Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay

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So I looked up Vel' d'Hiv on Google and I found several things.

Here is first article:


Letters from Drancy

Memorials for the 60th anniversary of the first mass round-up of French Jews in 1942 include the publication of a book of 129 victim testimonials, reports Jon Henley

* Jon Henley
* guardian.co.uk,
* Thursday July 18 2002

This article was first published on guardian.co.uk on Thursday July 18 2002. It was last updated at 14:23 on July 18 2002.
The operation that became known as the round-up of the Vél d'Hiv began at 4am on Thursday July 16, 1942.

Some 4,500 French policemen took part. The 12,884 victims - including 4,051 children - were held briefly in schools and police stations throughout Paris, then herded into municipal buses and driven away.

Some 7,000 of them, foreign, stateless and French Jews, men women and children, spent five days in the Vélodrome d'Hiver, the winter cycling stadium, on rue Nélaton in the capital's 15th arrondissement, without food and with one water tap between them.

From there, families were sent to two camps in the Loiret district, where the children were separated from their parents. Single adults and couples without children were mostly taken straight to the Drancy transit camp just beyond the Paris ringroad.

Almost all of them ended up in Auschwitz. La rafle du Vél d'Hiv, Operation Spring Wind for the German occupiers, marked the start of the mass round-ups of Jews in France. Of the 33,000 rounded up and deported over the next two months around the country, 2,600 returned.

The Vélodrome d'Hiver itself no longer exists. But nearby, at the place de Martyrs-Juifs, is a monument where the French prime minister, Jean-Pierre Raffarin, will lay a wreath this Sunday in a ceremony also attended by the defence minister, the mayor of Paris, officials from the Jewish community and a handful of survivors.

A special programme on the round-up is being taught this week in Paris schools. Posters have been stuck on all the city's buses: "Sixty years ago, 4,000 Jewish children were arrested, deported and exterminated at Auschwitz. France says no to anti-semitism."

Films and documentaries about the event are being shown on television and at the Forum des Images in Les Halles. Photo exhibitions have been mounted at Montparnasse and St-Lazare main line stations.

A plaque was unveiled yesterday on the rue des Pyrénées in the 20th arrondissement, one of the worst hit in the round-up.

Newspapers have been printing heartrending testimonies and reproducing horrifying letters scribbled on wrapping paper, or pages torn from school exercise books, in the stadium or the subsequent transit camps. A book containing 129 of them, Letters from Drancy, has just been published.

Few guessed what was in store. On the day of the round-up, Paulette Stokfisz-Bronstein wrote to her sister Nana. "The police came and arrested all the Jews in the building, they took me and my two children, I am writing to say we are being taken to the Veélodrome d'Hiver. I ask you to go to my home, 1, passage du Jeu-de-Boules in the 11th, to get the keys from the concierge. Just take all that's there. Take all my things, all you find ... Bring me a few jars of conserves and two skirts so I can change."

Two days later, another letter, this time from the Vél d'Hiv, more concerned. "Take a cushion cover to send me a few blouses and socks and ask Lisa [their sister] to bring them to me here, they'll let her in, but do it quickly because we're moving on from here to an unknown destination ... Bring me some sugar and conserves, because they give us nothing to eat."

On July 31, without news of her sister, Paulette writes again, from the Pithiviers transit camp: "I am perhaps leaving again for an unknown destination. My cousin has already left, her son stayed behind but he is with me. I am going to leave. Jacques and Raymonde [her children] will be left alone. The Red Cross may ask you to take them in.

"I beg you Nana, accept ... Jacques can look after himself. Raymonde goes to school. They won't bother you. Dear Nana, go to my flat and take everything, I give it all to you. I will send you a parcel. There is some money and my jewels. Keep them ... I beg you, have pity on my children. I think this is my last letter ... Keep all I asked you to send. I don't need anything any more."

Paulette Stokfisz-Bronstein was deported to Auschwitz on August 7 1942. Her two children, Jacques and Raymonde, followed on September 2.

Not all the stories of the Vél d'Hiv are so despairing. If they were not dropped from the windows of trains and buses, many of the Letters from Drancy were smuggled out of the stadium or the camps by friendly policemen. And or two testimonies of hope have emerged this week: a 75-year-old woman recounted on the radio this morning how a young policemen escorted her out of the stadium on the day after the round-up.

"He had been looking at me for some time," she said, "and then he just came up to me and asked me to follow him. I did, out of the stadium, sticking right behind him. To everyone who questioned him he said: 'It's alright, she's with me.' He left me at the metro station and said he couldn't go any further. I regret never trying to get in touch with him after it was all over; maybe he got into trouble for what he did."

But the truth remains that it was the French police who implemented - and indeed exceeded - the German plans for Operation Spring Wind. Originally, French Jews and all those under 18 were to have been spared. But, eager to meet the wildly unrealistic Nazi target of 25,000 foreign-born adult Jews, zealous French officials rounded up everyone they could lay their hands on.

It took until 1995 for the French state to acknowledge its role. "Yes," said Jacques Chirac then, soon after he was first elected president of the Republic, "the criminal madness of the occupier was seconded by the French, by the French state, everyone knows it. That day, France accomplished something irreparable."

So in the week that saw an attempt by a lone extreme-right militant to assassinate Mr Chirac, it is only proper that France should make much of the 60th anniversary of a black chapter in its history that it has only recently begun to admit as its own.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2002/jul/18/worlddispatch.jonhenley



from ask yahoo:

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker
Hi S.Have you read , Jews In France During WW2 By Renee Poznanski, Nathan Bracher. You can read it on line books.google.com/books? It deals with , La Grande Rafle du Vel d'hiv July 16 1942.Also you should read, Sarah's Key by Tatiana de Rosnay You should also check out hgs.oxfordjournals.org/cgi/reprint/9/1/2... They have journals and accounts of that day.I hope this is of help.Good luck my friend, cathorio.
1 month ago

Asker's Rating:
Asker's Comment:
I am reading Sarah`s Key right now,thats how I became aware of the incident and of how the French police/state were so complicit in the imprisonment and thence deportation of so many Jews to Auschwitz. Your valued input has been very helpful,and five stars are well deserved.