Online Memorial to the Jews Deported from France Introduction

The online version of the Memorial of the Deportation of the Jews of France consists of a free, bilingual website (French/English), with an interactive search engine. This tool enables to search by any combination of criteria among all fields. Based on the latest published Memorial (Serge Klarsfeld, 2012), its periodic updates offer new complements, corrections and references to other online resources. For more details, read below.

1978 Memorial              1983 English edition

In the first edition of the Memorial to the Jews Deported from France (1978, english edition 1983), Serge Klarsfeld compiled the list of 76,000 Jews, men, women and children, deported from France, who were executed or died in the internment camps of France under the Nazi occupation and the Vichy regime. Convoy descriptions precede the nominal list of the deportees who compose it. Vladimir Jankélévitch welcomed this publication with these words:

"The Memorial of Serge Klarsfeld, perpetuating the memory of 75,000 Jewish deportees in France, is first of all due to the enormity of the work it represents and the ruthless, methodical, meticulous rigor that presided over its elaboration. (...) One can not conceive of a more atrocious and diabolical machinery dismantled in a more sober work. (...) The Memorial of Serge Klarsfeld brings out the night and the cloud by calling them by their name, the innumerable anonymous ghosts annihilated by their executioners. To name these pale shadows is to summon them to the light of day." (Le Nouvel Observateur, May 22, 1978)

2012 Memorial

After 40 years of research and a series of intermediate versions, Serge Klarsfeld published the third edition of the Memorial to the Jews Deported from France (2012) in memory of the 76,000 deportees, the 3,000 dead in the camps in France and the thousand Jews executed during the Second World War. Many corrections have been made since the original 1978 version. This alphabetical version provides additional information for each victim, including the maiden name, the last address in France and the transit or internment camp.

Find here the translation of Serge Klarsfeld's original introduction to the 2012 Memorial.

Online Memorial

• post online Serge Klarsfeld's lifetime achievement - the Memorial to the Jews Deported from France - as an interactive tool which allows to search individuals by surname, by given name, by maiden name, by date or place of birth, by last known address, by convoy, etc, or by any combination of these criteria. Here are several search examples:

  • find the persons born in Greece, who lived in Marseille and were deported in 1943.

  • search for the persons born in Frankfurt am Main and inmates in the Gurs internment camp.

  • find the persons deported by convoy no. 51 whose last address was in Corrèze.

  • find the children under age 7 who lived in the 11th arrondissement of Paris and whose given name starts with a 'J'.

• allow for a phonetic search of surnames, given names, maiden names or localities, in order to find persons recorded under a slightly distinct spelling.

• extend Klarsfeld Memorial by identifying as precisely as possible the birthplaces listed in the 2012 book, and report their current names together with the country and region they are found in.

The database of the online Memorial is built from the 2012 edition of the Memorial; it also includes corrections made by Serge Klarsfeld since 2012. From there, I started editing. This Memorial does not include the names of the persons who were released or who escaped from the internment camps in France.

I first did a systematic review of the data. The massive use of computer techniques has made it possible to detect and correct a small number of errors or inaccuracies and to standardize the results. For example, adding the year of birth to the age of the person at the time of their deportation, we should normally obtain a value between 1941 and 1945. Otherwise, there is a contradiction that must be resolved. I also corrected the minor errors that had crept into the addresses in France, street names, departments, birth dates, etc. I updated the names of the streets (when it was possible), the names of the communes of France and the departments.

Then I tried to specify the place of birth of the victims. The versions of the 1978 and 2012 Memorial generally provide the date and place of birth of each person, but without any other details. One of this version's objectives is to identify these places of birth, giving the current name of each locality, as well as the country and the department (in France) or the administrative region (outside France) where it is currently located.

This task is tricky for the following reasons:

• The lists of convoys and other sources used to develop the 1978 and 2012 Memorials are sometimes in a bad conditions that makes them difficult to decipher.

• The spelling of places of birth as found in these lists is often approximate or even fanciful, especially with respect to foreign names.

• The transcription in French of the names of these localities has removed the diacritic accents and introduced new approximations.

