The two-hour Shoah Memorial Trail in Luxembourg City offers an insight into the eradication of Jewish life in Luxembourg by Nazi Germany.
MemoShoah Luxembourg asbl created this memorial tour to ensure that the fate of the approximately 4,000 Jewish women and men who lived in Luxembourg on the day of the German invasion is not forgotten. The trail passes by well-known and lesser-known places that played an important role in the Shoah in occupied Luxembourg.
The tour begins at the memorial plaque in the glass hall of the city's main railway station. From October 1941 onwards, a total of 659 Jewish women and men were deported from this station in eight trains to various ghettos and extermination camps. The last of the nine stops on the memorial trail is the Mémorial de la Shoah on Boulevard Roosevelt. Here, the fate of all Jewish victims of Nazism from Luxembourg is commemorated. The Mémorial de la Shoah consists of the Kaddish Monument and the Wall of Names, on which the names of 1,225 Jewish people who did not survive Nazi Germany's anti-Semitic persecution policy are engraved.
According to current figures, 1,157 of the 4,000 Jewish inhabitants fell victim to the genocide of the Jews, the ‘Shoah’ (Holocaust), and 68 people lost their lives in the resistance against Nazi Germany or in other circumstances. In addition to the 659 people who were deported directly from Luxembourg to the East, around 600 Jewish residents of Luxembourg were deported from France and Belgium to extermination camps. A total of around 700 Jewish people from the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg were murdered in the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp alone.
It was not until 2016 that the Jewish victims of the Nazi regime from Luxembourg were recognised as an equal victim group alongside the two other local victim groups – those who were forced into the German military and those who fought in the resistance.
