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.

Architecture gives form to history and memory. In this compelling book, Hesz-Wood tells the extraordinary story of a building in Drancy, a town on the north-eastern outskirts of Paris. Drancy's name has, in France at least, become synonymous with the internment and deportation of Jewish people. From the summer of 1941 to the summer of 1944, Drancy internment camp operated as an antechamber to Auschwitz: the beginning of a direct route from the suburbs of Paris to the death camps in the 'East'. 67,000 of the 75,000 Jews deported from France under Nazi occupation were at one time incarcerated in Drancy. Few returned.
This book broadens perceptions of Drancy, revealing a place bound to, but not wholly defined by this inhuman horror. The vast building complex repurposed for the camp during the Second World War was, in fact, a ground-breaking prefabricated development, originally conceived as a model city in the early 1930s by French architects Eugène Beaudouin and Marcel Lods, and named the Cité de la Muette, 'The Silent City'. Following the war, the complex returned to its objective as social housing, which it remains today.
In listening to the narratives imbued within the Cité de la Muette over the past eight decades, Hesz-Wood describes how such seemingly disparate layers interconnect. Questioning how the temporary interruption of a site permanently transforms perceptions of it, Hesz-Wood discovers how one place may come to represent antithetic ideals, and come to reconcile its cultural, social, and historical potency.
Realigning and extending the story of Drancy, following the narratives formed, interrupted and restored in the wake of trauma, this book finds new meaning through a holistic spatial interpretation. Interwoven, powerful oral histories across eight decades direct the storytelling. These include the testimony of survivors, witnesses, artists, architects, activists, writers, curators, educators and residents past and present.
The Silent City of Drancy poignantly reveals how personal stories within one place over time can encapsulate the horrors and their after-image: a pertinent reminder that remarkable events were endured, witnessed-lived-by ordinary people in familiar places.