The knock came at three in the morning—sharp, relentless, and utterly without mercy. “Hurry up, you have five minutes to pack your bags because we’ve got a lot of people on our list.” The words cut through the stifling July heat like a blade, shattering the fragile peace of sleeping families across Paris. It was July 16, 1942, and the city was about to become a hunting ground.
Thousands of police officers fanned out through the streets, lists in hand, teams of two to ensure no one could feign ignorance or refuse. The operation was meticulously planned, chillingly efficient. Among the Jewish families, rumors had spread like wildfire in the hours before dawn—a warning from a friendly inspector, a desperate whisper passed from door to door. Some fled to the free zone while there was still time. Others stayed, paralyzed by the belief that only men would be taken.
In one apartment, a mother faced the officers alone, her husband absent. “My husband isn’t here,” she said, her voice steady. One officer moved to take her and her children. The other hesitated. “It’s going to be more trouble than it’s worth with a woman and two children.” They left. A miracle, she would later call it—an accident of bureaucracy that meant life instead of death.
But for Rachel and her sister, there was no such reprieve. Discovered hiding at their grandparents’ house, they were sent with their mother to the Belleville sorting center, a sweltering, overcrowded waystation filled with families, some children barely two years old. Rachel’s mother had one thought: escape. She pleaded with acquaintances, insisting they were not being sent to Germany to work, that the Nazis were lying. Other mothers grew angry—it was not what they wanted to hear.
Then came the rumor of an emergency exit. A neighbor’s daughter had slipped through it. Rachel’s mother seized the chance. “I didn’t want to leave my mother,” Rachel remembered. “I screamed, ‘I don’t want to leave you!'” Her mother slapped her—the only time in her life anyone had done so. The blow stunned her into silence. They moved toward the exit, and there, the police on guard duty turned the other way, as if they had seen nothing at all.
That slap saved her life. The two young girls ran back to their grandparents’ house, and they were not taken. Rachel’s mother, who had passed herself off as a spinster, was sent to Drancy. The families, meanwhile, were herded into the Vélodrome d’Hiver—the Vel d’Hiv—a vast, glass-roofed cycling stadium in the heart of Paris.
By the time the roundup stopped at one in the afternoon on July 17, 12,884 Jews had been arrested. Men, women, and children. They would remain cooped up in the sweltering heat, with nothing to eat and nothing to drink, for six agonizing days.
Serge Klarsfeld stood at the exact spot where the entrance of the Vélodrome d’Hiver had once been. “This is where they were brought,” he said quietly, his voice carrying the weight of decades. On July 16, 1942, for the first time in France, Jewish families—men, women, and children—were arrested in a single massive operation.
Joseph, who was arrested later, arrived in the early afternoon. The complex was already overflowing. “I entered the place,” he recalled, his voice trembling across the years. “It was overpoweringly hot, stank. It was incredibly noisy and violently lit up. It was a lot of disorder and confusion.” He was eleven years old.
Then he saw something he would never forget: a woman throwing stadium seats from an upper gallery. They landed on the people below in a pool of blood. “This image still chills me when I think about it,” he said. “It’s the 11-year-old child who’s talking to you here.”
Hundreds more Jews continued to arrive until the next day. The roundup stopped at 1 p.m. on July 17. 12,884 Jews had been arrested by then. They would remain cooped up in the sweltering heat with nothing to eat and nothing to drink for six days.
The crowds who found themselves at the Vél d’Hiv on the 16th and 17th of July—and up until the 22nd—weren’t crowds who’d stay a few hours. It was six awful days, and above all, they didn’t know what awaited them. While Berlin hadn’t yet decided what should be done with the children, it seemed impossible to leave them in the chaos of the Vél d’Hiv in the middle of Paris.
A temporary solution was found. They would be sent with their parents to the camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.
Joseph Viceman was not on that mortality list. He was, however, one of those who left the Drancy station for the camps in the Loiret, in the center of France. “We saw the immense trains as long as the eye could see,” he said. “The cattle wagons, the freight train wagons with horses, ‘eight men, 40’ written on the side. They got us on board at over 200 people per wagon.”
Barbarity has no limits. The transportation of the Jews in these cattle wagons served a precise practical purpose. It was much easier to guard the people inside and prevent escapes. “You needed five times more people to guard a deportation train made up of passenger cars,” one historian explained. “With cattle cars, you shut them and you need much less surveillance.”
After a trip carried out in abominable conditions, the small boy arrived at the camp of Beaune-la-Rolande. He stayed there for two weeks with his sisters and parents—until the day of his deportation and the atrocious family separations.
