France will create a museum and memorial to honor Roma who were persecuted during World War II and the German occupation. The initiative was announced yesterday by the Prime Minister, Élisabeth Borne, within the framework of 80 measures to combat racism, anti-Semitism and any discrimination due to people's origin.
The museum dedicated to gypsies will be located in the former Montreuil-Bellay concentration camp, in the Maine-et-Loire department, some 300 kilometers southwest of Paris.
Borne delivered a speech at the Arab World Institute in the capital. The prime minister is especially sensitive to racism because her father, a Jew, survived Auschwitz, but never recovered from the trauma and ended up committing suicide when the prime minister was a child.
The head of the French Government warned that "hate has been reinvented", sometimes under an intellectual guise and, frequently, "hidden behind social networks". For Borne, it is "intolerable" that racial discrimination is still alive in "a secular and indivisible Republic."
The new measures include the obligation for school students to visit, at least once during their educational career, a place of memory of discrimination, for example, the Shoah memorial in Paris or even Auschwitz. Teacher training on the subject will be strengthened. Random checks will also be carried out in companies to detect possible cases of racism. It is not excluded that there may be sanctions and that companies that commit discrimination be made public, as an example.
