Netanyahu to visit Paris for 75th anniversary of mass deportation of French Jews
On July 16-17, 1942, French authorities rounded up 13,152 Jews, including 4,000 children, and sent them to Nazi concentration and death camps
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Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will visit Paris on July 16 to commemorate the 75th anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, a mass-arrest of over 13,000 French Jews in July 1942 that was part of the Nazi effort to eradicate France’s Jews.
The Elysee Palace confirmed the visit in a Thursday statement.
“On the occasion, a working meeting will take place” between French President Emmanuel Macron and Netanyahu, the statement said.
On July 16 and 17, 1942, 13,152 Jewish men, women and children were arrested by French authorities at the request of the Nazis.
Held in inhuman conditions, 1,129 men, 2,916 women and 4,115 children were crammed into the bleachers of the Velodrome d’hiver stadium, which was demolished in 1959, before being taken to concentration camps.
There, some 3,000 young children were separated from their parents and deported to Auschwitz via Drancy.
This raid alone claimed more than a quarter of the 42,000 Jews sent from France to Auschwitz in 1942, of whom only 811 would return after the end of the war.
Of those who were taken in the Vel d’Hiv sweeps, fewer than a hundred — and not one of the 4,000 who were children — survived.
The episode caused controversy during the spring presidential campaign in France, when far-right candidate Marine Le Pen insisted France was “not responsible for the Vel d’Hiv.” France’s then-president Jacques Chirac recognized French responsibility for the deportations in July 1995.
The Times of Israel Community.