French president denounces “unbridled” hatred of Jews by dedicating a memorial to the 80th anniversary of the Vel’ d’Hiv raid
French President Emmanuel Macron this Sunday denounced the existence of “rampant anti-Semitism”, coinciding with the 80th anniversary of the attack on the Winter Velodrome in Paris, staged in July 1942. The head of the Elysée has a Holocaust memorial in the old Pithiviers train station, where the victims of Vel d’Hiv, as the Parisians called the Winter Velodrome, passed. Pithiviers is today a symbol of the Vichy regime’s anti-Semitic and collaborative policies with Nazi Germany.
On July 16 and 17, 1942, nearly 13,000 Jews were arrested by the French police in and around the capital. “The French police only needed one weapon: the lists of men, women and children, whose only mistake was that they were Jewish,” Macron recalled. Only a hundred of them survived the Holocaust. Among his victims were some 4,000 children, 3,000 of whom were of Gallic nationality.
The president explained that after their arrest in their homes, they were transported in buses “out of shame” to the Winter Velodrome, which “became the first circle of hell for five days.” The Pithiviers were then deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp, where the vast majority of them were murdered by the Nazis in the gas chambers.
“In this front room of the fields, French families whispered words in Yiddish – a language belonging to Jewish communities – to reassure themselves that France would never do that. But France did it, the French state did it,” Macron insisted. These foreign and French Jews were “victims of Nazi Germany and Vichy France.”
For decades, France has preferred to forget this black chapter of its history. In 1995, Jacques Chirac became the first French president to officially acknowledge the country’s responsibility for the attack on Vel’ d’Hiv. “That day France committed the irreparable,” said the then president.
Eighty years after the major attack on the Winter Velodrome, Macron has called on citizens to “double vigilance” and “look the truth in the eye” in the face of “rampant” anti-Semitism and historical revisionism. “Neither Pétain, nor Laval, nor Bousquet, nor Darquier de Pellepoix, none of them wanted to save the Jews,” he recalls. The head of state believes that those who insist on these “lies” are falsifying history, trying to destroy the Republic and divide the country.
Source: La Verdad
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