#Frances #Macron #80th #anniversary #crackdown #Jews #World #War
French President Emmanuel Macron will on Sunday mark the 80th anniversary of the war arrests of Jews in France at a former train station used for deportation to Auschwitz.
With him at the Pithiviers train station, 100 kilometers (60 miles) south of Paris, will be some of the few survivors of the deportees in the eight convoys sent to the Nazi camp.
Macron’s speech will express his concern about the ongoing threat of anti-Semitism, which “still lurks, and sometimes in insidious ways,” an official at his office said.
He will denounce “historical revisionism” – particularly over the role of French wartime leader Philippe Petain in collaborating with the Nazi regime, the official added.
Also present at the ceremony will be historian and well-known Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, as well as a survivor of the camps, Ginette Kolinka.
The head of the French railway network, Jean-Pierre Farandou, will also be present.
Macron is expected at the former Pithiviers train station around 15:00 (1300 GMT).
The building, which has not served passengers since the late 1960s, has been converted into a Holocaust memorial, which opened earlier this month.
“This station is where the French event becomes the European genocide,” said Jacques Fredj, director of the Shoah Memorial, which commemorates the French deportations.
“It is a place of remembrance that is unique in France.”
The new 400-square-meter center is primarily intended for scholars, Fredj said.
“Given the rise of anti-Semitism, racism and conspiracy theories, this is a priority.”
Some of the 13,000 Jews arrested in Paris and its suburbs by French officials on orders from the Nazi occupiers passed through the station. 4,115 were children.
The incident has become known as the Vel d’Hiv raid because French police took 8,160 Jews, including the elderly and the sick, to the Velodrome d’Hiver, a velodrome in Paris’ 15th arrondissement.
From there they were taken to camps in Pithiviers and other places, as well as to Nazi concentration camps. Only a few dozen ever returned.
– France “can’t deal with” anti-Semitism –
Sunday’s speech will recognize that “French society is not done with anti-Semitism,” Macron’s office said.
The comments come just months after failed presidential candidate, far-right journalist and polemicist Eric Zemmour, argued that Petain did in fact save French Jews during the war years.
The claim is disputed by most historians, who point to the war leader’s well-documented anti-Semitism.
Macron himself was criticized for saying in 2018 that Petain was a “great soldier” during WWI, even if he made “fatal decisions” afterwards.
The French President’s speech on Sunday is intended to continue the work of his predecessor Jacques Chirac, who in 1995, 50 years after the Vel d’Hiv raids, acknowledged France’s responsibility for what happened.
“France did the irretrievable that day,” Chirac said in a speech that is now considered groundbreaking.
After Chirac, Francois Hollande went even further during his presidency, speaking in a 2012 speech of a crime “committed in France by France”.
In 2017, newly elected President Macron reiterated France’s responsibility for the crackdown in a speech marking his 75th anniversary and in the presence of then-Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
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