France commemorates 80 years since the roundup of nearly 13,000 Jews, including 4,115 children, who were taken to Auschwitz for extermination
800 meters from the Eiffel Tower is the Vel d’Hiv Children’s Memorial Garden, as the Parisians called the Winter Velodrome. In July 1942, this sports pavilion in the 15th arrondissement of Paris was the scene of the largest roundup of Jews in France and Europe. A place of meditation and remembrance that few Parisians and tourists know. Eighty years later, with books, an exhibition and official acts, the Gallic country commemorates one of the most tragic episodes of the Vichy regime’s collaboration with the Nazi occupier.
After the Second World War, the French prefer to forget this dark chapter in their history. For decades, only the Jewish community commemorated the victims of Vel d’Hiv. Jacques Chirac was the first French president to acknowledge responsibility for what happened at the Winter Velodrome. “Yes, the occupier’s criminal madness was supported by the French, by the French state. France, the homeland of the Enlightenment and human rights, the land of welcome and asylum, committed the irreparable that day. He broke his word and turned his protégés over to their executioners,” he said in 1995.
The president, Emmanuel Macron, will inaugurate a new memorial to the Shoah this Sunday in the old train station of Pithiviers. In the summer of 1942, freight trains carrying the detainees of the Vel d’Hiv roundup departed from this disused small provincial station to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. The Nazi occupiers initially asked Paris to arrest 40,000 Jews: men and women of working age. They were already preparing ‘the final solution’, extermination.
On 16 and 17 July 1942, at the request of the Nazi occupier and with the consent of the Vichy government, 12,884 Jewish women, men and children were arrested by the police in the French capital and surroundings. Almost all of them died in Auschwitz. Only a hundred survived. «No other operation in Western Europe was of this magnitude: about 13,000 people, arrested by 4,500 agents in less than two days. Nowhere, not even in Berlin between 1941 and 1943, had so many victims been arrested in such a short time,” explains Laurent Joly, director and researcher of the National Center for Scientific Research, in his book “The Vel d’Hiv Raid.” .
The raid began at 4 a.m. on July 16 and ended at 1 p.m. the next day. The French police showed up at their houses. They knew where they lived because they were registered in a ‘Jewish file’. They expected to arrest 25,000 German, Austrian, Polish, Czechoslovak and stateless Jewish adults and some 10,000 children living in and around Paris.
After their arrest, they were separated. The childless adults were transferred to the Drancy internment camp. The families were taken by bus to the Winter Velodrome, where no food or anything else was planned for their reception. The sanitary conditions were terrible, survivors recall. Between 19 and 22 July, they cleared the Vel d’Hiv and transferred the families to the French internment camps of Beaune-la-Rolande and Pithiviers. Adults and adolescents were first deported, children, later forcibly separated from their parents.
The names and ages of the 4,115 children arrested in this massive roundup of Jews in Paris are written on a wall in the Vel d’Hiv Children’s Memorial Garden, located on the site of the Winter Velodrome, destroyed in 1959. About 3,000 were born in France.
Frida Abelanksi, 9 years old, is the first on the list of minor victims. The latter was named Danielle Gradsztejn and she was 3 years old when she was arrested. Fourteen children from the Vel d’Hiv died in French internment camps. Most were killed in Auschwitz. Only six teenagers survived. In this Parisian garden monument, located a few meters from the Winter Velodrome Raid Monument, you can see the photos of some of them.
Another way to give a face to the Vel d’Hiv tragedy is the exhibition ‘Cabu. The Vel’ d’Hiv’ attack on the Shoah memorial in Paris, the largest Holocaust archive center in Europe. Publishing house Tallandier has published Cabu’s book with the illustrations. In 1967, the French cartoonist illustrated this tragic episode for the magazine ‘Le Nouveau Candide’, on the occasion of the publication of the book ‘The Great Raid of Vel d’Hiv’ by Claude Lévy and Paul Tillard. The work revealed this black page in history to the French and was a great sales success.
Cabu, who had nightmares while carrying out this assignment, called his black-and-white drawings “punched in the mouth.” The cartoonist was killed on January 7, 2015 in the attack on the editors of the satirical magazine ‘Charlie Hebdo’. The jihadists wanted to retaliate for the 2006 publication of the controversial cartoons of Mohammed.
Source: La Verdad
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