July 1942
Nearly 14,000 Parisians were arrested by the French police and, for the most part, rounded up at the Vélodrome d'Hiver, for the sole reason that they were Jewish.
Among them, many children. More than half of the 11,400 Jewish children deported from France between 1942 and 1944 were little Parisians.
IDENTIFICATION AND EXCLUSION
The armistice of June 22, 1940 divided France in two. Paris, and therefore the majority of French Jews, was in the northern zone. From September 1940, the occupying authorities and the Vichy government organized the stigmatization of the Jews.
French laws and German ordinances defined who the Jews were before identifying and locating them. They then excluded them from economic and cultural life. Most of these measures concerned not only adults but also children.
They thus mark a radical break with the protective status that children have increasingly enjoyed in Europe since the 18th century.
André PanczerCity of Paris
ARREST AND DEPORTATION
More than 6,100 children were arrested in Paris during the Holocaust, mostly by the municipal police. Most of them were deported to the Auschwitz camp in Poland where they were exterminated upon arrival.
Being a child of an internee
The first Parisian roundups took place in 1941. They led to the arrest of nearly 8,200 people, exclusively men and almost all foreigners.
The internment of these fathers plunges their families into additional material and psychological difficulties. It sometimes means that the children are brutally left alone.
SOLIDARITY AND RESCUE
It was in Paris that the fate of the majority of Jewish children deported from France was decided. Beyond its scope, the Vél d'Hiv round-up marked a double turning point. On the one hand, it definitively sealed the fate of Jews under the age of 16.
On the other hand, by the reactions it provokes, it opens the way to forms of opposition to this radical exterminating project.
On their doorsteps, in their buildings, in their streets, Parisians witnessed the sudden disappearance - and sometimes the brutal arrest, by French police officers - of not only men but also women and especially children.
These scenes provoked several reactions of solidarity among a non-Jewish population that had until then been indifferent, and sometimes satisfied, with the situation of the Jews.
Jewish social organizations - which have been taking care of families for several months now - can now rely on these expressions of sympathy to pursue the goal that is now obvious to everyone: saving the children.
Baigneur ayant appartenu à Francine ChistopheCity of Paris
SURVIVE AND GROW
In Paris, as in all of France, about 80% of Jewish children survived the war. It is generally estimated that 10,000 of them remained alive because they were taken in by Jewish rescue networks, assisted by non-Jews.
However, it is difficult to establish a definitive figure. A quantitative estimate is even more difficult when it comes to the gestures of solidarity of a particular neighbor, friend or classmate.
Finally, many children lived through the war in the company of their parents, who sometimes even stayed at home in Paris throughout the war. The experience of Jewish children who survived the war in France is therefore plural.
Society for the Health of the Jewish Population
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