Director tells story of how 13,000 Jews were herded into Paris velodrome
One of the darkest events in modern French history has been almost banished from the screen, until now. Now a movie, Le Rafle, is the first to address head-on the notorious persecution of French Jews during the Second World War.
The film tells the story of the arrest of 13,000 Parisian Jews, including 4,000 children, by French police in July 1942, who were herded into a giant cycling stadium, the Vélodrome d'Hiver, or Vél d'Hiv, close to the Eiffel Tower. Almost all of them died in Nazi death or concentration camps.
Vél'd'Hiv has come to symbolise the enthusiastic participation of many – not all – French officials and police officers in the Holocaust. An estimated 76,000 Jews were deported from France between 1940 and 1944 of whom it is believed that only 2,500 survived the death and concentration camps.
Former president Jacques Chirac saluted the film's willingness to portray "atrocious images of officials in French uniforms separating mothers from their children ... and throwing them brutally into wagons of death". In a newspaper article, Mr Chirac recalled that, soon after his arrival in the Elysée Palace in 1995, he became the first French leader to admit officially that the French state had played an active part in the Holocaust. "There can be no great nation, no national unity ... without a willingness to remember," he wrote in 1995.
Sources:
Lichfield, John (March 8, 2010). Film awakens France's shame in the Holocaust. London Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/film-awakens-frances-shame-in-the-holocaust-1917807.html
Lichfield, John (March 8, 2010). http://www.thestatesman.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=321785&catid=37
The film tells the story of the arrest of 13,000 Parisian Jews, including 4,000 children, by French police in July 1942, who were herded into a giant cycling stadium, the Vélodrome d'Hiver, or Vél d'Hiv, close to the Eiffel Tower. Almost all of them died in Nazi death or concentration camps.
Vél'd'Hiv has come to symbolise the enthusiastic participation of many – not all – French officials and police officers in the Holocaust. An estimated 76,000 Jews were deported from France between 1940 and 1944 of whom it is believed that only 2,500 survived the death and concentration camps.
Former president Jacques Chirac saluted the film's willingness to portray "atrocious images of officials in French uniforms separating mothers from their children ... and throwing them brutally into wagons of death". In a newspaper article, Mr Chirac recalled that, soon after his arrival in the Elysée Palace in 1995, he became the first French leader to admit officially that the French state had played an active part in the Holocaust. "There can be no great nation, no national unity ... without a willingness to remember," he wrote in 1995.
Sources:
Lichfield, John (March 8, 2010). Film awakens France's shame in the Holocaust. London Independent. http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/film-awakens-frances-shame-in-the-holocaust-1917807.html
Lichfield, John (March 8, 2010). http://www.thestatesman.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=321785&catid=37
