by Juliette Jabkhiro and LEA GUEDJ
PARIS (Reuters) – When the French police came knocking at his home in eastern Paris on July 16, 1942, Joseph Schwartz, then aged 15, was no longer there. Warned that something was up, he and his father Lejbus had gone into hiding.
He thought that his mother, Ruchla, and his little brother Paul were not in danger: there had already been raids in Paris then, but they had only targeted men.
But, on July 16 and 17, the police tore entire families from their homes.
More than 13,000 Jewish men, women and children were arrested by French police in Paris and its suburbs and herded into the Vélodrome d’Hiver before being sent to concentration camps.
Ruchla, Paul and Lejbus, who turned himself in to the police in the vain hope that his wife and son would be freed in exchange, were among them. Joseph never saw them again. “I didn’t know where to go, I was in a bit of a daze, I didn’t know where I was,” recalls Joseph Schwartz, one of the few survivors of the roundup still alive.
“You leave your parents the day before, everything is fine, we kiss you, we take care of you, and the next day there is no one left.” As France commemorates the 80th anniversary of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, collecting testimonies from survivors is now a race against time. “What will become of the work of memory when there are no more survivors? We are no longer numerous, people my age who were 15 at the time,” Joseph Schwartz told Reuters. The Shoah Memorial, which collects archives of victims, has launched an appeal to collect the accounts of the last witnesses and survivors of the Vel d’Hiv. “We were surprised to have around forty people come forward,” said Lior Lalieu-Smadja, head of the Shoah Memorial’s photo library service. “The last witnesses we had (…) had never testified,” she added. “They said: ‘we are 80 years after the fact, it’s a duty now, I haven’t done it until now, I feel like a duty, like an urgency to do it’.” As Lior Lalieu-Smadja explains, many stories have already been lost, despite the billions of archival documents and thousands of photos kept at the Shoah Memorial. She believes that the work of the Memorial remains crucial in keeping the memory of the victims alive, educating French society and combating the resurgence of anti-Semitism. For Joseph Schwartz, the most shocking thing is the fact that after the liberation of Paris, the Parisian police received a decoration for their role in the liberation of the city. “For people like me who lived through this period, it is an outrage to our dead. When we still know that eight days before the liberation of Paris, we feared the raids carried out by the French police (…). J ‘admit that you have reason to be disillusioned,” he said.
(Report Juliette Jabkhiro and Lea Guedj, with the participation of Layli Foroudi, Sarah Meyssonnier and Benoit Tessier; French version Valentine Baldassari, edited by Jean-Stéphane Brosse)