Netanyahu to attend commemoration of WWII mass roundup of Jews in Paris
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu will depart Sunday to Paris for the commemoration of 'Vel D'Hiv.'
By REUTERSFRANCE ISRAEL DEPORTATION COMMEMORATION
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is expected to attend a ceremony in Paris on Sunday to commemorate the mass arrest of Jews in the French capital during World War Two, today known as the Vel D'Hiv.Netanyahu and French President Emmanuel Macron, accompanied by their wives, will attend the tribute together where they will lay wreaths, observe a minute of silence and make a joint statement.In July 1942, after France collaborated with the Germans under the Vichy regime, French police executed a Nazi-ordered roundup in the Velodrome d'Hiver cycling stadium in Paris of 13,000 Jews, who were then deported to Auschwitz concentration camp.Former French President Jacques Chirac officially acknowledged for the first time in 1995 French complicity in the wartime deportations. But it was only in 2009 that France's highest court recognised the state's responsibility.Standing on the former site of an internment camp in the northeastern Paris suburb of Drancy, a lone wagon acts as one of the memorials to the French victims of the Holocaust.French rail firm SNCF has acknowledged guilt, it says it was a "cog in the Nazi extermination machine" and forced to obey the orders of the government and the German occupiers.About 76,000 Jews were arrested in France during World War Two and transported in appalling conditions in railway boxcars to concentration camps such as Auschwitz, where most died.Between 1.2 and 1.5 million people died at the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, most of them Jews. Many deaths were not registered because on arrival at Birkenau, groups were sent directly from their trains to nearby gas chambers.
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