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The War on Anti-Semitism Is Not Over
(French Ministry of Foreign Affairs) French President Francois Hollande - French President Francois Hollande spoke on the 70th anniversary of the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup (a Nazi-decreed raid and mass arrest in Paris by the French police in 1942): "Seventy years ago, on 16 July 1942, early in the morning, 13,152 men, women and children were arrested in their homes. Childless couples and single people were interned in Drancy....The others were taken to the Velodrome d'Hiver. Piled together for five days in inhuman conditions, they were taken from there to the camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande." "A clear directive had been given by the Vichy administration: 'The children must not leave in the same convoys as the parents.' So, after heart-rending separations, they departed - the parents on one side, the children on the other - for Auschwitz-Birkenau, where the deportees of Drancy had preceded them by a few days. There, they were murdered. Solely for being Jews." "This crime took place here, in our capital, in our streets, the courtyards of our buildings, our stairways, our school playgrounds. It was to pave the way for other roundups, in Marseille and throughout France....76,000 French Jews were deported to the death camps. Only 2,500 returned.... My presence this morning bears witness to France's determination to protect the memory of her lost children and honor these souls who died but have no graves." "The truth is that French police - on the basis of the lists they had themselves drawn up - undertook to arrest the thousands of innocent people trapped on 16 July 1942. And that the French gendarmerie escorted them to the internment camps. The truth is that no German soldiers - not a single one - were mobilized at any stage of the operation. The truth is that this crime was committed in France, by France." "Honor was saved by the Righteous, by all those who were able to rise up against barbarism, by those anonymous heroes who hid a neighbor here, helped another there and risked their lives to save those of innocent people. By all those French people who enabled three-quarters of France's Jews to survive."