July 16 1942 – 2 Av 5702
The Nazis began to round up Parisian Jews, most of whom were herded into the Vélodrome d’Hiver – the city’s “Winter Stadium.” The hunt went on for two days; an unestimated number of Jews managed to slip through the Gestapo’s net, fleeing Paris or hidden by the French Resistance. Conditions in the stadium were appalling; thousands were held there for five days, in stifling heat, with no arrangements for food, water or sanitation. What happened next was no relief – they were loaded on to trains and sent to Auschwitz for extermination. They were just a quarter of the 42,000 French Jews deported from France to Auschwitz in 1942. By the war’s end, only 811 of them were still alive. A few thousand Jews survived the war in France in hiding. Apart from the terrible human tragedy, it was also a grave historic and cultural loss: one of the world’s most ancient Jewish communities, with a rich tradition reaching far into the Middle Ages, was to all intent’s and purposes wiped out. Today’s French Jewish community is based mostly on relatively new immigrants and their descendants, the majority having come from North Africa in the last seventy years.