• Localities have often changed their names throughout history and moved from sovereignty to sovereignty through political and administrative changes. For example, the Lemberg of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, has become Lwów, Poland in 1918 then Львов (Lvov), Soviet Union in 1945 and now Львів (Lviv or L'viv), Ukraine since 1991. The redistribution of borders at the end of the Second World War and following the partitions of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia contributed significantly to these changes of name and language. In the same way, municipalities have changed their name or disappeared, being absorbed by other agglomerations.

• The places of birth provided by the deportees often reflect the name of the locality at the time of their birth, and the same city was often referenced by its various names. It is possible that the information provided by some deportees on their date and place of birth is deliberately incorrect or simply approximate (for example respond "born in Berlin" instead of "born in Charlottenburg", where Charlottenburg was a suburb, now a borough of Berlin). The Vichy authorities and the German occupation authorities also used the French names of localities (such as Varsovie for Warszawa, Poland or Brousse for Bursa, Turkey) or their German name (such as Petrikau for Piotrków Trybunalski, Poland) ...

• Distinct localities often share the same name, and are sometimes spread among in different countries.

We added references to the online lists of persons posthumously declared as "died in deportation" by the Office National des Anciens Combattants et Victimes de Guerre (National Office for Veterans and Victims of War) administration. These lists, published by the Official Journal of the French Republic, provide details not in Klarsfeld Memorial, but they often contradict it : different spellings of first and last names, multiple first names, date, place and country of birth, maiden name, ... Unfortunately, these lists introduce many errors: notably, foreign names and places of birth abroad are severely distorted. This is why it was necessary either to "reinterpret" this information or to ignore it. I leave it to the reader to check them.

The database has also been enriched with links to other online sources, such as biographies, testimonies, metrical records, memorial records such as those from the Memorial of the Victims of Persecutions against Jews by the Nazi regime in Germany (Gedenkbuch), the Documentation Center for Resistance in Austria (Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes), the website of the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, the Pages of Testimony pages at Yad VaShem or the Jewish genealogy sites. All these sites are freely accessible but some of them may request pre-registration, login or other security procedures. The information provided by these other sources may sometimes contradict this repository and/or may contain inaccurate information. Please note that each referenced site is responsible for their own material.

To unmistakably identify the uncertain birthplaces of people born in France (mainly in Alsace/Lorraine), we consulted the departmental archives online to find the trace of their birth in the civil records and decennial tables. In these cases too, links to the websites of the Departmental Archives were added.

The critical comparison of these different data has made it possible to precisely identify the many birthplaces of the deportees, which until then have remained indecipherable. For 93% of deportees, there is now a precise estimate of their place of birth. For the remaining 7% were born in 3,900 locality names are still not identified (out of 15,000 distinct place names in the 2012 Memorial) but they account for 2% of the persons. In a few hundred cases, this study also made it possible to propose additions and corrections of errors in the surnames, first names and maiden names of the persons named in the Memorial.

By giving everyone the name of the city or village of their birth, this tool hopefully helps to enrich and clarify a little more the identity of the victims and their journey. For genealogists, this is the key to any search for ancestors upstream and other branches of the family.

This study shed new light on the distribution of deportees according to their place of birth. It is striking to find out the extreme diversity of this population born among 6,400 towns and villages across 74 countries (in 2019 borders), mostly in now vanished Jewish communities in Europe and around the Mediterranean basin. The distribution of the birth places can be seen here.

However, we did not systematically correct the first and last names when the differences are minor and they do not affect the phonetic search or when translating to French: for example, an entry for a person named Maurice Loeb in the 2012 Memorial and Moritz Löb in the Gedenkbuch may remain unchanged.

When the information from the various sources diverges totally, we left the information of each source. The birth dates in different sources often differ by a year or two, perhaps reflecting the strategy of the persecuted Jews to declare themselves younger or older, depending on the case, to increase their chances of survival.

The 1978 version of the Memorial specifies the nationality of a large number of the deportees until June 1943 and indicates who were the known survivors in 1945. These data being excluded from the 2012 version, they are currently only partial and we will complete them in the future.

