France's Betrayal of Its Jewish Citizens - Holocaust

"We will continue to teach against ignorance. We will continue to cry out against indifference. 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."

"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]. It is infiltrating social networks ... it inserts itself into debates on some TV shows."

"It showed itself in the complacency of certain political forces. It is prospering also through a new form of historic revisionism, even negationism."

"Let us repeat here with force, whether self-styled revisionist commentators like it or not."

French President Emmanuel Macron

"The policy, from 1942 onward, was to organize the murder of the Jews of Europe and therefore to organize the deportation of the Jews of France."

"Most of the time, the decisions were made by the Nazis ... but the management was French."

Jacques Fredj, director, Paris Shoah Memorial

Entrance to the Vel’ d’Hiv (the Winter Stadium, or Velodrome d'Hiver), where Jews were detained en-masse in preparation for their deportation to concentration camps in France.

 

Other French citizens ended up in concentration camps; committed French socialists who defied the Vichy government and their Nazi masters. In the camps they were in separate barracks from the majority camp occupants who were Jews. The French socialists bore difficult times, most of them managed to survive their ordeal. They empathized and pitied the Jews crammed into their barracks, the plight of the women and children, knowing well what that all-pervading odour both of fear and resignation and the stench of the smoke billowing out of the giant chimney signified.

 

Vivarais-Lignon, Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, in France in Feb. 2016.  Alamy Stock Photo

 

And there was a haven, in the mountains of southern France where Le Chambon residents harboured Jewish children, cared for them, hid them, nurtured them and brought them life and eventually even reunion with surviving family members. All at great risk to themselves, but determined to defy orders from the Nazis and from their own fascist Vichy government. Because of their activities, thousands of French Jewish children and Jewish children from other parts of Europe survived the war. They were Protestant French, surrounded by French Roman Catholics.

Jews living at a children's home in Le Chambon-sur-Lignon, France, with their director, Juliette Usach, 1941. The people of Le Chambon and surrounding villages hid nearly 5,000 people fleeing Nazi occupation.

French police were entirely complicit with their Nazi overmasters; what the Nazis decreed, the French police carried out under the collaborationist Vichy government. In July 1942, French police went  house to house rounding up French Jews. It took two days where 13,000 men, women and children, all French citizens, were assembled to be dispatched to Nazi death camps. The Vel d'Hiv raids will forever be a black mark against France in the Second World War.

Police herded 13,142 French citizens of Jewish extraction, among them, 4,115 children into the Winter Velodrome of Paris (Vel d'Hiv). Western Europe had no rival to this large roundup where children were separated from their families, very few of whom survived the terrifying episode whose purpose was genocidal intent. There is a monument now, erected at a garden where once the velodrome stood. It holds the names of those thousands of children inscribed for posterity, so they will not be forgotten. Only six of those thousands of children survived.

A memorial is pictured near a train car symbolizing the Drancy camp, at the Shoah memorial, July 12, 2022 in Drancy, outside Paris (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)

 

Renowned Nazi Hunter Serge Klarsfeld spoke in the garden on Saturday, an "earth shaking testimony to the horrors lived by Jewish families", he said of the garden and its memorial, stressing the urgency of passing on memories in the wake of the last of the survivors passing away. The following day the French president visited a site south of Paris where police sent families following the Vel d'Hiv roundup until they were sent on further to the Nazi camps.

There, in Pithiviers, a new memorial site honouring those French Jews was inaugurated, with a plaque reading: "Let us never forget". The Shoah Memorial in the Paris suburb of Drancy hosted another ceremony. Drancy was home to a transit centre central to the deadly journey to Nazi camps for French Jews. Of the 76,000 Jews deported from France under the collaborators of Nazi Germany in France, most transited the Drancy camp.

And now, in present-day Europe, Jewish communities are concerned with rising antisemitism throughout Europe; in France and in Germany in particular over recent years. The nation's Interior Ministry reports a rise in antisemitic acts, adding that racist and anti-religious acts are on the increase overall, while Jews are disproportionately targeted. 

Following the Second World War, fifty years passed before French leadership officially acknowledged state involvement in the Holocaust. Then-President Jacques Chirac apologized for the role of French authorities in the Vel d'Hiv raids. As President Macron said on Sunday, none of France's Vichy wartime leaders "wanted to save Jews".

French policemen register foreign Jews in Pithiviers for their subsequent deportation, in May 1941.- (AFP)