Along with other Jewish communities around the world, the Anti-Defamation Commission has marked the 77th anniversary of the rounding up and imprisonment of Paris’s Jews in the Vél d’Hiv in 1942.
More than 13,000 Jews were arrested in Paris, in a Nazi-directed raid carried out by the authorities. The incarcerated Jews were held for four days at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a cycling stadium in Paris’s 15th arrondissement under terrible sanitary conditions with almost no food or water before being transported by train to Auschwitz and other camps. None of the children sent to Auschwitz survived.
Dr Dvir Abramovich, Chairman of the Anti-Defamation Commission issued the following statement:
“Today we commemorate and pay tribute to the memory of 13,152 Jews who were hunted, interned and sent to Nazi death camps. This is one of the darkest chapters in French history and reminds us of the duty of the nation to face up to its collaborationist past and the crimes committed by the nefarious Vichy regime, as well as by administrators, police and gendarmes. This is especially timely given Marine Le Pen’s recent whitewashing of the historical truth when she denied that the French state was to blame for a notorious round-up.” As antisemitism surges across Europe, now more than ever, France must make the fighting against Jewish-hatred and the protection of its Jewish community, a key priority. Furthermore, the French government must mobilise its resources and laws to promote Holocaust education, fight intolerance and xenophobia, and preserve human rights.”