A Cycle of Judicial Memory and Immoral Forgetting: Vel d'hiv 1942: Review Essay: Novels, Films, Memoirs, Interviews

Recreating and Recollecting an Historical Event

What happened in August 1942 to Jews in the Vel d'hiv (Vélodrome d'hiver or Winter Cycling Stadium) in one sense is not in controversy; the event does not raise the voices of deniers as does the Holocaust itself; and no one tries to trivialize the arrest, deportation, and execution of more than thirteen thousand French men, women, and children.¹ Though until very recently, no one in France liked to talk about it because this rafle or round-up involved ordinary Parisian gendarmes, bus drivers, and other civic officials of the collaborationist government under Nazi occupation, along with those French bureaucrats working for the Vichy regime of Marshall Pétain to the south. It was known to have happened. But the exact details were apparently lost: lost because the Germans unusually for them did not keep accurate records, including photographs and other plans. Lost because what material evidence (realia) that lasted was later destroyed or interfered with after the war, such as the velodrome itself, which was torn down, and the holding camps outside of Paris, bulldozed away or transformed into something seemingly innocuous; and it is charged that even General Charles de Gaulle, when he later came to power, had the few remaining photographs airbrushed so that French police officers were removed and the round-up presented as an all-German operation. Lost too because virtually all Jews who passed through the action did not survive, and those few Jews who did were mostly so young at the time they could not present substantial reports. Rose Bosch, the director of the film La Rafle, says the number of returnees was only 25.² Ordinary non-Jewish citizens of France pretended they could not remember, claimed not to know anyone who did recall, and resisted attempts to help them recollect. Anyone who did collaborate with the Nazis in this affair must have been a monster, the feeling went, and therefore the individuals who collaborated and did not seem like monsters could neither have known nor participated in the business. A vicious circle. Gendarmes, neighbors, passersby on the street, no one could bring to mind such an event happening, though they did not deny that it must have happened; it is not something nice to talk about. In time, of course, most French people did really forget, and the teachers and school textbooks forgot to remind them.

Perhaps, as Rose Bosch told Simon Round in an interview for the British Jewish Chronicle, "France was the only country in Europe which sent thousands of unaccompanied children on trains to the death camps," adding that "[w]hen they arrived at Auschwitz they were either marched to the gas chambers or machine-gunned to death."³ Not only that, most French people do not realize either that there were over two hundred internment camps on their national territory or that Marshal Petain's embarrassingly naive and almost comical government took an active part in the deportation and murder of Jews, often without any demands coming from the Germans."⁴ To accept as a judicial memory and a moral fact these aspects of French history is, of course, difficult, even for those not directly culpable, particularly children and grandchildren of those who were participants in the crimes or passive witnesses, because such matters are immensely shameful and depressing. Those who deliberately suppress the memories, keeping it from their families and the general public, may do so for malicious reasons: to protect themselves from answering to...