France should never forget the deep scars left by the French police-led roundup of Jews in Paris during World War II, Defense Minister Florence Parly said on Sunday as France commemorated the victims of the incident.
On July 16, 1942, thousands of French policemen under the Vichy regime arrested more than 13,000 Jews, including more than 4,000 children, and ceded them to the Nazis, who put them in internment camps. Fewer than 100 survivors would come back to France after the deportation.
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France had denied responsibility for the roundup until 1995, when former President Jacques Chirac recognized the country's wrongdoing.
Parly's voice crackled and eyes welled with tears as she said France "has betrayed its own children."
"The Vel d'Hiv roundup [named for the Vélodrome d'Hiver, a bicycle velodrome where most of the victims were temporarily held] has left a wound in France's soul, a deep scar that will not heal and that we should never heal since this gaping hole in our soul reminds us that our values are not infallible," she said. "At any moment, what we consider our accomplishments could be threatened, baffled, destroyed."
Parly said the National Memory Day should encourage the country to "never again … turn a blind eye," especially amid a resurgence of hateful acts against the Jewish community.
Parly's comments come after a series of Jewish graves in France were desecrated with swastikas earlier this year, prompting crowds to protest anti-Semitism in Paris.
The number of anti-Semitic acts in the country has surged by 74% in 2018, according to Interior Ministry figures.
