Two ceremonies yesterday marked the 40th anniversary of the first Nazi organized deportation of France’s Jews to the death camps of Eastern Europe. Some 80,000 people, including 11,000 children and infants, less than three percent of whom surviced, were deported aboard 72 death trains which left France for Nazi-occupied Poland.
Several hundred people, including France’s Chief Rabbi Rene Samuel Sirat, Mayor Jacques Chirac of Paris and Presidential advisor Jacques Attali, gathered on the site of the Drancy camp, where the Jews were held before their deportation, and at the Royallieu railway station from which the first death train left on March 27, 1942 with 1,112 Jews aboard.
Sirat said that “40 years later we still fail to grasp the full horror of the Holocaust. The memory of the victims continues to haunt us.” Paris Chief Rabbi Alain Goldmann wamed, “We must remain vigilant if we want to make sure that history does not repeat itself.”
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