THE VÉLODREME D’HIVER AND THE DRANCY INTERNMENT CAMP:

Two Focal Points Of Unresolved Dialogue

Ingrid Halí Tokún Haga Álvarez

Introduction

staLin used to rewrite history, erasing his enemies from photographs and textbooks. He was an expert at hiding, exaggerating, and distorting facts. However, he was not the frst nor the last to do this. Centuries before, the Romans tried to erase Carthage from human memory. Their example was followed by King Henry IV, who in 1598 forbade his subjects from remembering the wars of religion.

Because “no memory is possible outside the framework used by people in society”,1 “group memberships provide the materials for memory and prod the individual into recalling particular events and into forgetting others”.2 According to this idea, collectives —like family, class, and nation— decide what is valuable to remember. With this objective in mind, they create organized mnemonics like textbooks, public holidays and memorials. The past is constructed as a myth to serve the interest of a particular community. Because people belong to different collectives that sometimes have different interests, memory becomes an arena of contest between rival notions. As a result, commemorative sites are transformed into focal points of unresolved dialogue.

This academic paper is divided into three sections. The frst part studies the Monument commémoratif de la grande rafe du Vel’ d’Hiv’. The second one analyses the Mémorial de la Shoah in Drancy. Finally, in the conclusion, I refect about the conficts over the French memory present in both memorials.

MONUMENT CONMERATIF DE LA RAFLE DU VEL’ D’HIV

The Vel d’Hiv Roundup

After the French troops surrendered in June 1940, France was divided into two zones: one occupied in the north and a “zone libre” in the south with its capital in Vichy. Led by the World War I hero Philippe Pétain, the Vichy regime not only collaborated with the German forces, but it also embraced anti-Semitic measures, even before the Nazis requested them.

On January 20, 1942, Nazi offcials met in Wannsee and planned the Final Solution: the murder of all the European Jews. Two months later, they started implementing it in France. They organized a massive roundup in

Paris. Vichy’s Prime Minister, Pierre Laval, agreed to detain foreign Jews if French Jews were exempted from the measure. He feared that there would be internal revolts if French citizens were deported. In contrast, foreign Jews were an easier target. Almost nobody —even the French Jewish community— was interested in defending them.

The roundup started on July 16, 1942. “At least 7,000 civil servants were operational”;3 those detained were mainly refugees from nations occupied by the Nazis.4 The roundup, which ended the next day, was the largest carried out in France.5 Of those arrested, 62% were detained at the Vélodrome d’ Hiver (VdH), a bicycle racing track not far from the Eiffel Tower. Inside it, the living conditions were so brutal that some prisoners took their own lives. Five days after the rails ended, all the detainees were sent to death camps.

Between oblivion and half truths: the vdh roundup after the war

When the Second World War ended, the French population tried to forget the occupation and a prevalent culture of national denial became widespread. “No French leader from de Gaulle to Mitterrand acknowledged the state’s part in deporting Jews to Nazi death camps”.6 “France founded its post-war self-image on ideas promoted by de Gaulle: the Republic emerged unsullied by the collaborationist Vichy regime […] and there was a clean break between Vichy and the post-war Governments”.7 French statesmen argued that, because the Republic died with the occupation, the post-war government was not guilty of Vichy’s crimes. Moreover, the New Republic was experiencing a period of unfnished mourning. As the historian Rousso claims, the transition between the occupation and the liberation was so abrupt that the French population found it almost impossible to make sense of the changes. As a result, memories about Vichy were “repressed”.8

4 Loc. cit.

5 United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, “Drancy”, https://www.ushmm.org/wlc/es/ article.php?ModuleId=10005215, retrieved April 7, 2018.

6 The Economist, “Remembering the Vel d’Hiv”, March 18, 2010, https://www.economist. com/node/15731410, retrieved April 4, 2018.

Nevertheless, despite the best efforts of the government, the VdH roundup was not completely forgotten. Jewish victims gathered at the stadium every June 16 to commemorate it. A plaque was installed in 1949 by an antiracist association at the entrance of the velodrome,9 which was dedicated to the memory of the 30,000 Jewish, “victims of racial persecution […], confned in this space by order of the Nazi occupier”.10 Therefore, the VdH became a point of confict between two groups: the Jewish community, who refused to forget the extermination of Jews in France, and the majority of the population, who preferred to leave the past behind.

It is important to remark that both groups attributed the responsibility of the persecution against Jews to the Nazis, not to the Vichy’s authorities. These myths and half-truths were used to unite the country. “The challenges posed by decolonization[...], together with the diffculties involved in adjusting to […] the Cold War, relegated the conficts of 19401944 to the margins of national consciousness”11

8 Henry Rousso, The Vichy Syndrome: History and Memory in France Since 1944, trad. Arthur Goldhammer, Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1991, passim.

9 Peter Carrier, Holocaust monuments and national memory cultures in France and Germany since 1989: the origins and political function of the Vél’ d’Hiv’ in Paris and the Holocaust Monument in Berlin, New York, Berghahn, 2005, p. 53.

10 Michael Dorland, “The Black Hole of Memory: French Mnemotechniques in the Erasure of the Holocaust”, MediaTropes eJournal, num. 2, 2016, p. 11.

11James Chisem, “The collective memory of WWII in France”, http://www.e-ir. info/2011/08/22/the-collective-memory-of-wwii-in-france/, retrieved January 19, 2018.

Breaking the wall of silence: 1968-1991

In 1959, a fre destroyed the VdH; however, memories about French collaborationism did not fade away. They remained not only because some Jewish refused to forget, but also due to a series of events: the trial of Adolf Eichmann (1961), the Yom Kippur War (1973), and terrorist attacks against Jews in the 1980s. Hence, since the 1960s, a younger generation struggled “to make sense of Vichy’s collaborationist legacy”.12 Between the members of this generation was a future prime minister and president: Jacques Chirac. In 1982, as mayor of Paris, he attended the fortieth anniversary of the VdH roundup. Four years later, as prime minister, Chirac unveiled a plaque where the stadium used to be. It corrected the number of victims —reducing the fgure to 13,152 people— and broke it down by age and gender. The plaque placed the responsibility for the roundup to “the Vichy Government police upon the orders of the Nazi occupiers”.13

The question of collaborationism was not fully addressed until the 1990s, when the fall of the USSR, the trials of Touvier (1994) and Papon (1997), and the action of Jewish pressure groups increased the political cost of continued indifference about the topic.14 Thus, during the fftieth anniversary of the roundup, the president François Mitterrand raised controversy when he left a wreath before the VdH plaque without recognizing the responsibility of the French government. During the next year, a parliamentary bill introduced a National Day of Commemoration of the Racist and Anti-Semitic Persecution, and ordered the edifcation of a

12 Rosemarie Scullion, “Unforgettable: History, Memory, and the Vichy Syndrome”, Studies in 20th Century Literature, num 1, 1999, p. 15.

13 Michel Lafftte, “The Vélodrome d’hiver Round-up: July 16 and 17, 1942”, http://www. sciencespo.fr/mass-violence-war-massacre-resistance/en/document/va-lodrome-da-hiver-roundjuly-16-and-17-1942, retrieved April 3, 2018.

14 James Chisem, op. cit.