Of the arrest of 12,884 Jews in Paris, including 4,115 children, on July 16 and 17, 1942, only one photograph remains. We see a street in Paris, the pavement glistening with rain, five buses parked along the Vel’d’Hiv, shadows crowding around, a car parked on the other side of the street. A cyclist passes.
Cabu was 29 years old, in 1967, when he drew this crime with missing images. He performs command work of the New Candidto illustrate the publication of the good pages of a forthcoming book, signed Claude Lévy and Paul Tillard: The Great Rafle of Vel’d’Hiv.
Along these lines, Cabu discovered, “totally shocked”, the horror: the mass arrests of Jewish families by the French police on July 16 and 17, 1942, French families for several generations as recent immigrants. Men, women, children, hunted like animals from dawn and for more than thirty hours, crammed into dozens of buses from the Compagnie du Métropolitain which transport some of the victims directly to Drancy, the other being parked in the 15th arrondissement, at Vel’d’Hiv’.
The stay is extended to Drancy in Seine-Saint-Denis, or to Beaune-la-Rolande or Pithiviers in Loiret, transit camps from where all are deported to Auschwitz. Only 819 of them survived the death camps.
We had never seen these little-known drawings of Cabu, assassinated in 2015 in the terrorist attack against Charlie Hebdo. Sixteen drawings that his wife Véronique Cabut loaned to the Shoah Memorial on the occasion of the commemoration of the 1942 Vélodrome d’Hiver roundup. Sixteen drawings, in sensitive black, recomposing the story of the tragedy, 80 years earlier . “A punch in the face” – the word is from Cabu…
These drawings are not just an illustration: they are the witnesses of what took place, and the witnesses of the witnesses, and the expression of the tragedy of the roundups of July 1942. They are an act of historical documentation, of a extreme fidelity to the truth that we know today.
With his drawings where we observe the “expressive faces with frightened eyes of men, women and children, and all the harshness of the impassive police, gendarmes, soldiers”, Cabu fills the void, the absence of photographs, and “his generosity is flagrant. Véronique Cabut salutes the commitment of the cartoonist: “All his soul is there to tell this tragedy which cost the lives of 13,000 Jews”.
Until November 7, 2022, at the Shoah Memorial, Paris.