200 digitised images (photos)
Creator(s)
- Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance, Mechelen
Biographical History
The Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance (JMDR), predecessor of Kazerne Dossin, opened its doors in 1996. The museum was the result of a collaboration between the Jewish Central Consistory of Belgium and the Union of Jewish Deportees. Sir Natan Ramet, survivor of Auschwitz, the death marches and Dachau, was appointed president of the new museum. Apart from its commemorative, museological and educational assignment, the JMDR also had a historical assignment : to digitise all archival collections related to the Holocaust in Belgium and to make these documents available to the public. In 2008 the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance was reorganised and became, in 2012, Kazerne Dossin - Memorial, Museum and Documentation Center on Holocaust and Human Rights.
Archival History
In 2005 honorary curator Ward Adriaens launched the Give Them a Face archival project. After negotiations with several ministries and the immigration authorities, the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance (JMDR) received permission from Minister of Internal Affairs Patrick Dewael to digitise certain photos from immigration files, drafted by the immigration authorities. The portraits of all Jewish, Roma and Sinti deportees which passed through the SS-Sammellager Mecheln (Dossin barracks) in 1942-1944, were scanned to create the “Give Them a Face” portrait collection. In 2009, all of these were published in the four volume commemoration book "Mecheln-Auschwitz, 1942-1944". In 2011, Ward Adriaens broadened the Give Them a Face project, and the pictures of Jews living in Belgium but deported from France were also digitised. These photos were published in the commemoration book "Drancy-Auschwitz, 1942-1944" in 2015. The "fichier Drancy", containing postwar index cards on those deported from France, was used as the starting point for the research. The original "fichier Drancy" is stored at the Directorate-general War Victims in Brussels.
Acquisition
State Archives, Brussels ; Yad Vashem, Jerusalem ; USHMM, Washington DC ; researchers ; private and family collections.
Scope and Content
This collection contains over 4,200 portraits of Jewish men, women and children from Belgium, whom have been deported from the French camps Drancy, Angers, Beaune-la-Rolande, Compiègne, Pithiviers and Lyon, to Auschwitz-Birkenau, Sobibor, Maidanek and Kaunas between March 1942 and August 1944. Among the deportees, four groups can be distinguished : persons that had lived in Belgium and whom had emigrated to France legally before the beginning of the war, persons that fled from Belgium to France in May 1940 or afterwards, children born out of these refugees in France and persons arrested by the Belgian state as "suspects" in May 1940 and deported to the camps in the South of France.
Accruals
Newly found pictures will be added upon digitisation.
System of Arrangement
Alphabetical per transport
Conditions Governing Reproduction
State Archives, Brussels - digitised by Kazerne Dossin
Physical Characteristics and Technical Requirements
Digitally stored at Kazerne Dossin
Finding Aids
The name index of the Give Them a Face (France) portrait collection is accessible at the Kazerne Dossin documentation center. It was also published in : VAN GOETHEM Herman e.a., Drancy-Auschwitz, 1942-1944, Brussels, 2015.
Existence and Location of Originals
State Archives, Brussels and other institutes or collections
Existence and Location of Copies
Memorial de la Shoah in Paris received copies of the Give Them a Face (France) portrait collection.
Subjects
- Extermination
- Deportations
- Transit camps
- Sondertransporte
- Holocaust survivors
- France
- Deportees