Place Daviel

A discreet stele, a heavy memory: the 1943 roundup at Marseille’s Old Port
Right in front of the Hôtel-Dieu, in a corner often passed without a glance, stands a small bronze memorial. Discreet, almost silent — but heavy with meaning. It is not a museum, not an official monument with big golden letters. It is a sculpture: a body lying down, emaciated, almost faded, yet in pain like the memories it evokes.

This site commemorates one of the darkest — and least known — episodes of Marseille’s history: the Old Port roundup of January 22, 23, and 24, 1943.

That weekend, while Marseille had been under German occupation since November 1942, the city was literally sealed off. More than 12,000 French policemen, supported by the Nazis, searched house by house, street by street. Thirty thousand residents were expelled, 1,500 buildings were blown up. The Old Port was leveled, emptied, destroyed — officially to “sanitize” a district deemed unhealthy. Unofficially? A reprisal operation, a political and racial purge, planned at the highest levels of the Nazi regime.

More than 4,000 Jews were rounded up, several hundred of whom were sent to the death camps. Sobibor, Sachsenhausen, Compiègne… names that still resonate today like scars.

The Opéra district was not spared. There too, families were torn from their sleep, sometimes in pajamas, separated forever. All this carried out with brutal violence, by zealous French police and militias often recruited from the local underworld.

This work by Louis Amaud, inaugurated in 1983 thanks to a committee of former deportees, pierces the heart. It waits for us to stop, to learn, to remember.

There is also the Memorial to the Death Camps at Fort Saint-Jean.