France Commemorates Vichy Roundup After Years of Silence on 1942 Event

France, for the first time, has officially commemorated the roundup and deportation into Nazi hands of tens of thousands of Jews in France carried out by the collaborationist Vichy regime during World War II.

Speaking last Friday at a ceremony at the site of a Paris sporting stadium where thousands of non-French Jews were held after being rounded up in July 1942, Prime Minister Edouard Balladur honored those who were “hurled down into horror and death with the atrocious complicity of the regime instituted under the (German) occupation.”

The memorial day, to be marked annually on July 16, has been established to honor the memory of some 13,000 Jews who were rounded up between July 16 and 17, 1942 and held in atrocious conditions at the stadium, the Velodrome d’Hiver.

About 4,000 of the Jews, those without family, were sent to the Drancy internment camp, from which they were deported to Auschwitz. The remaining 9,000, which included 4,000 children, were kept at the so-called Vel d’Hiv for a week and then sent directly to Auschwitz.

Only 30 of those Jews, all adults, returned after the war.

The roundup was carried out by the French police on the orders of Rene Bousquet, who was in charge of the Vichy police.

Bousquet, who had been slated to stand trial for crimes against humanity, was murdered last month at the door to his Paris apartment.

In his speech last Friday, Balladur said, “The memory of the World War II events must inspire our vision of the world of today. It is our duty to transmit to the coming generations this memory.”

MITTERRAND DID NOT ATTEND

He also made a point of referring to the current growth of racism, saying, “The world is fragile. Economic privation and nationalist passions give rise to dangerous temptations, generate a climate of anxiety and racist and anti-Semitic actions.

“Fortunately, these actions remain isolated but must be fought against and strongly punished from the start,” he said.

But President Francois Mitterrand, who in February declared July 16 to be an annual day of remembrance, did not attend the ceremony.

Mitterrand had been accused by Jews and other French citizens of refusing to deal with France’s wartime history, and his decree came after years of heated polemics in the media.

The French authorities, including leaders of both left and right, were loath to acknowledge France’s responsibility in the mass murder of Jews in the Holocaust, despite clear evidence of the willing role Vichy played in their arrests and deportations.

A campaign in the French media disclosing the role of Bousquet and the Vichy regime in the arrest and deportation of thousands of Jews generated a movement that French leaders were unable to disregard.

Mitterrand’s declaration stated that July 16 would become the “national day for the commemoration of the racial persecutions committed under the de facto authority known as the ‘government of the French state,’ 1940-1944.”