According to the practices used in genealogy, this tool uses the current names of each locality, as they are used locally, including their accents, cedillas and other diacritics (e.g. Łódź, Ivano-Frankivsk, Chişinău, Bucureşti). However, we have indicated the ancient names of these localities when they appeared on the sources (e.g. Stanisławów for Ivano-Frankivsk in Ukraine, Kishinev for Chişinău in Moldova). For non-Latin alphabets (i.e. Greek, Arabic, Russian, Belarussian, Bulgarian, Serbian, Macedonian, Hebrew), we use the transliteration of these places to the Latin alphabet as found on the English versions of Google Maps or Wikipedia (e.g. Thessaloniki for Θεσσαλονίκη). Country names are in English (e.g. Hungary, Germany). The names of the provinces and administrative subdivisions of each country are usually in the local language with accents and diacritics signs: for example, the Rhine-Palatinate land in Germany is indicated as Rheinland-Pfalz, the French departments are noted with their accents (e.g. Ariège, not Ariege), the Holy Cross Province (voivodeship) in Poland is noted Świętokrzyskie.

Despite the utmost attention given to this study, some choices may prove to be wrong, some errors may have occurred. I am the one and only responsible for them. Contact me here for any additions or corrections.

Geographical tools

• Google Maps

• Wikipedia in English, French, German, Polish, and all the european languages.

• U.S. Board on Geographic Names

• Gary Mokotoff and Sallyann Amdur Sack with Alexander Sharon, Where Once We Walked: Revised Edition, Avotaynu, Teaneck, NJ, 2002.

• JewishGen Community Database

• JewishGen Gazetteer

• Paris street names, including former street names.

• Judaism of Alsace and Lorraine.

Linguistic and onomastic tools

• Daitch-Mokotoff soundex

• Beider-Morse Phonetic Matching

• Beider, Alexander, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Russian Empire: Revised Edition (Bergenfield, NJ: Avotaynu, 2008)

• Beider, Alexander, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from the Kingdom of Poland (Teaneck, NJ: Avotaynu, 1996)

• Beider, Alexander, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Galicia (Bergenfield, NJ: Avotaynu, 2004)

• Beider, Alexander, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Maghreb, Gibraltar, and Malta (Bergenfield, NJ: Avotaynu, 2017)

• Beider, Alexander, A Dictionary of Jewish Surnames from Italy, France, and Portuguese Communities (Bergenfield, NJ: Avotaynu, 2019)

• Menk, Lars, A Dictionary of German Jewish Surnames (Bergenfield, NJ: Avotaynu, 2005)

• Tagger, Mathilde, Dictionary of Bulgarian Jewish Surnames (New Haven, CT: Avotaynu, 2014)

• Steve Morse: Searching Ashkenazic Reference Books for Jewish Surnames

• Steve Morse: Searching Sephardic Reference Books for Jewish Surnames

Many publications by Beate and Serge Klarsfeld (books, magazines, stories) are now available online in english and in french here.

• Serge Klarsfeld, Le Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France (Klarsfeld, Paris, 1978)

• Serge Klarsfeld, Le Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France (Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France, Paris, 2012)

• Alexandre Doulut, Serge Klarsfeld, Sandrine Labeau, Les rescapés juifs d'Auschwitz témoignent (Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France/Après l'oubli, Paris, 2005)

• Alexandre Doulut, Serge Klarsfeld, Sandrine Labeau, Mémorial des 3943 rescapés juifs de France (Beate Klarsfeld Foundation/Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France/Après l'oubli, Paris, 2018)

• Serge Klarsfeld, French children of the Holocaust, a Memorial (New York University Press, New York, 1995)

• Serge Klarsfeld, French children of the Holocaust, a Memorial, Volume 2 (Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France, Paris, 2016)

• Le Mémorial de la Shoah, Paris

• Le Livre Mémorial de la déportation en France, Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation. This repository lists the convoys and persons deported from France for persecution reasons (political opponents, resistants, civil hostages) and not for persecution reasons.

• Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial And Museum, a partial list of deportees, prisoners in Auschwitz-Birkenau who where not gassed immediately upon arrival.

