TestimonialsThe miracles of the Vél’ d’Hiv (2/4). On July 16 and 17, 1942, in Paris, the French state police organized the largest roundup of Jewish women, men and children. Final destination: the Auschwitz extermination camp. Eighty years later, “M” returns to this shameful page in the history of France through the stories of survivors. Children, who owed their salvation to the leniency or negligence of the police.
They are children of 80 or 90 years old. Their faces are parched, but they still say ” dad mom “ Where ” my teddy bear “, when they tell, these rescued from the roundup of the Vél’ d’Hiv, these survivors of misfortune, how the French police came to knock on their door on July 16 and 17, 1942. Their memories are as high as three apples. “When I testify, it is the child who speaks and not the grandfather”, immediately warns Joseph Weismann, 91 years old on his identity card, 11 years old forever.
With exquisite politeness, Rachel Jedinak, 88, apologizes for the oversights of the 8-year-old girl that she was: “It’s amazing, isn’t it, the choice of a brain. I have recurring images, precise on certain moments and, on others, I blacked out. » At least does she manage to tame her buried pain. Louise, her eldest by five years, who lives in the United States and experienced exactly the same events, never succeeded. “As soon as we talk about it, she cries”, says the sister.
“As we passed by the lodge, one of the policemen dropped us, with a mocking air: “You can thank your concierge, she was the one who told us where you were. » Rachel Jedinak
These children were mostly French, declared as such at birth by their immigrant parents. Parisians, kids from the suburbs, even in their accent which, at home, broke with the Yiddish intonations of their parents. All shame drunk, these children under 16 were added to the lists of foreign Jewish people to be arrested, on the proposal of the French authorities.
Only a hundred of the 9,000 adults (under 60 for men and under 55 for women) sent to Auschwitz after this roundup survived the extermination camp. No children. Most were gassed upon arrival. The rue Nélaton memorial, erected in a small Japanese-style garden on the site of the Vélodrome d’Hiver, in the 15e district of Paris, lists on an endless wall the 3,900 names of these young victims.
“They are just children”
In front of her, Rachel Jedinak has piled up mountains of personal archives, like so many sworn attestations of the veracity of her statements and like so many crutches of memory. Before July 16, 1942, before the cataclysm that left her an orphan, she was Rachel Psankiewicz and lived at 26, rue Duris, a small two-room apartment nestled in 20e district, in the heart of this Ménilmontant popularized by singers. His father, Abram, a cabinetmaker who had joined the French army, was arrested on May 14, 1941 in what has come to be known as the “greenback roundup”. Leaving on June 28, 1942 in convoy 5, he was assassinated in Auschwitz.
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