On a solemn Sunday in Paris, France gathered to honor the memory of more than 13,000 Jewish victims of the 1942 Vel d’Hiv roundup, one of the darkest chapters of collaboration between the wartime Vichy regime and Nazi Germany. The annual commemoration this year carries heightened urgency, as the nation confronts a sharp increase in antisemitic violence and harassment across the country following the outbreak of the Israel-Gaza conflict in October 2023.
The mass arrest operation, named for the Paris Winter Velodrome where thousands of detainees were crowded in inhumane conditions before deportation, unfolded over four days starting July 16, 1942. French authorities mobilized more than 4,500 police officers and requisitioned dozens of civilian buses to carry out the raid, acting on Nazi orders. Over 13,000 Jews were arrested, one-third of them children. Families were torn apart as officers seized children from their parents’ arms, and nearly all detainees were ultimately sent to Nazi death camps, where very few survived.
During World War II, after Nazi Germany invaded and occupied France in 1940, the collaborationist Vichy government administered French territory and actively aided the Nazi regime’s genocidal campaign against European Jewry. It would take five decades for the French state to formally take responsibility for its role in the Holocaust: in 1992, then-President Jacques Chirac issued a historic public apology for the French authorities’ central participation in the Vel d’Hiv roundup and other atrocities.
Today, France is home to the largest Jewish community in Europe. In the months after the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel and the subsequent Israeli military campaign in Gaza, official data has recorded a major surge in antisemitic incidents, ranging from verbal threats and graffiti vandalism to physical assaults on Jewish people and sites. The troubling wave of hate cast a shadow over this year’s commemoration, after authorities confirmed a memorial plaque honoring a French family recognized as Righteous Among the Nations by the State of Israel was vandalized in Paris in the days leading up to the ceremony. The family had saved a 13-year-old Jewish child from capture during the 1942 roundup.
French Deputy Defense Minister Alice Rufo condemned the act of vandalism in stark terms, saying “To attack the Righteous is to desecrate the entire universe.” She reaffirmed the state’s commitment to restoring the plaque and preserving the legacy of those who resisted antisemitism and genocide, stressing that “In the face of antisemitism, in all its forms, the Republic will not yield an inch.”
Each year’s commemoration serves as both a tribute to the victims of the roundup and a reminder of the ongoing need to confront antisemitic hate in modern French society, keeping the memory of the Vel d’Hiv victims alive for future generations.