Paris 1942: No time for love if they come in the morning
The rounding up of Jews by Parisian police marked a shameful period in French history that echoes today, writes Miriam O’Callaghan
Paris, July 16, 1942
IT’S 4am and 4,000 policemen head out, two-by-two, through the streets of Paris. They’re about to raid houses and apartments in a round-up of the city’s foreign and refugee Jews. Shortly, on landings and in the streets, Parisians will stand thrilled or horrified as bewildered Jewish families stumble down stone staircases on the poison of suspicion, dehumanisation, other-ing.
In the chaos and screaming, some neighbours will grab Jewish children from their parents, shut their doors. Others will note how the usually glamorous Mesdames don’t look so good, so newly woken. Good citizens, puffed up with their duty and opportunity to denounce, will ask: “How is it the Goldbergs have two children, but Monsieur sees today they have none?” Monsieur will find the Goldberg toddler and baby upstairs in the apartment closet. But which Monsieur will it be? The one who will get them out, throw them to their parents? Or the one who will deny the sight of his eyes, make sure they have air, close the door to keep the looters out?
Over two days, Operation Spring Breeze — known as La Rafle du Vel d’Hiv — will arrest 13,152 Jewish people: 3,118 men, 5,919 women, 4,115 children. The raid stands out for two reasons. Firstly, on Vichy orders, children are arrested en masse. Secondly, every strategist and arresting officer is French. The zealots lift not only foreigners and refugees, but Jews who are French born. In contrast, other members of the gendarmerie have either alerted the Resistance or gone houseto-house warning Jews, particularly in the 11th and 20th arrondisements. Thousands go into hiding. Consequently, fewer than half of the 25,000 Jews demanded by the Gestapo and fingered by Petain’s government are ‘delivered’.
Those over 16 and without children are taken to transit camps on fleets of French public buses, ordered-up, lined-up, sealedup for the purpose. Parents and children under 16 are brought to the cycling and skating velodrome known as the Vel d’Hiv near the Eiffel Tower. Here more than 8,000 men, women and children suffer under the Vichy regime and the velodrome’s sealed glass ceiling, in a sweltering July. With only one tap, there is virtually no water; with only three toilets the families must urinate and defecate without regard to privacy or dignity, wherever they can find a space. In this squalor, it is reported that 300 die of measles, scarlet fever and diphtheria. Others throw themselves onto the cycle tracks from the stadium’s top tiers. More are shot by their French guards. Of the few who survive Vel d’Hiv, either by bribery or escape, the overwhelming memory is of the terror, the stench, the constant screaming.
After six days, the Vel d’Hiv prisoners are taken to Drancy transit camp with its only marginally less slaughterhouse-like conditions. Drancy’s multistorey capacity is 700. It will house 7,000 at its busiest. Since the Vichy government is anxious to appease the Gestapo, at Drancy, parents and children are violently separated. The parents are stripped, shorn, subjected to brutal body searches, sealed into cattle trucks and transported.
Some ‘post’ last letters through the slats. These are delivered by French men and women with more than a vestige of humanity.
The babies and children, alone now, begin to die of brutality, starvation, contagion, neglect. That some are mute from shock, others pre-verbal, more too young to know their names, makes them difficult to identify. But who these are children is irrelevant. It’s what they are that packs them, too, into sealed cattle trucks and transports them to Auschwitz. No child can give witness to that journey of two days and two nights, because no child survives. They are gassed immediately on arrival. The youngest Drancy transportee is reportedly 18 months old.
In Paris, as awareness grows of Vel d’Hiv, it is the fate of the children of “The Israelites” that “touches” Parisians — and “gravely”.
Those who assisted in the murder of the children’s parents now set out to malign them as blackmarketeers, migrants, thugs, usurers, gluttons, troublemakers, criminals, job-stealers. They are foreign and filth. Paris and France are better, richer, cleaner without them.
