FRENCH PRESIDENT FRANCOIS HOLLANDE ON THE OCCASION OF THE VEL D’HIV….PLEASE READ …SEE NOTE
In French at: http://jssnews.com/2012/07/22/hollandehistorique
IT MAY SUFFER A BIT IN TRANSLATION BUT IT IS A MAGNIFICENT SPEECH…NEVER MIND LEFT OR RIGHT….
ALSO PLEASE READ RITA KRAMER’S COLUMN ON VEL D’HIV PUBLISHED TODAY IN OUTPOST ONLINE:
http://www.mideastoutpost.com/archives/frances-shame-rita-kramer.html
We gather this morning to recall the horror of a crime, expressing the grief of those who lived through the tragedy, evoking the dark hours of collaboration, our history, and therefore the responsibility of France.
We are here also to transmit the memory of the Shoah, which the raids were the first step, to lead the fight against oblivion, to testify to the new generations of barbarism that is capable of doing and what humanity may itself contain resources to defeat it.
70 years ago, July 16, 1942, at dawn, 13,152 men, women and children were arrested at their homes. Childless couples and singles were interned in Drancy, where the fall will amount to the museum created by the Shoah Memorial.
Others were taken to the Velodrome d’Hiver. Crammed for five days in inhumane conditions, they were transferred from there to the camps of Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.
Clear direction was given by the Vichy administration: “Children should not be dispatched in the same convoy as the parents.” So, after agonizing separations that parents on one side, the other children, went to Auschwitz-Birkenau where deported from Drancy had preceded them a few days.
They were murdered. Simply because they were Jews.
This crime took place here in our city, our streets, in our current building, in our stairwells, in our school yards.
It would pave the way for other raids, in Marseille and throughout France, that is to say on both sides of the line. There were also other deportations, including that of Gypsies.
The infamy of the Vel d’Hiv was part of a company that had no precedent and can not be compared to anything: the Holocaust, the attempted annihilation of all Jews of Europe.
76,000 Jews from France were deported to extermination camps. Only 2,500 have returned.
These women, these men, these children could not wait for the fate that had been reserved. They could not even imagine. They had confidence in France.
They believed that the country of the Great Revolution, the City of Light, they serve as a refuge. They loved the Republic with a passion inspired by gratitude. It is indeed in Paris in 1791 under the Constituent Assembly, that for the first time in Europe, Jews had become full citizens. Later, others found in France a land of welcome, a chance at life, a promise of protection.
It is this promise and confidence which were trampled there seventy years.
I want to remember the words that the Chief Rabbi of France Jacob Kaplan wrote to Marshal Pétain in October 1940 after the promulgation of the odious status of Jews: “Victims, he wrote, measures that affect us in our dignity as men and in honor of our French, we express our deep faith in the spirit of justice of the eternal France. We know that our ties to the great French family are too strong to be broken. ”
There is betrayal.
Beyond time, beyond mourning, my presence this morning demonstrates the willingness of France to watch over the memory of her fallen and honor the dead unburied, those beings whose only grave is our memory .
This is the meaning of the requirement under the Republic: the names of these victims do not fall into oblivion.
We owe it to the Jewish martyrs of the Velodrome d’Hiverla truth about what happened there seventy years.
The truth is that the French police, on the basis of lists that had established itself, was responsible to stop the thousands of innocent people trapped July 16, 1942. Is that the French gendarmerie was escorted to the internment camps.
The truth is that not one German soldier, not one, was mobilized for the entire operation.
The truth is that this crime was committed in France by France.
Join 24,000 JSSNews friends on Facebook!
The great merit of President Jacques Chirac is known to have right here, July 16, 1995, this truth.
“France, he said, France, homeland of the Enlightenment and human rights, land of welcome and asylum, France, that day, accomplished the irreparable.”
But the truth is also that the crime of Vel d’Hiv was committed against France, against its values, against his principles, against his ideals.
The honor was saved by the righteous, and above all by those who knew how to speak out against the barbarity, by the unsung heroes who, here, hid a neighbor who, where, aided by another, who risked their lives for those innocent people are spared. For all those French who have survived that three quarters of the Jews of France.
