France remembers its horror of sending 13,000 Jews to Nazi Germany during Vel d’Hiv deportations
Family by family, house by house, French police rounded up 13,000 people in central Paris on two terrifying days in July 1942. Then they sent them to Nazi death camps simply because they were Jewish.
Eight decades later, France is honouring the victims and trying to keep their memory alive.
A week of ceremonies marking 80 years since the Vel d’Hiv police roundup on 16-17 July 1942 ended on Sunday with a speech by President Emmanuel Macron at the railway station where the Jews were sent to their deaths in Nazi Germany.
The raids were among the most shameful acts undertaken by France during World War II and one of the darkest moments in its history.
Over those two days, police herded 13,152 people -- including 4,115 children -- into the Winter Velodrome of Paris, known as the Vel d’Hiv, before being sent to Nazi camps.
It was the most extensive roundup of members of the Jewish community in western Europe. The children were separated from their families, and only a very few survived.
In public testimonies over the past week, survivor Rachel Jedinak described a middle-of-the-night knock on the door, and being marched through the streets of Paris and herded into the velodrome in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower.
She recalled her desperate mother shouting at the police. Some neighbours informed on Jews, while others wept as they watched them corralled like livestock, she said.
Chantal Blaszka’s aunts and uncle were among the children rounded up: 6-year-old Simon, 9-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 some 4,000 other children targeted in the raids.
Photos of the children hang from tree trunks, the result of years of painstaking
Read more on euronews.com
