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France honored 13,000 Holocaust victims on Sunday in ceremonies marking 80 years since French police arrested them for two days in July 1942 simply because they were Jewish and sent them to Nazi death camps.
President Emmanuel Macron presided over the event, which culminated in a week of ceremonies commemorating the police arrest at Vel d’Hiv on July 16-17, 1942. Macron visited a site in Pithiviers south of Paris where police sent families after the Vel d’Hiv arrest , before sending them to camps.
The raids were among the most shameful actions taken by France during the Second World War 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.
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Children were separated from their families. Of these children, expelled from Vel d’Hiv 80 years ago, only six survive.
A memorial is pictured near a wagon symbolizing the Drancy camp at the Shoah memorial on Tuesday, July 12, 2022 in Drancy, outside Paris. The mayor of Paris and head of the French Holocaust Memorial will mark the 80th anniversary of the arrest of Vel d’Hiv, France’s largest Nazi concentration camp for Jews, by visiting the site used as an internment camp for dozens during World War II war of thousands of people who were then sent to Auschwitz and other death camps. (AP Photo/Tomas Padilla)
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.
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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.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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