Certain children like Joseph were not part of the convoy. It was the worst horror you could imagine. The grief of the children and the grief of the parents. “I think it was after having lived through this that I first smelled death,” Joseph said. “It was inhuman. So I had to get out.”
After several attempts, the young Joseph and his friend Joe escaped during one meal time when all the inmates were inside the barracks. It was an epic escape—through thick fences of barbed wire that lasted six hours. “We were halfway through and we said we’d done something stupid,” Joseph remembered. “We couldn’t go on. We were exhausted. We had no strength left. Then luckily, after we’d rested a bit, we said going back is going to be as hard as going on. So, let’s keep going.”
The courage of those small boys saved their lives. For the others, their destiny was in the hands of Berlin.
On the 13th of August, the decision was announced. The children would be deported, sent to the Drancy camp, then to Auschwitz. They were gassed immediately. The children were deported, but the children had French nationality. So, the French were deported. Nevertheless, the agreement reached between the chief of SS police Carl Oberg and the chief of the French police René Bousquet not to round up French Jews had not in the end been respected.
If the Vel d’Hiv roundup was the most emblematic, it was not the only one. Mass arrests were carried out all over France—in the free zone as well as the occupied zone—from July 15 until the end of summer 1942. Almost no region was spared. Everywhere Jews had been counted in the census, they were rounded up.
In Nice, in the occupied zone, the roundup of July 19, 1942, was a fiasco. There were only a dozen arrests in a city where several hundred Jews should have been arrested. It was the only failure. This roundup failed thanks to one man who was the head of the foreigner service of the Nice police. He practically ordered all of his men to go and warn everyone in the city that there was going to be a roundup the following day. These people left or went into hiding. The day of the roundup, there were so few arrests that the Germans preferred to cancel the convoy for Auschwitz.
In the free zone, René Bousquet would attempt to hand over the 10,000 Jews he had promised in May. The French government first transferred internees to camps in the south of France. There were about 3,500 people—adults, men and women. Then it was the turn of the men who were incorporated into the foreign workers groups along with their wives. In some cases, a thousand people. It still wasn’t enough to reach the 10,000 Jews Bousquet had promised.
The police chief decided at that moment to launch a major program of arrests in the free zone. The roundup of August 26, 1942, was politically important because here was an operation organized by Vichy at the request of the Germans in territory where the Germans were completely absent—and which shows full and complete collaboration of the French state in the carrying out of the Final Solution. The different police services, the mobile reserve guards, the Gendarmerie, and the army were all mobilized to sweep the 40 departments of the free zone.
On the evening of August 28, 1942, the main police station of every department communicated the number of Jews it had managed to round up. In all, nearly 7,000 Jews thanks to this vast operation. The August 26 operation was much bigger than the final number suggests because in order to gather together 7,000 Jews to be handed over to the Germans, there were perhaps as many as 20,000 arrests.
The people rounded up in the Marseilles region were sent to the Milles camp. Before the departure for Auschwitz, all of these people were sorted by commissions set up to decide who would go next. At 5:00 in the morning, everyone had to assemble in the courtyard. Everyone had to come down with all their possessions, a minimum of baggage, and wait for the list of names to be called out to see who had been chosen to leave on the next convoy.
The ones selected were escorted to the deportation platform, which was only 300 meters from the tile factory where the inmates were confined. This proximity made this moment all the more harrowing for those who stayed behind. From their windows, they saw and heard the cries of the wretched individuals who were about to be deported. It caused a lot of suffering and a number of suicides. In particular, the suicide of a mother who had two babies who decided to throw herself out of a high window with her babies in her arms simply because her husband was leaving with their eldest child in the convoy.
Before leaving, the train might stay at the platform for 48 hours. Some didn’t answer the roll call. The police had to go and find deserters hidden in the internment camp. It was a very large building, a tile factory that wasn’t at all built for interning people. By removing part of the roof, some inmates had succeeded in going and hiding in its windowless rooms. Others, adolescents mainly, went onto the roof to hide behind the chimneys. Not all were lucky enough to escape deportation.
In that summer of 1942, 2,000 Jews—men, women, and children—left the Milles camp for Auschwitz. In the summer where the heat is so intense that it leads to suffocation and even death before arrival at the camp at times, the reality is also that this will be a very long journey. You have very long stops at certain railway stations, and that makes it even more agonizing for those who are inside the deportation convoys.
