Holocaust roundup recalled
France marks 80 years since 13,152 sent to Nazi camps
PARIS — French President Emmanuel Macron decried his Nazi-collaborator predecessors and rising antisemitism, vowing to stamp out Holocaust denial as he paid homage Sunday to thousands of French children sent to death camps 80 years ago because they were Jewish.
House by house, French police rounded up 13,000 people on two terrifying days in July 1942, wresting children from their mothers’ arms and dispatching everyone to Nazi death camps. France honored those victims this weekendas it tries to keep their memory alive.
For the dwindling number of survivors of France’s wartime crimes, a series of commemoration ceremonies Sunday were especially important. At a time of rising antisemitism and far-right discourse sugarcoating France’s role in the Holocaust, they worry that history’s lessons are being forgotten.
A week of ceremonies marking 80 years since the Vel d’Hiv police roundup on July 16-17, 1942, culminated Sunday with an event led by Macron, who pledged that it wouldn’t happen ever again.
“We will continue to teach against ignorance. We will continue to cry out against indifference,” Macron said. “And we will fight, I promise you, at every dawn, because France’s story is written by a combat of resistance and justice that will never be extinguished.”
He denounced former French leaders for their roles in the Holocaust and the Vel d’Hiv raids, among the most shameful acts undertaken by France during World War II.
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 they were sent on to Nazi camps. It was the biggest such roundup in Western Europe. The children were separated from their families; very few survived.
In public testimonies over the past week, Serge Klarsfeld, a renowned Nazi hunter whose father was deported to Auschwitz, spoke Saturday in the garden, calling it an “earth-shaking testimony to the horrors lived by Jewish families.” Klarsfeld, 86, stressed the urgency of passing on memories as more of the war’s witnesses pass on.
On Sunday, Macron visited a site in Pithiviers, where police sent families after the Vel d’Hiv roundup before sending them onto the Nazi camps. A new memorial site honoring the deportees was inaugurated, including a plaque that reads: “Let us never forget.”
The president urged vigilance: “We are not finished with antisemitism, and we must lucidly face that fact.”
“It is showing itself on the walls of our cities” when they are vandalized with swastikas, he continued. “It shows itself in the complacency of certain political forces. It is prospering also through a new form of historic revisionism, even negationism.”
Another ceremony was held at the Shoah Memorial in Drancy, home to a transit center that was central to French Jews’ deadly journey to Nazi camps. Most of the 76,000 Jews deported from France under the collaborationist Vichy government passed through the Drancy camp.
The Drancy Shoah memorial actively documents the Holocaust, especially for younger generations.
France’s Interior Ministry has reported a rise in antisemitic acts in France over recent years. While racist and anti-religious acts overall are increasing, it said Jews are disproportionately targeted.