Emmanuel Macron commemorates this Sunday the 80th anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv Roundup by inaugurating, in the company of survivors, a new place of memory in the former station of Pithiviers (Loiret), from where eight convoys left for Auschwitz- Birkenau.
Accompanied by several personalities, including the historian Serge Klarsfeld, the survivor of the camps Ginette Kolinka or the CEO of the SNCF Jean-Pierre Farandou, Emmanuel Macron arrived at 3 p.m. in the small station of Pithiviers, a hundred kilometers south of Paris, which has not welcomed travelers since the end of the 1960s and which has just been transformed into a museum by the Shoah Memorial.
“Anti-Semitism “can take on other faces, wrap itself in other words, other caricatures”
During his speech, Emmanuel Macron called on “republican forces” to “redouble their vigilance” in the face of “even more burning” and “creeping” anti-Semitism than 20 years ago.
Almost 30 years later, anti-Semitism “can take on other faces, wrap itself in other words, other caricatures,” said Emmanuel Macron. “But the odious anti-Semitism is there, it lurks, still alive, persists, persists, returns”, he continued, evoking in turn the “terrorist barbarism”, the “assassination and crimes”, the resurgences on “social networks” or “tomb desecrations”.
“He interferes in debates on television sets. It plays on the complacency of certain political forces. It also thrives around a new form of historical revisionism, even negationism,” he insisted, alluding, without naming him, to the far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour who had notably argued that Marshal Pétain had “saved” French Jews during the Second World War.
“Neither Pétain, nor Laval, nor Bousquet, nor Darquier de Pellepoix, none of them wanted to save Jews. It is a falsification of history to say so”, also hammered the head of state, considering that “those who indulge in these lies have the project of destroying the Republic and the unity of the nation”.
Looking our truth in the face is not weakening France or repenting. It is recognizing everything so as not to reproduce it.
Emmanuel Macron
Transit station for some of the deported Jews
Some of the 13,000 Jews – including 4,115 children – arrested in Paris and the suburbs on July 16, 1942 and the following days, by 9,000 French officials, at the request of the Germans, passed through the Pithiviers station. . 8,160 of them, including the elderly and the sick, were taken to the Vélodrome d’Hiver stadium in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. Before being evacuated to the camps of Drancy (Seine-Saint-Denis), Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande (Loiret).
From Pithiviers station alone, eight convoys then left for the extermination camps, for more than 8,000 deportees, making it the second French deportation site after that of Drancy. Only a few dozen adults will survive.
“This station is the place where the French event becomes European genocide. (…) It is a place of memory unique in France,” says Jacques Fredj, director of the Shoah Memorial.
For Borne, “80 years ago, France committed the irreparable”
At the same time, Prime Minister Elisabeth Borne attended the traditional ceremony in the morning on the site of the former Vélodrome d’Hiver, in the presence in particular of the PS mayor of Paris Anne Hidalgo.
“80 years ago, France lost itself and committed the irreparable”, declared Elisabeth Borne, for whom “those days of July, as during the roundups that followed, France lost a bit of its soul”.
Courage consists in recognizing it and commemorating it. The fight against anti-Semitism never stops.
Elisabeth Borne
A tribute different from politics
In July 2012, François Hollande had gone further by declaring that “this crime was committed in France, by France”. Then in 2017, Emmanuel Macron, newly elected president, had reaffirmed, for the 75th anniversary of the roundup, the responsibility of France and made a plea against anti-Semitism in the presence of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
But today “French society has not finished with anti-Semitism”, underlines the Elysée, also highlighting the “trivialization of debates” around the Vichy regime.
The far-right presidential candidate Eric Zemmour (Reconquest!) notably argued that Marshal Pétain had “saved” French Jews during the Second World War.
“80 years ago, the collaborationists of the Vichy regime organized the Vel d’Hiv roundup. Do not forget these crimes, today more than ever, with a President of the Republic who honors Pétain and 89 RN deputies ”, tweeted the leader of the LFI deputies Mathilde Panot on Saturday, arousing indignation in the majority. .
In 2018, Mr. Macron called Pétain a “great soldier” during the First World War, even if he then “led disastrous choices”.