Rachel Jedinak, who was eight years old, had never been slapped by her mother. That day yes, and very strong. The girl did not want to obey the blunt order to try to escape from the velodrome through an emergency door. Finally Rachel and her sister did. They were lucky because the two French policemen turned their heads, pretending not to see them. The little ones then wandered the streets of Paris and found refuge in their grandparents’ house. They would never see her mother again. “Much later I realized that that slap had saved my life,” explained Rachel, with a lump in her throat, in an excellent documentary broadcast last Monday by the public channel France 3.
This weekend marks the eightieth anniversary of a drama that has gone down in history as “the Vél d’Hiv roundup (short for Winter Velodrome)”. It was on July 16 and 17, 1942. The French police, dependent on the collaborationist Vichy regime, zealously carried out the will of the German occupiers to carry out a mass arrest of Jews. They ended up being more than 13,000, mostly women and children. Agents went house to house looking for Jews already registered. The raid began at four in the morning on July 16 and continued the next day.
The survivors interviewed by France 3 explained the disbelief of their parents, until the last moment, a very common phenomenon among the victims of the Shoah. They saw it as impossible that in the country of Zola and Rousseau, of the rights of man and of Voltaire, they could be arrested for no reason and their lives destroyed. Some police officers turned a blind eye and allowed them to flee, but this was the exception. The same thing happened with the janitors of the buildings. There were cases of solidarity, but many of total complicity with the perpetrators of the raid.
The Vél d’Hiv, a modern building a few hundred meters from the Eiffel Tower, demolished after the war, was the main temporary internment center for families, in Dantesque conditions. The Germans, at first, did not want to include those under 16 in the deportation, but the Prime Minister of the Vichy government, Pierre Laval, insisted on not separating them from their parents, for a “humanitarian issue”. Despite everything, some were saved. Among those who were sent to Auschwitz, the vast majority, only a few hundred returned. After Vél d’Hiv, in August 1942, there were other massive raids in the south of France. Until a week before the liberation of Paris, in August 1944, Jews were still being deported from the Drancy transit camp on the northern outskirts of the capital.
For more than fifty years, the French authorities refused to admit the guilt of the state. One of those stubborn to the end was François Mitterrand, president for 14 years. The socialist leader, an icon of the European left, considered that the French Republic could not excuse itself from a crime it did not commit, since it was the Vichy regime, under Marshal Pétain and the tutelage of the Nazis. An ambiguous character with a very murky past, Mitterrand was, by the way, a personal friend, throughout his life, of the Vichy police chief, René Bousquet.
It had to be a right-wing president, Jacques Chirac, who, in 1995, finally made the mea culpa and restored historical justice. “France, homeland of the Enlightenment and of the rights of man, land of welcome and asylum, France, on that day, committed the irreparable, breaking her word, and handed over her protégés to their executioners,” Chirac said. All subsequent presidents – Sarkozy, Hollande and Macron – have followed the same line.
This Sunday, Macron will mark the 80th anniversary of the Vél d’Hiv raid on the Pithiviers train station, south of Paris. In this rehabilitated railway facility, a small museum opens to the public on Monday to remember that it was the starting point of eight convoys with 8,400 deported Jews.
Elysee sources indicated that Macron wants to give a special meaning to his speech on Sunday because “the context is no longer that of 1995; France has changed. “Looking at history head-on is looking at oneself today; French society has not yet finished with anti-Semitism”, they added from the entourage of the head of state.
Macron is concerned not only about the persistent scourge of anti-Semitism, with periodic attacks, but “a new type of historical revisionism” by characters such as Éric Zemmour, ultra candidate in the last presidential elections, who maintain that the Vichy regime saved many French Jews. . That recurring argument that only foreign Jews were deported is miserable and fallacious. Many of them, although originally from families that came from Eastern Europe, had lived all their lives in France and their children were French by birth. That distinction of nationality made by those who relativize French complicity in the Shoah is an argument that adds even more shame to shame.
