The carriage used for deportation at the Cité de la Muette in Drancy, where several thousand Jews were interned between 1941 and 1944. Photograph taken on October 5, 2001. FREDERICK FLORIN / AFP
Two swastikas have been found spray-painted on buildings in a Paris suburb that served as a World War II transit camp for some 63,000 Jews deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Drancy internment camp served as the main departure point for Jewish deportees from France to Nazi death camps between August 1941 and August 1944. The two swastikas were drawn in two different buildings. One measured a few centimetres across, while the other was nearly one meter in diameter.
A candidate in the upcoming municipal elections spotted the swastikas on Wednesday, February 26, while campaigning, before notifying memorial associations, he told Agence France-Presse (AFP). "In this neighborhood more than any other, which was once a transit camp for Holocaust victims before they were deported to death camps by the Nazis, these acts are extremely serious," Gökhan Unver, a mayoral candidate for the radical-left La France Insoumise (LFI), told AFP. Three local lawmakers had filed a report with judicial authorities, he added.
