Book Launch – The Silent City of Drancy

Join us as we launch Stephanie Hesz-Wood’s new book, The Silent City of Drancy: Social Housing & Holocaust Memory on the Margins of Paris.
About this Event

Join us as we launch Stephanie Hesz-Wood’s new book, The Silent City of Drancy: Social Housing & Holocaust Memory on the Margins of Paris. This event is held as part of the Holocaust and Genocide Research Partnership.

Revealing the ways architecture gives form to history and memory. Hesz-Wood tells the extraordinary story of a building in Drancy, a town on the north-eastern outskirts of Paris. Drancy’s name has become synonymous with the internment and deportation of Jewish people. From 1941 to 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 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. 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.

Hesz-Wood will be joined in conversation by Professor Dan Stone. Following the conversation, there will be a Q&A session and a reception, at which there will be the opportunity to purchase a discounted copy of Hesz-Wood’s book.

About the Speakers

Stephanie Hesz-Wood has a PhD in Modern History from Royal Holloway, University of London, for which she was the recipient of an Arts and Humanities Research Council Doctoral Award. Hesz-Wood’s interdisciplinary research interests include architectural and urban history, oral and cultural history, Holocaust memorialisation and representation, and the history of art and design. Hesz-Wood appeared on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking (BBC Sounds, 2021), discussing her research on Drancy alongside Michael Rosen, Martin Puchner, and Ludovine Broch, and has published a chapter in the book Beyond Camps and Forced Labour (Palgrave Macmillan, 2021).

Dan Stone is Professor of Modern History and Director of the Holocaust Research Institute at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is the author of over 100 scholarly articles and some 25 books, including, most recently: The Holocaust: An Unfinished History (Penguin, 2023); Fate Unknown: Tracing the Missing after World War II and the Holocaust (OUP, 2023), among others. His next book is a history of the Holocaust in Romania, to be published by Penguin in early 2027.