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July 8, 1942. The SS commander in France,
General Oberg, issues regulations barring Jewish adults and children in the
Occupied Zone from attending any public entertainment – especially
theaters, dance recitals, concerts, and movies open to the public. Except
between 3 and 4 P.M., Jews can no longer enter department stores or
neighborhood shops nor make purchases or have others make purchases for them.
It is forbidden for Jews to enter or use the following places open to the
public: cafés, restaurants, tea rooms, bars, theaters, movie theaters,
concert and music halls, all other places of entertainment, public telephone
booths, historic monuments, sporting events, race-tracks and betting shops,
camp sites, and parks or public gardens.
Jews of the Occupied Zone are
now pariahs – outcasts from French society. French laws exclude them from
most professions and work and German regulations mark them with the yellow star
and isolate them from all social life. They are virtually forced to remain at
home, and when they go out they risk at every committing some minor infraction
that can be a pretext for their arrest. And once arrested, even if they are
French they will often be sent to Drancy and deported.
July 10,
1942. On this Friday afternoon the Franco-German Special Commission meets
for the second and last time. This time, Dannecker's new assistant,
Röthke, is at the side of his chief and Heinrichsohn and he keeps the
record of the meeting. On the French side there are Galien, Leguay, and
department heads of the Police Prefecture, as well as officials of the SNCF
– the French National Railways, which will transport arrested Jews from
Paris to the camps of the Loiret area – and officials of the Public
Assistance institutions that will take charge of young children.
The
following points are discussed: the date of the roundup is put off to July 16.
It will begin at 4 A.M., and the arrested Jews will be assembled at the Vel
d'Hiv. André Tulard, keeper of the Prefecture's Jewish Census file,
estimates that 24,000 to 25,000 individuals will be interned. Upper age limits
are raised to 55 for women and 60 for men. This is probably because examination
of the records for stateless Jews shows they are too few to produce the
predicted number of arrests, but it somewhat contradicts the appearance that
these are to be "deportations for labor service" – the initial description
of the operation.
For the moment, it is planned that Public Assistance
agencies will take charge of children under 15 taken to the Vel d'Hiv, before
turning them over to the UGIF. Jewish women who are mothers of infants under
two years of age will not be arrested, but stateless Jewish spouses of Aryans
will be arrested. The first deportation convoy after the police raids will
leave for the East on July 21 or 22 moment and others will follow at a
contemplated rate of three per week.
Dannecker telexes Eichmann that
the raids will be carried out by the French police from July 16 to July 18 and
it is expected that about 4,000 children will be among those arrested.
Dannecker sets out the main arguments in favor of deportation of these 4,000
children: to prevent promiscuity between them and non-Jewish children under
Public Assistance care; and the impossibility that the UGIF can care for more
than 400 of them. Dannecker requests an urgent response to the question of
whether, beginning with the tenth convoy
(July 24), the 4,000 children can also be
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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