Paris Journal 2012 – Barbara Joy Cooley Home: barbarajoycooley.com
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Paris in the summer of 1942. It is difficult to understand. A large part of the southern half of the country was NOT under German occupation until November of that year. The Pechiney company, based in the Camargue, was there, in the unoccupied area. Yet the executives of Pechiney chose to build their technical school in Paris, in the occupied zone, in 1942. That summer, construction was either under way or recently completed. The school, at number 87 boulevard de Grenelle, was just down the street from the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a bicycle racing stadium on the boulevard de Grenelle at the rue Nélaton. I’ve written about the horrible round-up of Jewish families at Vel d’Hiv a number of times. It happened in the middle of July, about a week before my husband was born in South Carolina. French officials, including President Hollande, are finally acknowledging that the round-up was entirely a French operation. There was slight pressure on the Vichy government to meet certain quotas, but the Nazi’s did not order the round-up of little children in mid-July 1942. That was a French idea. On April 9, 2008, The Independent published an excellent article by John Lichfield about what it was really like in Paris in 1942. The occasion for his article was a photographic exhibition showing what a man named Zucca captured on film of daily life in Paris. It was disturbingly normal. No, Paris was not a miserable place full of French people being persecuted by Nazis. That’s how DeGaulle tried to describe it after the fact, but that simply wasn’t true. The vast majority of Parisians went about their lives, ignoring the atrocities happening around them on days like July 16 and 17, 1942. Zucca was a collaborationist; he was able to get and use German Agfa film to take those photographs. The Pechiney company officials were collaborationists; they went into the occupied zone and built their technical school in 1942. The architect Saacké, the artist Riolo – collaborationists. Tom and I walked by the site of the Vélodrome d’Hiver again yesterday. The park between that site and the river contains an appropriate memorial with words that say the French were responsible. Unfortunately, an older memorial facing the boulevard de Grenelle has older wording that is less than honest. It is downright wrong. It attempts to place the blame for the Vel d’Hiv round-up operation on the Nazi occupiers. No, no, no. It was a French operation. It is time for somebody to change the plaque on that older memorial, which is shamefully dishonest. This summer, another photographic exhibition of Paris in 1942 is showing at city hall; this one is photos of the round-up at Vel d’Hiv. It continues through October 27; I will go to see it after we move over to the 6th in September. Tom won’t go; it is just too awful to contemplate. But the journalist in me must witness. I’ll go alone. Here’s a web page with a few of the photos. It doesn’t show what happens next, but you know what happened at Auschwitz. The novel Sarah’s Key fairly captures some aspects of the Vel d’Hiv roundup, and it is well written. The first time I wrote about the Vel d’Hiv atrocity was on August 2, 2001, after I happened upon the memorial in the park called the Place des Martyrs Juifs. I wrote on that journal page that the site of the Vel d’Hiv is now a block of modern apartment buildings. But actually, part of the site seems to be occupied by a Ministry of the Interior government building. What struck me yesterday were the circa 1900 buildings around the site; people were living in these places in the summer of 1942, and surely they witnessed what was happening across the street from their apartments. By and large, they did nothing about it. Ninety-some percent of the French did nothing to stop the slaughter. They simply went about their lives during the occupation. Here’s a photograph that must have been taken from one of those apartment buildings. Last month was the 70th anniversary of the round up at Vel d’Hiv. Never forget. |
Friday, August 17, 2012
Plaque
on older Vel d’Hiv
memorial, with dishonest wording.
Poster
for the current photographic exhibition at the Paris city hall. (Sorry about all the reflection.)
Many
who lived near the Vélodrome d’Hiver
in the summer of 1942 attended religious services here, at the Saint John the
Baptist of Grenelle church, at the Saint
Christopher of Javel church, or at the Saint Leon
church on the Place Dupleix. |
