Musée-Mémorial des Enfants du Vel d’Hiv

The Musée-Mémorial des Enfants du Vel d’Hiv (Children of Vel d’Hiv Memorial Museum) in Orléans is part of the Centre d’Etude et de Recherche sur les Camps d’Internement dans le Loiret (Centre for Study and Research on the Loiret Internment Camps), or CERCIL. It is museum and memorial to the history of three Second World War internment camps in the Loiret department – in Beaune-la-Rolande, Pithiviers and Jargeau – as well as to the approximately 4400 children detained and deported from France by German and Vichy authorities as part of the Holocaust, including in Paris’s Vel d’Hiv roundup on July 16-17, 1942.   

The CERCIL was founded in 1991 with the purpose of locating and preserving documentation on the internment camps of Loiret, and the experiences of internees and deportees. The memorial museum was inaugurated on January 27, 2011, and is housed in a former elementary school. The museum contains a permanent exhibition on the history of the Loiret camps and the children interned and deported there, as well as a memorial to all children deported from France which includes a fragment of a former barracks from the camp at Beaune-la-Rolande.