PARIS –
Family by family, house by house, French police rounded up 13,000 people in two terrifying days in July 1942, sending them to Nazi death camps simply because they were Jews. Eighty years later, France honors the victims and tries to keep their memory alive.
For France’s dwindling number of war crimes survivors, Sunday’s commemoration ceremonies are especially important. At a time of rising anti-Semitism and far-right discourse sugarcoating 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 Vel d’Hiv police raid of July 16-17, 1942 culminates on Sunday with an event led by French President Emmanuel Macron.
The raids were one of the most shameful acts carried out by France during World War II and one of the darkest moments in its history.
During those two days, the police herded 13,152 people, including 4,115 children, to the Paris Winter Velodrome, known as the Vel d’Hiv, before sending them to Nazi camps. It was the largest such raid in Western Europe. The children were separated from their families; very few survived.
In public testimony over the past week, survivor Rachel Jedinak described being knocked on her door in the middle of the night and led through the streets of Paris and led to the velodrome, in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
She remembered her desperate mother yelling at the police. Some neighbors denounced the Jews, others cried seeing them rounded up like cattle.
Chantal Blaszka’s aunts and uncle were among the children detained, including six-year-old Simon, nine-year-old Berthe and 15-year-old Suzanne. Their names are now engraved on a monument in a garden where the velodrome once stood, along with 4,000 other children who were targeted in the raids. Photos of the children hang from tree trunks, the result of years of painstaking research to identify and honor the unnamed victims.
Of the children deported from the Vel d’Hiv 80 years ago, only six survived.
“You can imagine?” Blaszka asked, pointing to the names and shaking his head. “You can imagine?”
Serge Klarsfeld, a renowned Nazi hunter whose father was deported to Auschwitz, spoke in the garden on Saturday, calling it a “moving testimony to the horrors experienced by Jewish families.”
He highlighted the urgency of transmitting living memory. “The youngest of us are 80 years old,” she said of the children of deportees.
Micheline Tinader’s father was among the 76,000 Jews deported from France under the collaborationist Vichy government. When she was a child, Tinader herself had to hide from the Nazis.
He participated 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 had a transit center that was central to the deadly journey of French Jews to Nazi camps. Some 63,000 people were arrested during the course of the war.
The Drancy Shoah memorial actively documents the Holocaust, especially for the younger generation. This work is especially important at a time when Jewish communities are increasingly concerned about the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe. The French Interior Ministry has reported an increase in anti-Semitic acts in France in recent years, saying that while racist and anti-religious acts are generally on the rise, Jews are disproportionately targeted.
The anxiety has worsened for some since the far-right National Rally party made a surprise electoral breakthrough last month, winning a record 89 seats in France’s National Assembly. The party’s co-founder, Jean-Marie Le Pen, has been found guilty of racism and downplaying the Holocaust. His daughter Marine, who now heads the party, has distanced herself from her father’s positions, but the party’s past still raises concerns for many Jews.
During the campaign for this year’s French presidential election, far-right candidate and pundit Eric Zemmour spread the false claim that Adolf Hitler’s Vichy collaborators protected the Jews of France.
It took France’s leadership 50 years after World War II to officially acknowledge the state’s involvement in the Holocaust, when then-President Jacques Chirac apologized for the French authorities’ role in the Vel d’Hiv raids.
On Sunday, Macron visited a site in Pithiviers, south of Paris, where police sent families after the Vel d’Hiv raid, before sending them to camps.
“The policy, from 1942 onwards, was to organize the murder of the Jews of Europe and thus to organize the deportation of the Jews of France,” said Jacques Fredj, director of the Paris Shoah Memorial.
“Most of the time, the decisions were made by the Nazis and implemented by the French administration,” he said. “But the management was French. The (French) gendarmes or police were managing and supervising.”
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Le Deley reported from Drancy, France. Masha Macpherson in Paris contributed.