French Minister for War Veterans Kader Arif recalled complicity of “enslaved France” in crimes against the Jews Sunday at a commemoration for the 71st anniversary of the Velodrome d’hiver rondups, at the Jewish Martyrs Square in Paris.
The event, the largest single instance of deportation of the French Jewish community in occupied France during WWII, “is also the drama of millions of men, women and children, which reflected the worst case of human folly, the image of the hatred that inspired the architects of the Final Solution. By virtue of their silence, this enslaved Europe, enslaved France,” said the minister in his address.
“To tell the truth is not only to revisit the past. Telling the truth is also seizing the present day and taking a hard line on those inciting racism and anti-Semitism,” he continued, in an echo of President Francois Hollande’s words at last year’s ceremony, when he insisted “it can not and will not be a lost memory to the French Republic”.
In adopting this rhetoric, Hollande himself followed in the footsteps of former President Jacques Chirac, who became the first French head of state to acknowledge responsibility of the wartime French government in the deportation of Jews, which previous leaders General de Gaulle and Francois Mitterand had always refused to do, insisting that they hadn’t been the complicit actions of a free France, but one under Nazi German occupation.
Of the rounding-up of French Jewry, that of the Velodrome D’Hiver, commonly referred to as the Vel d’Hiv, saw the largest instance of Jewish arrests made in France, over two days from 16-17 July 1942. By the end of the second day, the total number of arrests hit 13,152 across Paris and its surrounding suburbs, according to official police figures.
This alone constituted a quarter of the total 42,000 Jews deported from France to Auschwitz in 1942, of whom only 811 returned home at the end of the war. In all, 75,000 Jews were deported from France between 1941-1944.
Addressing participants at the memorial, Arif heralded “the men and women whose love and respect for others were stronger than fear and indoctrination”, and who were “willing to give their lives to protect that of another”.
The minister further paid tribute to “the commitment, the courage and the honour of Jew in the resistance movement”, invoking y name Denise Verney, Raymond Aubrec, Daniel Mayer, Leo Hamon, Jean-Pierre Levy, Joseph Epstein, and Georges Loigner, on the occasion of his 102nd birthday.
“We must remember so as not to forget. Remember, to arouse the consciousness of our nation. Remember, so that such barbarism can never be repeated. Remember, to build a better future together. Remember, to come together with a shared memory in peaceful world,” he added.
Simultaneous memorials were also held in many other French cities to the victims of racist and anti-Semitic attacks perpetrated by the French State under the Vichy administration of WWII.