• Victims of the Persecution of Jews under the National Socialist Tyranny in Germany, Gedenkbuch

• Yad VaShem, Jerusalem

• US Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, DC

• The mentions 'mort en déportation' (died during deportation) published in the French Official Journal

• Cartography of Deported Children in Paris and France

• AMEJD, Associations for the Memory of Deported Jewish Children

• Dokumentationsarchiv des österreichischen Widerstandes, Austrian Victims of the Holocaust

• Czech Victims of the Holocaust

• Dutch Victims of the Holocaust

• Centro di Documentazione Ebraica Contemporanea, Shoah Victims in Italy

• Kaserne Dossin, Memorial, Museum and Documentation Center on the Holocaust and Human Rights, Malines/Mechelen, Belgium

• MemoShoah Luxembourg, Association for the memory of the Holocaust victims who lived in Luxembourg before WWII

• Le Maitron, a biographical dictionary of all those who were shot, executed or massacred in France, 1940-1944.

• JewishGen Holocaust Database

• Bas-Rhin Memorial, Holocaust deportees and victims born or residing in the Bas-Rhin département (Alsace, around Strasbourg).

• Haut-Rhin Memorial, Holocaust deportees and victims born or residing in the Haut-Rhin département (Alsace, around Colmar and Mulhouse).

• Le Mémorial des déportés Judéo-Espagnols de France, Association Muestros Dezaparesidos, Paris 2019. This memorial book focus on the fate of the Jews originating from the Balkans, Greece and Turkey who were deported from France.

• Franche-Comté Memorial, Holocaust deportees and victims from Franche-Comté, an area around Besançon in Eastern France including the following departments : Doubs, Jura, Haute-Saône and Territoire de Belfort.

• Amis de la Fondation pour la Mémoire de la Déportation de l'Allier, a website to the memory of the deportees, Jews and non-Jews, born or resident in the Allier department, in central France (cities: Vichy, Moulins, Montluçon).

• Les déportés juifs de la Sarthe, a website to the memory of the persecuted Jews born or resident in the Sarthe department, in western France.

• Association de Recherche et d’Etudes Historiques sur la Shoah en Val de Loire, a website to the memory of the persecuted Jews from the Indre-et_Loire department, around Tours.

• La Shoah dans l'arrondissement de Saint-Nazaire, a website to the memory of the persecuted Jews from the Saint-Nazaire district, an area within the Loire-Atlantique department near Nantes.

• Les Juifs de la Manche sous l'Occupation, Archival research about the Jews from the Manche department (50). See also the Cherbourg Memorial wiki.

• Itinéraires de Mémoire sur la Shoah sur les Juifs de Soissons, Archival documentation about the Shoah of the Jews of Soissons, Aisne (02)

• Jewish refugees in Haute-Vienne, faces and stories, Holocaust deportees and victims born or residing in the Haute-Vienne département (around Limoges).

• Convoys from Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande association and web site in memory of the internees in the Loiret camps - Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande - and deported by convoys nos. 4, 5, 6, 13, 14, 15, 16 and 35.

• Les Témoins - The witnesses, testimonies from relatives of the internees in the Loiret camps (CERCIL).

• Convoy no. 8, association and web site in memory of the deportees of convoy no. 8 (left Angers on July 20, 1942 for Auschwitz-Birkenau).

• Convoys nos. 50 and 51, Serge Klarsfeld online monography on these two transports from Drancy to Sobibor in March 1943.

• Convoi no. 64, web site in memory of the deportees of convoy no. 68 (left Drancy on December 7, 1943 towards Auschwitz-Birkenau).

• Convoy no. 68 association and web site in memory of the deportees of convoy no. 68 (left Drancy on February 10, 1944 parti towards Auschwitz-Birkenau).

• Convoy no. 73 web site in memory of the deportees of convoy no. 73 (left Drancy camp on Mai 15, 1944 towards the Baltic states).

• Convoi no. 76, Biographies of deportees from convoy no. 76 (left Drancy on June 30, 1944 towards Auschwitz-Birkenau), Cercle d'étude sur la Déportation et la Shoah.

• Convoy no. 77 association and web site in memory of the deportees of convoy no. 77 (left Drancy camp on July 31, 1944 for Auschwitz-Birkenau)

• Anonymes, Justes et Persécutés durant la période Nazie dans les communes de France, a website about Jews and persecuted populations during the Nazi era thorough all localities of France.

