Mémorial des Martyrs de la Déportation

Tucked into the Square de l'Île-de-France at the far eastern point of Île de la Cité, directly behind Notre-Dame, this memorial is easy to miss entirely — its entrance is a narrow stairway descending below ground level, giving no hint from street level of what lies beneath. That's deliberate: architect Georges-Henri Pingusson designed the memorial, inaugurated by Charles de Gaulle in 1962, to physically enact the experience of imprisonment and deportation rather than simply commemorate it from a respectful distance.

Visitors descend a narrow staircase into a small courtyard enclosed by high walls, then pass through a barred, cell-like opening into the memorial's central crypt: a long, dimly lit corridor lined on both sides with 200,000 backlit glass crystals, one for each French deportee who died in Nazi concentration camps during WWII, extending into darkness at both ends to suggest a number too large to fully grasp.