76 years ago, more than 7000 foreign Jews gathered and locked up at the Velodrome d’Hiver in Paris (15th arr.), Before being deported to the death camps.
The Vichy government, led by Pierre Laval, agrees to help the Germans by limiting arrests to foreign Jews or considered “stateless”, and their children, born in France and therefore French. Adolf Eichman negotiates with the French police – Jean Leguay (1909-1989), a collaborator of the Vichy police in the occupied zone, and René Bousquet (1909-1993), general secretary of the police of the Vichy regime – who organizes the raid.
Facts that took place during and after the roundup. Transported by bus to the ‘Vél d’hiv’, the arrested Jews are taken to the Winter Velodrome. This building, now missing, was located (rue Nélaton) in the 15th arrondissement of Paris, at the corner of Boulevard de Grenelle.
Men, women and children are crowded together for several days in squalid conditions: no sleeping, no food, no drinking water. Only three doctors and nurses from the Red Cross are allowed to intervene. The families are transferred to the internment camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande, in the Loiret, where they are separated.
The mothers will be transported to the extermination camps in Poland.
Singles and couples without children are taken to the internment camp at Drancy; from there they are deported to the Auschwitz camp, where most of them will be exterminated.
Memory: commemorative national day
It was at the initiative of François Mitterrand, President of the Republic, that an annual commemoration day was set up. It is celebrated on the 16th of July if it falls on a Sunday, or the following Sunday. Decree No. 93-150 of 3 February 1993.
In a moving speech delivered on July 16, 1995, during ceremonies commemorating the 53rd anniversary of the “Vel ‘d’Hiv” Rafle, Jacques Chirac recognized for the first time in the name of the Republic, the complicity of the French State in the persecution of the Jews.