• Déportés politiques à Auschwitz, le convoi du 6 juillet 1942 dit des "45000", a website to the memory of the deportees from July 6, 1942 convoy I.42. from Compiègne to Auschwitz-Birkenau, also known as the Convoy of the 45000 in reference to their inmate numbers. In this convoy some 50 Jews joined hundred of persons, political deportees for repression reason.

• Internees in the camps of the Pyrénées-Orientales. This database created by the Archives Départementales des Pyrénées-Orientales enables to trace the itinerary of men and women who passed through the internment camps of this département, including Perpignan, Rivesaltes, Saint-Cyprien and Argelès-sur-Mer.

• Travailler sur la Shoah avec des ressources numériques, a comprehensive educational digipad by Christine Guimonnet, with online resources about the Holocaust (in french)

Metrical books and genealogy

• French Departmental Archives Online,

• Archives nationales d'outre-mer, index of metrical records from French citizens of Algeria.

• JewishGen

• Jewish Records Indexing-Poland

Publications

• Using Auschwitz Prisoner Numbers to Correct Deportation Lists, research study on Convoy 1, Genealogy journal, February 2024 (in english).

• Le Mémorial de Klarsfeld sur Internet, Mémoire Vive N° 73, September 2022 (Association Alumim), interview by Valérie Cudkowicz (in french and in hebrew בעברית).

• L’évolution du Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France, video conference to Cercle de Généalogie Juive de France, March 2021 (in french).

• Le Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France est désormais en ligne, Convoi no. 77 website, Charlotte Oberti, November 2020 (in french).

• L’évolution du Mémorial de la Déportation des Juifs de France, Bulletin des Fils et Filles des Déportés Juifs de France, number 146-147, September 2020 (in french).

Acknowledgments

I am particularly indebted to Steve Morse for his logistical support around the One-Step tool, and for hosting the search engine on his website. Without the One-Step tool available, I would probably not have started this project.

Let me express my gratefulness to the Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem, and specially to Dr. Alexander Avram, Director of the Hall of the Names, to authorize the usage of their API to create a direct interface to the Pages of Testimony kept in the Central Database of Shoah Victims' Names.

I am endebted to VUBPRESS Brussels University Press and to the Jewish Museum of Deportation and Resistance at Mechelen/Malines, Belgium (Kazerne Dossin) to allow me and publish the history of the déportation transports of the Jews of Belgium which took away to Auschwitz the Jews arrested in the Nord/Pas-de-Calais departments of Northern France.

I submitted a few questions and working assumptions to Alexander Beider, who kindly replied with his encyclopedic knowledge.

I thank Eve Line Blum-Cherchevsky (z"l), Chantal Dossin and Georges Mayer who helped me to resolve questions about the deportees of convoys 73, 76 and 77 respectively. Eve Line, stressing the importance of officially declaring victims as "died in deportation" by the French Ministry of Defense (War Veterans Affairs), enlightened me as to what could be expected from the lists published in the Journal Officiel. Thanks to Nicolas Coiffait who shared with me the material he indexed from the archives of the Rothschild Hospital.

The German Federal Archives (BundesArchiv in Berlin) were kind enough to share their information on the German Jews who were in France during the war.

Jackie Schwarz applied her remarkable skills to fill gaps about Jews who came from Antwerpen or Belgium.

Muriel Némirovski supports me in numerous cases, especially on deportees from the Gard and Vaucluse departments; moreover, she helped me to test the data consistency in this Memorial and detect problems. Her dedication significally contributes to improve the tool reliability.

Nathalie Louvet, seasoned genealogist, shares with me her findings from Paris Archives, the Moscow collection and elsewhere, enabling to restore countless distorsions on facts and names.

Yves Moreau, historian and creator of the website Les déportés juifs de la Sarthe, shares his remarks about the deportees from Western France.

My friends Jacqueline Weisz, a member of the Sons and Daughters of the Jewish deportees from France association and Philippe Boukara, historian at the Mémorial de la Shoah in Paris, provided me with useful advices and feedback on the first steps of this project.

Since 2018, many researchers, users and relatives of the victims reported inaccuracies and shared valuable complements. May they all be thanked here! Again, if errors have crept in, I assume full responsibility for them.

Finally, I wish to thank my spouse Isabelle, who supported me by her smart remarks and infinite patience.

Jean-Pierre Stroweis
Jerusalem, Israel