Léon Zyguel Garden

The Leon Zyguel Garden is a quiet refuge in the heart of the twentieth arrondissement, but its namesake lived a life of immense historical consequence. Leon Zyguel was a survivor of both Auschwitz and Buchenwald who spent his later years in nearby Montreuil, dedicating his life to teaching younger generations about the Holocaust. He famously participated in the film Les Heritiers, which followed a group of students as they learned about the resistance and the horrors of deportation through his personal accounts. Beyond his work in schools, he was a driving force behind the effort to ensure that the names of every child deported from Paris were permanently inscribed on plaques at the front of their former schools. When you step into this space, you are standing in a place named for a man who transformed his traumatic history into a lifelong mission of remembrance and education for the youth of France.