La Cité de la Muette council estate in Drancy some 7 km from the centre of Paris. La Cité de la Muette was originally planned as a vast public housing estate, the first of its kind in the Parisian suburbs if not in France. It was part of the `modern movement' in architecture and was influenced by the Bauhaus, the important German architectural school. The architects were Marcel Lods and Eugène Beaudoin and work on the estate they designed started in the mid-1930s. Like the council estates built in the postwar years, and in spite of the disturbing political situation in Europe, it was constructed in an era of optimism to provide low cost housing to those on low incomes. However, it was not yet completed when war began.

By 1941 Drancy, including La Cité de la Muette, was turned into a transit camp for `undesirables' including communists, Spanish republicans fleeing Franco and, of course, Jews. The transformation was an easy one as in 1939, at the start of the war it had been used as an internment camp for German nationals, many of whom, by a cruel twist of fate, were German Jews fleeing Nazi persecution. There were many such camps all over France and they were run by the French police. Despite being run by the French police between August 1941 and July 1943, living conditions in what was still a building site were predicably poor. There was little water, no electricity, no toilets, no privacy and the food rations were inadequate. Drancy was planned to provide housing for 700 but at its peak in the 1940s as a transit camp it held 7,000. It now houses just 400. Deaths there were inevitable. And yet this was not the worst: Drancy became the stopping off point for thousands of Jews resident in France on their way to Nazi concentration camps in Germany and Eastern Europe, the most notorious being Auschwitz. Jews from all over France were rounded up, arrested and sent to various transit camps - some call them concentration camps - of which the most infamous was Drancy. From there they were sent by train - or rather, by cattle truck (wagons à bestiaux) east to Auschwitz. From 1942 onwards, more and more Jews were rounded up in summary raids, sent to Drancy and from there on to the Nazi death camps.