Paris (AFP)

How memory has been transmitted in 75 years, from the manuscripts buried in 1944/45 under the ruins of Auschwitz-Birkenau to the speaking of the third generation post-war: this is the challenge finely raised by a exhibition at the Shoah Memorial.

The exhibition "the voice of witnesses", like the previous ones at the Memorial - the art market under the occupation, the Travelers in France, the genocide of Tutsis in Rwanda - convinces with exceptional documentation well presented in a narrow space: letters, books, photos and films from the period, most of which have never been shown, bring to life a dramatic story with emotion but without pathos.

This exhibition on witnesses, produced in partnership with the National Audiovisual Institute (INA) and which President Emmanuel Macron will visit on Monday, is centered around the voice.

"The strength of the voice makes the missing present. And it invites the visitor to listen," explains the young curator of the exhibition, the philosopher Léa Veinstein, 33. The underground voice will become public.

The Memorial invites you to (re) discover the voices of seven well-known witnesses, Primo Levi, Simone Veil, Elie Wiesel, Imre Kertész, Marceline Loridan-Ivens, Samuel Pisar and Aharon Appelfeld, whose immense portraits contemplate the visitor.

We can sit in seven small boudoirs sheltered by curtains, and, headphones on our ears, listen to their testimonies: a testimony very early, another very late, at the twilight of their lives.

On the curved walls of the exhibition - like the sinuosities of memory itself - is a circuit in several phases, which documents, from 1944 to 2020, how language has evolved on the great massacre of the Jews of 'Europe. "Holocaust" and "Shoah" were not terms used at the start.

- "You friend of the free world" -

"You friend of the free world": these are the first words of the message of a Jewish prisoner of the Sonderkommandos of Birkenau who knew, after having had to burn the bodies of the gassed, that he would himself be executed. He had buried his message near the crematoriums before disappearing forever.

Such yellowed rolls hidden in the ground were found as early as 1945, others until the 1980s. They were initially raw testimonies, anonymous cries emitted in an emergency and fear.

Then, in the 1950s, the testimonies within families were so unacceptable that they "took the path of fiction."

It was the time of Nuit et brouillard (1956) by Alain Resnais. We spoke of this period as that of the "great silence", but the exhibition tends to dismantle this "myth".

- Eichmann trial and Holocaust denial -

From 1961 to 1978, a rupture was caused by the Eichmann trial, broadcast on television, with the survivors parading at the helm. "Testimony comes from witness, a term which has a legal origin", observes the commissioner.

"There is therefore a little perspective which allows us to listen to what these witnesses have to say to us," notes Ms. Veinstein.

In the 1970s, the emergence of Holocaust denial invited survivors to speak up, to fight, to go to schools. They are living proofs. Simone Veil harangues the negationists: "You are SS on the small foot!"

Then, the broadcasting of the series "Holocaust" in 1979 in the "Dossiers de la screen" will trigger a debate on what is legitimate to say, between what is fiction and what is testimony.

In the years 80/90 until today, there is the event which constitutes "Shoah" of Claude Lanzmann, and works and films will multiply: "it is then necessary to testify before dying, to pass on to future generations. "

In the ultimate exhibition hall, six young researchers and artists today, who feel "heirs" testify and reflect in videos ... The real "witnesses" passed the baton to them.

An exceptional series of lectures at the Edmund J. Safra Auditorium will give the floor from the end of January to the end of March to former Jewish prisoners surviving the Nazi camps.

- The voices of witnesses - until January 3, 2021

© 2020 AFP