The quota of 10,000 Jews had been met, but the Germans weren’t going to stop there. They wanted 25,000 more arrests before November—before the possible suspension of the convoys during winter. Angered by this constant pressure, the government chief Pierre Laval refused this latest demand. Enough was enough. After the handing over of 40,000 Jews, there wouldn’t be any more.
There were no more Vichy government orders to local administrations to round up Jews because there was no longer any question of handing over Jews to Germany at that period. After having discriminated powerfully against Jews in 1940–42, Vichy did indeed try to slow down the deportations of French citizens. From October 1942, the Germans could no longer count on massive and systematic French collaboration. If roundups were going to take place now, they would require the zeal of local administrators such as the state delegates of the Marseilles area a few weeks later.
On November 8, 1942, British and American troops landed in North Africa. There they were on Hitler’s doorstep. And at that point, Hitler thought that they were probably going to land in southern France. He sent his troops into the unoccupied zone. On November 11, the German and Italian invaders shared out what is now called the southern zone. Mussolini’s army occupied most of the southeast. The city of Marseilles, a possible entry point for the Allies, was put in the hands of the Nazis. It was to become the target of a roundup of large proportions.
This was a very special operation. First of all, because it was decided in Berlin by Heinrich Himmler, who was obsessed with the danger that Marseilles represented. In Nazi fantasy, there was clearly a danger of epidemics because it was a port and the city was, they believed, run by the local mafia. From January 22 to 27, 1943, the French and German police arrested all the Reich’s opponents who had come and taken refuge in the city. The Marseilles roundup was exceptional because it wasn’t only directed towards the Jews, but also those considered ruffians, asocials, pimps—and also the Jews.
In all, 5,956 people were rounded up. Among them, at least 782 Jews. They were deported to the Sobibor camp in Poland. None of them would survive.
Without French collaboration, the roundups were less effective. The deportations slowed. From the spring of 1943, a train was made available when there were enough Jews to deport, and for that it was necessary to arrest Jews. The Germans took charge of the roundups. They even arrested people in hospitals and orphanages.
In 1943, the young Rachel was hiding in Paris, but her hiding place was anything but safe. The Germans dispatched convoys of 1,000 people to Auschwitz. And when they had, for example, 900 or so, they would come into the children’s centers to complete their human cargo.
After his escape from the Beaune-la-Rolande camp, Joseph had managed to make it to the capital. As the only survivor from his family, he hoped he’d be safe in the orphanage in Rue… In 1943, the director said, “You know, I can’t keep you here any longer. There have been two or three times now when the Gestapo nearly got you when they arrived, so you’re going to leave Paris. We’re sending you to the countryside.” And he sent me to the Sarthe where I lived in hiding.
All the Jews attempted to escape the police controls and many of them took refuge in Nice in the southern zone. Jews who were terrified of being arrested and deported rushed into the Italian zone in the summer of ’43. Nice had been the principal city of the Italian zone. It was full of Jews. It was practically the only part of Europe that was in the hands of the Third Reich and its allies where the Jews were safe.
And then suddenly a tragedy occurred. The Allied landing in Italy in July 1943 provoked the collapse of the Mussolini regime. His troops pulled out of the French occupation zone, which was immediately invaded by the Germans. On September 10, 1943, Alois Brunner, an officer expert in the organization of roundups, was hurried to Nice. The number of Jews deported from France had been dropping, and he had been nominated to reverse the tendency.
He had to act without the collaboration of the French police. Vichy was going to disengage from direct collaboration. In other words, they would continue to practice a policy of anti-Semitism, but if you want to arrest Jews in what has become the southern zone, it’s up to you to arrest them. It is clear by this time that Germany is going to lose the war. So, Laval and Bousquet are a little less enthusiastic about the idea of collaborating.
Brunner had at his disposal an SS commando of only 20 men. He didn’t know the language or the terrain. So to help him with his mission, he recruited hundreds of local ultra-collaborators. Among them, members of the French Popular Party militia. Jews were arrested mostly by the Gestapo assisted by French accomplices—people who, out of ideological conviction or because they were paid to do it, proceeded to arrest Jews.
Together they began operating throughout the city of Nice. Their aim was to track the dispersed and hidden Jewish population wherever it was. We went from a period of roundups to one of tracking and hunting. So they would target living quarters, hotels, furnished rental accommodation, boarding houses, and bars and restaurants, too. Most Jews no longer had jobs, so they met up where they could.