The honor of France was embodied by General de Gaulle, who had risen 18 June 1940 to continue the fight.
The honor of France was forbidden by the Resistance, this army of shadows that does not resign himself to the shame and defeat.
France was represented on the battlefield, with our flag, the soldiers of Free France.
She was also served by Jewish institutions, as the work of Save the Children, which organized the clandestine rescue of over 5,000 children and orphans who welcomed the Liberation.
The truth does not divide. It gathers. With this in mind that this day of commemoration was established by Francois Mitterrand, and that, under the government of Lionel Jospin, was created the Foundation for the Memory of the Holocaust. It is under the same government, with Jacques Chirac, that the commission was installed to compensate victims of anti-Semitic spoliations, whose goal was to repair what could still be.
I recollect now, in the chain of our collective history, to continue this joint memory, truth and hope.
It starts with transmission.Beaucoup drifts are rooted in ignorance. We can not resign ourselves to only two out of three young French do not know what was the Vel d’Hiv roundup.
The republican school, to which I express my confidence, has a mission: to educate, educate, teach the past, awareness, understanding, in all its dimensions. The Holocaust is on the agenda of the CM2, the third and first.
It should not be in France one school, one college, one high school, where she can be taught. It should not be a single institution where that story is fully understood, respected and meditated. There can be, there will not, for the Republic of lost memory.
I will personally.
The challenge is to fight tirelessly against all forms of falsification of history. Not only against the outrage of Holocaust denial, but also against the temptation of relativism. Sharing the Story of the Holocaust, it is indeed teach his terrible uniqueness. This crime is, by its nature, its dimension, its methods, the frightening precision of its implementation, a single deep in human history. This singularity then must be constantly reminded.
Transmit this memory is finally holding all leçons.C is how the ignominy was possible yesterday, so it can never reappear tomorrow.
The Holocaust did not spring from nothing and from nowhere. Certainly, it was implemented by the new alliance and terrifying stubbornness in delirium racist and rationality in industrial performance. But it also made possible by centuries of blindness, stupidity, lies and haine.Elle was preceded by many signs, which did not alert the conscience.
Our vigilance must never be compromised. No nation, no society, no person is immune against evil. Let’s not forget the judgment of Primo Levi about his persecutors: “Except they were not monsters, they had our faces.” Remain on alert to detect whether the return of monstrosity in its most innocuous tunes.
I know the fears expressed by some of you. I want to answer.
Aware of this history, the Republic hound with great determination all anti-Semitic acts, but still all about who could only bring Jews of France to feel uneasy in their own country.
Nothing in this area, is indifferent. Everything will be fought with the utmost vigor. Shut-Semitism, conceal, explain it, it’s already accepted.
Security of Jews in France is not the case of the Jews is that of all the French, and I mean it is guaranteed in all circumstances and in all places.
Four months ago, in Toulouse, children were dying for the same reason as the Vel d’Hiv: because they were Jews.
Anti-Semitism is not an opinion, it is a humiliation. For this, it must first be viewed in front. It must be named and recognized for what it is. Wherever it spreads, it will be unmasked and punished.
All ideologies of exclusion, all forms of intolerance, all fanaticism, xenophobia all, attempting to develop the logic of hatred, the Republic will find their way.
Every Saturday morning, in every synagogue French, at the end of the office, heard the prayer of the Jews of France, that they send to the salvation of the country they love and want to serve, “What France may live happy and prosperous. It is strong and great by the union and concord. It enjoys lasting peace and retains its nobility of spirit among the Nations “.
This spirit of nobility, it is France as a whole must be worthy.
Tirelessly teach historical truth scrupulously respect the values of the Republic; constantly remind the requirement of religious tolerance, as part of our secular laws; never yield on the principles of freedom and dignity ; always promote the promise of equality and emancipation. These are the steps we need collectively to assign to us.
In thinking of the lives that could not be accomplished, these children without a future, these fates that we must cut down prematurely to a level even higher requirements of our own lives. This is by refusing indifference, neglect, complacency, as we become stronger together.
By being clear about our own history that France, through the spirit of concord and unity, bringing the best values, here and around the world.
Comments are closed.
