The station at the gates of hell will have lasted two days, it is therefore in two days that France commemorates the 80th anniversary of the Rafle du Vél d’Hiv, a wound still alive in the history of France. This Sunday afternoon, the President of the Republic inaugurated, in the company of survivors, a new place of memory in the old station of Pithiviers (Loiret), a hundred kilometers south of Paris. More than 8,000 of the approximately 13,000 Jews arrested in Paris and its suburbs on July 16, 1942 and the following days by French officials, at the request of the Germans, passed through this station before being taken to Auschwitz-Birkenau, on massive extermination camp in Poland.
Accompanied by several personalities, including Serge Klarsfeld, the survivor of the camps Ginette Kolinka, or even the CEO of the SNCF Jean-Pierre Farandou, the Head of State joined in the afternoon the small station which no longer accommodates travelers since the end of the 1960s, and which has just been transformed into a museum by the Shoah Memorial. He then spoke.
The Elysée had promised an “offensive discourse” against anti-Semitism, which “still lurks and sometimes insidiously”, which is “very worrying”. “For five days, the winter velodrome turned into a circle of hell,” recalled the president this Sunday afternoon. On July 16, 1942, “the police only needed one weapon: lists. Lists of men, women, children, whose only wrong was to be Jewish”, continued Emmanuel Macron, referring to these families, “who said to themselves that France could not do that”. “The French state did it,” asserted the head of state. “The French State penned up these families, entrenched them in detention camps, (…) before deporting them to extermination camps. »
Emmanuel Macron took up the words of Jacques Chirac, who, after fifty years of silence from the French authorities, had recognized in 1995 the responsibility of France in the Roundup of Vél d’Hiv, in a speech that remains engraved in the memories. “These dark hours forever sully our history. France, that day, accomplished the irreparable, ”said the head of state from the old station of Pithiviers.
“Anti-Semitism is still there”
“We are not done with anti-Semitism. (…) He can wrap himself in other words, other caricatures, but the odious anti-Semitism is there, as Zola said. He is on the prowl”, warned the president again, referring in particular to the Hyper Cacher attack in January 2015, and calling on “republican forces” to “redouble their vigilance”.
Emmanuel Macron also denounced “historical revisionism”, as he had already done in Vichy last December, in particular on the role of Marshal Pétain during the Second World War, he who in 2018, had angry by recalling with a word the merit, during the First World War, of the serviceman struck with national indignity. “Neither Pétain, nor Laval, nor Bousquet… None of those wanted to save the Jews. It is a falsification of history to say so, ”insisted the head of state, to loud applause.
“This storyof the Holocaust), we will continue to recall it against oblivion, we will continue to teach it against ignorance, we will continue to mourn it against indifference, we will continue to probe its deep roots and new ramifications against the resurgence of wrong. And we will fight”, finished Emmanuel Macron.
Borne’s tribute to the victims
Earlier in the day, this Sunday morning, the Prime Minister went to the site of the old velodrome, rue Nélaton, in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. It was there, at number 17, that the entrance to the stadium was located, where most of the nearly 13,000 Jews arrested on July 16 and 17, 1942, before being deported, were gathered in unspeakable conditions. It is also there that a garden has been laid out at the foot of a large recent building (which hosts part of the editorial staff of Le Parisien-Aujourd’hui en France). All in symbols, the place initiated by the historian Serge Klarsfeld pays homage to the 4,115 Jewish children rounded up, separated from their parents, then killed in the Nazi death camps.
After the testimonies and the words, words of dread and tenderness, worried words, too, of Yonathan Arfi, the president of Crif, “here we always hear the cries of distress and the orders shouted”, said Élisabeth Borne. “These sentences we utter seem almost powerless in the face of violence and horror in its cruel reality.” “It is indeed our laws, it is indeed our police who stopped thousands of loopholes, it is indeed our country which let them suffocate here”, she continued, accusing the then regime of to have “gone further” than the demands of the Nazi occupiers.
“Yes, these July days, France lost a bit of its soul. (…) Our country waited until 1995, less than 30 years ago, to recognize its responsibility. It was an immense relief, one of those moments where words finally put reality on the unspeakable. To keep its honor our country must look its history in the face.