The roundups were particularly violent. The Germans carried out brutal interrogations in the rooms of the Excelsior Hotel, Brunner’s headquarters. The SS chief’s men tortured Jews to make them give their identity and reveal where other Jews were hiding. The roundups were brutal because the Germans were fanatical. They anticipated their defeat and defeat for a Nazi fanatic was the Jews’ fault.
Faced with this danger, Janette’s parents, who had taken refuge in Nice, decided to entrust their children to the rescue network set up in the region by the couple Dr. Odette Rosenstock and Moussa Abadi. One evening, Mom and Dad took us to the famous address that Dr. Rosenstock had given Mom. I was 13 and a half. I was very conscious that I was going to stay with my little brother and that Mom and Dad were going to leave. My little brother, on the other hand, was young. He was seven and a half and he had a feeling of abandonment that has never left him.
Moussa Abadi took them to a Catholic boarding school and gave them fake identities. It was easy with me. I was grown up. He said, “Your name is Jean Muru. You were born in Marrakesh.” “Very good, sir. I got it.” But with the little ones, you needed to drum it into them. At first, they thought it was fun. Then he said, “Henriette.” And he called them by their old name. They weren’t supposed to turn their heads. Most of the time, they replied to their old name.
In total, 527 children hidden by Moussa and Odette were protected and saved. Thanks to these acts of solidarity, many Jews in the region escaped the clutches of Alois Brunner. The haul from these roundups was 3,500 Jews out of 25,000 who lived on the Riviera. They arrested 3,500 Jews. The French police would have arrested more Jews in one night than they had arrested over several months.
The end of the war was fast approaching and to the very end the Nazis continued to arrest Jews. No longer with any consideration for their nationality. When Bousquet was dismissed by order of the Germans in December 1943, he was replaced by a militia man called Joseph Darnand and he accepted that the French police would arrest French Jews.
The roundups of 1944 surprised French Jews living in the occupied zone in Bordeaux. Most Jews who’d reasoned that up to now they hadn’t been targeted were arrested. That made the Bordeaux roundup formidably effective. More than half the Jews were at home when the roundup happened. That was enormous.
When the local police didn’t want to cooperate, the Germans took charge of operations themselves—as in Nice in March 1944, where all the Jews remaining in the city were deported. In Paris, the manhunt was increasingly difficult, but the Gestapo was able to count on numerous letters of denunciation. They were transmitted to special French police brigades who would then carry out the arrests.
“I denounce the completely Jewish family who live at 46 Rue Godot-Cavignac who have been dealing on the black market for a long time. They live in a flat on the first floor.” Of the 15,000 Jews who were deported in 1944, most of them had been hunted down, and I estimate that a third were arrested after being denounced. So, you see, it was enormous.
The police also exploited the smallest bending of the rules. The wearing of the yellow star remained a foolproof way to arrest and deport Jews, both French and foreign. There was a train just about a week before Paris was liberated. It did continue. And things like the expropriation of Jewish property continued right up to the end.
Almost all of France’s territory had been liberated. So the Final Solution was brought to a halt, not because the Germans weren’t able to organize it, but because the Allies liberated French territory so quickly. Between March 27, 1942, and August 17, 1944, 79 convoys left France, taking almost 76,000 people to their deaths. There were another 3,000 Jews who were in the French camps and died there of typhus or malnutrition or what have you.
Could France have avoided handing over its Jews? Today, there’s no doubt about it. Without Vichy, there would never have been roundups organized in France. What we mean by roundups isn’t the operations organized by the German police in ’43 or ’44. It’s the Vel d’Hiv and its 13,000 victims. It’s the roundup in the free zone and its 7,000 people who were arrested and handed over to the Germans. It’s the Marseilles roundup. It’s the February ’43 roundup.
Vichy’s responsibility is great because it offered up the use of its police department and unfortunately its police proved very effective. It wasn’t until July 16, 1995, and the speech by President Jacques Chirac that Vichy’s responsibility in the deportation of French Jews was recognized at last. An overdue recognition that left many of the actors in this genocide unpunished. Alois Brunner escaped judicial proceedings. René Bousquet served only three years in prison. As for Marshal Pétain and Carl Oberg, who were condemned to death, in the end they were pardoned.
Seventy-five years later, the names of the 4,000 children deported from the Vel d’Hiv are inscribed on a wall in Paris. Each name a life, a story, a future stolen. The survivors—Joseph, Rachel, Janette—carried their memories through decades of silence before finally speaking. Their voices, now frail with age, still echo through the corridors of history, asking us to remember.
What would you have done if you had been that neighbor, that policeman, that mother forced to choose? Would you have turned the other way—or would you have looked?
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