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he was well aware that the German police forces
available were too limited to make all the arrests themselves. His plan was to
remain in the shadow of the French police. For his part, Bousquet knew that if
disagreement with the Germans resulted in the failure of a round-up by German
police alone, it would prevent the police accord he sought. He and Knochen
therefore concluded an agreement on July 2 that French police would arrest
22,000 (later reduced to 20,000) stateless Jews living in Paris; French Jews
would not be arrested, at least for the time being. Bousquet also promised to
arrest and deliver to the Germans stateless Jews living in the Vichy Zone.
On July 4, Premier Laval reaffirmed the Bousquet-Knochen agreement and
in addition offered something that had not been asked by the Germans – to
hand over to them the children of stateless Jews living in the Vichy Zone.
Further, Laval said that the fate of children of stateless Jews living in
occupied territory "does not interest" him. Thus, for the first time, he gave
the Nazis a free hand in deporting thousands of children.
The
Bousquet-Knochen agreement was a silent starting gun for the planning of mass
arrests of Jews in Paris. On July 16 and 17, 1942, Paris police rounded up
13,000 Jews in Paris and its suburbs, more than 4,000 of them children,
arresting them in their apartments and in the streets. In their neighborhoods,
the Jews were herded onto city buses to be brought to the Vélodrome
d'Hiver, the indoor (winter) sports and bicycling stadium in Paris. But the
number arrested in the "Vel d'Hiv" roundup was far fewer than the 20,000 sought
by Dannecker.
On July 17, representatives of the French police, led by
Jean Leguay, Bousquet's delegate in the Occupied Zone, insisted to the Germans
that children be deported with their parents, or by themselves if their parents
were deported beforehand. This would assure that deportation convoys, now
scheduled for three per week, would be full. It also would mean that French
police would not have to arrest other Jews to replace them, and the Vichy
regime would be spared the problem of lodging and caring for 4,000 children. On
July 20, Eichmann agreed to take the children within a few weeks.
Toward the end of July, before Eichmann had given a green light to
deporting the children, Jewish mothers in the Beaune-la Rolande and Pithiviers
camps were bludgeoned – by French police – into giving up their
children. The mothers were sent from the Loiret camps to Drancy and deported to
the East early in August. The young children followed them a few weeks later.
They were brought to Drancy in a pitiful state and were put into convoys with
adults they did not know, to make it seem as though families were being
deported together. From Drancy they went to Auschwitz, where the death
installations had begun operation, and convoys arriving from France were
subject to "selections" of children, mothers, the aged and the weak for the gas
chambers and ovens beginning on July 21.
Between July 17 and the end of
September, 33,057 Jews were deported from France to Auschwitz in 34 convoys of
freight cars. As knowledge of the arrests and deportations spread, the French
public became increasingly indignant. Pétain and Laval balked at German
plans to step up the pace of deportation convoys to one per day by the end of
September. With a traditional commitment to humanitarian values, the French
were scandalized to
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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