Betrayal at the Vel D'Hiv

ISBN: 0809029235

Author: Levy, Claude

Condition: Used

'On July 16 and 17, 1942, thousands of Jews in Paris were taken to a vast sports arena. They had been rounded up for shipment to the German death camps, but they were not arrested by the Germans. That work was done, with alacrity and thoroughness, by the French police. This is the little-known story of those two fateful days, of a betrayal that today the French can scarcely believe.'

"It began on July 16, 1942. The plot was part of "Operation Spring Wind." The result was the roundup, in one day, of 12,884 Jews living in France at the time of the German Occupation. Seized without warning, men, women, children, and old people, invalids too, were piled into buses and taken to a Paris sports arena, the Ve'lodrone D'Hiver, on the first stage of a journey toward death at Auschwitz.

The story of this roundup of non-French Jews is told in Betrayal at the Vel d'Hiv with the ruthless economy of a documentary; the manhunt, the crowding of thousands of victims into the glassed cage of the arena, transportation of convoy after convoy from the Vel d'Hiv to Drancy and eventually to the "final solution".

Wherever possible, the authors have quoted eyewitness accounts and transcribed documents. The contrast between the businesslike, clerical itemization of who is to be considered eligible for arrest and the moving personal stories creates a chilling picture of humanity overwhelmed by the bureaucracy of murder.

Although there were Frenchmen who cared about and helped the hunted, the book in the main insists that we face terrible truths; the French police carried out the orders of the Germans with efficiency and without mercy. Many French citizens saw their neighbours taken away without batting an eye. The details build up convincingly until we come full circle and say, "No, it couldn't have happened." We know it happened. We feel it could not have. No one will read this book without reacting to it both with disbelief and with the horror that comes from believing."

Illustrated with 16 pages of black & white photographs.