July 16: “Operation Spring Breeze”

“Operation Spring Breeze,” the round-up of Jewish refugees and non-citizens by the government of Vichy France, was inaugurated on this date in 1942. Over the course of two days, in close cooperation with the Gestapo, French police grabbed 13,152 Jews, 31 percent of them children, and held them under harsh conditions at the Winter Velodrome, a stadium for bike races and other sporting events in the center of Paris, and at nearby internment camps, before deporting them to Auschwitz for extermination. Some people were warned by the French Resistance or hidden by neighbors and escaped being rounded up, but more than 75,000 Jews were deported to concentration camps over the course of the war, of whom only 2,500 survived. Pierre Laval, the minister who signed the deportation orders, was found guilty of high treason and executed at the end of the war. In 1995, President Jacques Chirac publicly apologized for the “Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup.”

“These dark hours soil forever our history and are an injury to our past and our traditions . . . The criminal folly of the occupier was seconded by the French, by the French state.” —Jacques Chirac