The idea of the French authorities “pulling files from cabinets” on Jewish families, had resonance here in the week of the Charleton Tribunal. Obviously, the situations are nothing alike. Yet, the testimony and questioning bring home how information assembled and acted on by any state and its agents, has the capacity to destroy lives, particularly those of children, without demands and expectation from the very top, that it be managed according to highest possible standards of acuity, human compassion and attention.
In Occupied France, however, files and information could mean death. On paper, denunciations began with ‘Dear Sir’ and ended with ‘Your faithful servant’. In practice, they began a process of exposition, investigation, speculation, separation, culminating in the arrest and extermination of entire families. The US academic Dr Kara Tableman, has written a record of these denunciations in Epistolary Hate: Letters of Denunciation against Jews in Vichy France (1940-1944). If you’re planning a trip to France, it’s worth reading.
In terms of the Jews of Vel d’Hiv, the Nobel Laureate Patrick Modiano, who writes extensively on wartime Paris, remembers how the authorities kept detailed files on the Jews, even those who were temporarily missing, perhaps so they could use this information to find them and then Disappear them completely.
But some Jews in Paris manage to Disappear themselves, and sometimes, thanks to their Muslim neighbours. The Grand Mosque of Paris opened up its heart and extensive underground tunnels to France’s Jews. The rector, Si Kaddour Benghabrit, provided refuge, false papers and escape to dozens. In the case of the Algerian singer and Jew, Salim Halali — a star at the time — he offered not only false papers, but is said to have had Halali’s grandfather’s name inscribed on a tomb in the Islamic cemetery as “proof ” of his being a Muslim.
The ruse worked. Halali evaded transportation and lived until 2005. It was thought that Sephardic Jews had been the sole beneficiaries of the Paris Grand Mosque’s kindness and courage, but it is claimed now by descendants of Ashkenazi Jews that their relatives, too, escaped the death camps thanks to the rector and his community.
It won’t be lost on Islam — or on anyone with an interest in history or humanity — how in the same week of July in 1995, thousands of men and boys would be massacred at Srebrenica, because of what they were: Muslims.
Equally, 1995 was the year that France first acknowledged its role in the Vel d’Hiv round-up and apologised for it. Prime Minister Jacques Chirac said: “France, the Homeland of the Enlightenment and the Rights of Man, a land of welcome and asylum, on that day committed the irreparable. Breaking its word, it handed those who were under its protection over to their executioners.”
Even the shortest walk through Paris will reveal plaques on schools commemorating their Jewish pupils executed in the death camps. Yet, as late as May, Marine le Pen and her acolytes were splitting a single human hair, of the two tonnes kept at Auschwitz, as to whether La Republique should make itself accountable for the actions of Vichy France in the matter of Vel d’Hiv.
In explanation, she cited de Gaulle’s and Mitterrand’s assertions that since La Republique was in London at the time, the Vichy regime was separate and “was not France”.
Around a year ago, the separateness of a couple at an international airport intrigued me. It was something more than the up-in-the-dark discombobulation, the traveller-loneliness, of the rest of us. Then the woman began to sing. Eyes closed, she sang the same song over and over and eventually into her phone. It was a mantra. And electrifying.
Apologising for intruding, I asked her what it was. “It’s traditional Turkish,” she said, passing me her phone to watch a video. She had been adding her voice to those of her medical colleagues sitting together on the ground, singing, having treated victims of a bomb attack in Istanbul.
In writing this piece, I thought of her. Perhaps, because in the round-ups, Jews began to sing the Kaddish, the mourning prayer in memory of the dead, this time, not for others, as is traditional, but for themselves and while they were still alive. There might be nobody left to do it for them.
Today, Parisians will commemorate Vel d’Hiv. The French still live, work, row, eat, sleep, love, celebrate, mourn, die, give birth, rear children in the very apartments where they came for the Jews.
At Drancy, where families live, there’s a small cobbled space on the ground. It marks the three metres by which three teams, tunnelling day and night, for three months, missed their freedom. They were shot.
Seventy five years after Vel d’Hiv, in Europe the ‘cobbled’ space between suspicion and trust, respect and rejection, even war and peace, is becoming infinitesimal.
‘Plaques on schools mark Jewish pupils executed in the death camps’