Director-General visits the Shoah Memorial in Paris
© UNESCO/Michel Ravassard - UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova at the Shoah Memorial in Paris with its President Eric de Rothschild, on the occasion of International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust - 27 January 2011
On 26 January 2011, UNESCO Director-General Irina Bokova laid a wreath in memory of Holocaust victims in the crypt of the Shoah Memorial in Paris, on the occasion of the International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust - 27 January. She was accompanied by Eric de Rothschild, the Memorial’s President.
After signing the guestbook, Irina Bokova visited the Documentation Centre of the Memorial, which counts some 35 million items - books, photographs, original documents and films illustrating the life and the genocide of Jews in Europe and in occupied France. Faced with the disappearance of the last witnesses of the Holocaust, the Centre - the first in Europe by the volume of its archives - obtains each year, more than a million new documents in order to preserve the memory of the genocide and fight against all forms of racism and intolerance.
The Director-General expressed the wish to visit the Memorial every year on 27 January. She underlined her intention to strengthen cooperation between UNESCO and the Shoah Memorial, which opened in 2005, with regards to knowledge dissemination and transmission of history.
- Preparing International Holocaust Remembrance Day (27 January)
- The Shoah Memorial in Paris - Museum, Center of contemporary Jewish documentation