PARIS (AP) — Family by family, house by house, French police arrested 13,000 people in two horrific days in July 1942, sending them to Nazi death camps simply because they were Jewish. Eighty years later, France honors the victims and tries to keep their memory alive.
For the dwindling number of survivors of France’s wartime crimes, Sunday’s commemorations are particularly important. At a time of rising anti-Semitism and far-right discourse glossing over France’s role in the Holocaust, they worry that the lessons of history are being forgotten.
A week of ceremonies marking 80 years since the police seizure of Vel d’Hiv on July 16-17, 1942 culminated on Sunday with an event led by President Emmanuel Macron.
The raids were among the most shameful actions taken by France during World War II and among the darkest moments in its history.
During those two days, police rounded up 13,152 people – including 4,115 children – at Paris’ Winter Velodrome, known as the Vel d’Hiv, before they were sent to Nazi camps. It was the largest such action in Western Europe. Children were separated from their families; very few survived.
In public testimony last week, survivor Rachel Jedinak described how there was a knock on the door in the middle of the night and how she was marched through the streets of Paris and thrown onto the velodrome in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
She remembers her distraught mother screaming at the police. Some neighbors told about Jews, others wept as they watched them being herded like cattle.
Chantal Blaschka’s aunts and uncle were among the arrested children: 6-year-old Simon, 9-year-old Bert, 15-year-old Suzanne. Their names are now carved on a memorial in a garden where the velodrome once stood, along with around 4,000 other children targeted by the attacks. Photographs of the children hang from tree trunks, the result of years of painstaking research to identify and honor the long-anonymous victims.
Of the children deported from Vel d’Hiv 80 years ago, only six survive.
“Can you imagine?” Blashka asked, pointing to the names and shaking his head. “Can you imagine?”
Serge Klarsfeld, a famous Nazi hunter whose father was deported to Auschwitz, spoke at the garden on Saturday, calling it “a harrowing testimony to the horrors experienced by Jewish families”.
He emphasized the urgency of passing on living memory. “The youngest of us is 80 years old,” he said of the children of the deportees.
Michelin Tinader’s father was among the 76,000 Jews deported from France during the collaborationist Vichy government. As a child, Tinader herself had to hide from the Nazis.
She took part in a commemoration ceremony this week at the Shoah Memorial in the Paris suburb of Drancy and is part of an association based at the site that organizes educational trips to Auschwitz.
Drancy held a transit center that was central to the deadly journey of French Jews to the Nazi camps. About 63,000 people were detained during the war.
The Drancy Shoah Memorial actively documents the Holocaust, especially for younger generations. This work is particularly important at a time when Jewish communities are increasingly alarmed by rising anti-Semitism in Europe. France’s interior ministry has reported a rise in anti-Semitic acts in France in recent years and said that while racist and anti-religious acts are generally on the rise, Jews are being disproportionately targeted.
Anxiety has worsened for some after the far-right National Unity party made a surprise electoral breakthrough last month, winning a record 89 seats in France’s National Assembly. Party co-founder Jean-Marie Le Pen has been convicted of racism and belittling the Holocaust. His daughter Marin, who now leads the party, has distanced herself from her father’s positions, but the party’s past still worries many Jews.
During the campaign for this year’s French presidential election, far-right candidate and pundit Eric Zemmur pushed the false claim that Adolf Hitler’s Vichy associates protected French Jews.
It took France’s leadership 50 years after World War II to formally acknowledge the country’s involvement in the Holocaust, when then-President Jacques Chirac apologized for the role of French authorities in the Vel d’Hiv attacks.
On Sunday, Macron visited a site in Pitiviers south of Paris where police sent families after the arrest in Vel d’Hive before sending them to camps.
“The policy from 1942 onwards was to organize the killing of the Jews in Europe and therefore to organize the deportation of the Jews from France,” said Jacques Frege, director of the Shoah Memorial in Paris.
“Most of the time the decisions were made by the Nazis and implemented by the French administration,” he said. “But the leadership was French. (French) Gendarmerie or policemen ruled and controlled.’
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Le Deley reported from Drancy, France. Masha McPherson in Paris contributed.
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