France remembers Paris mass round-up of Jews, 80 years on
July 17, 2022
The French president on Sunday marked the 80th anniversary of the wartime round-up of Jews at a former railway station that was used by Nazi Germany ultimately to deport them to the Auschwitz concentration camp.
Over two days, French police herded 13,152 people, including 4,115 children, into the Vel d'Hiv velodrome — the biggest such round-up in Western Europe.
How is France remembering?
President Emmanuel Macron was joined by some of the small number of survivors who passed through Pithiviers station, 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Paris, on their way to cross France and finally to Auschwitz.
The building has not served passengers since the end of the 1960s, and it has been converted into a memorial to the Holocaust that opened earlier this month.
Macron said, "it is still urgent, perhaps even more important than ever, to recall history in order to avert it, to explore the hatred in our past in order to better question it in our present," Macron said.
Macron was joined at the ceremony by famed Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, whose father was one of those deported to Auschwitz, camp survivor Ginette Kolinka and the head of France's rail network, Jean-Pierre Farandou.
The event comes at the end of a week of recollection and ceremonies to remember victims of the raids, still regarded as one of the darkest moments in French history.
What happened at the time?
Some of the 13,000 Jews arrested in Paris and its suburbs by French officials on the orders of the Nazi occupiers passed through the station. Of them, 4,115 were children.
The incident has become known as the Vel d'Hiv round-ups because French police took most of the Jewish victims — 8,160 people, including the old and sick — to a cycle racing track in Paris's 15th arrondissement, the Velodrome d'Hiver.
They were held there in extremely crowded conditions, with almost no food and water and with no sanitary facilities.
They were taken from there to camps at Pithiviers and other locations before being moved to Nazi concentration camps in rail cattle trucks. Only a few dozen ever came back.
In 1995, former French President Jacques Chirac apologized for the complicity of police and civil servants in the raid. Macron specifically admitted the responsibility of the French state in the raids and, hence, in the Holocaust.
rc/sms (AFP, AP)