On May 29, 1942, a German ordinance mandated that Jews over the age of six—whether French or foreign nationals—in the occupied zone wearthe Jewish star in public. Effective June 7, 1942, this yellow star had to be sewn onto outer clothing on the left side of the chest.
Jewish communist resistance fighters tried to make the Jewish population understand the gravity of the danger as they themselves became aware of it. A June issue of the underground newspaper *Unzer Wort*called on Jews to build closer ties with the French population.
In early July 1942, thanks to “leaks” from police officers in the Resistance, “ Solidarity “, a clandestine organization within the Jewish section of the M.O.I., alerted the Jews by distributing a leaflet in Yiddish announcing mass deportations. The text urged Jews—who until then had been very law-abiding—to go into hiding. But not all of them would be able to escape their pursuers. Once again, it was the French police who were carrying out the operation, at the request of the Nazis.
The largest roundup of foreign, stateless, or denaturalized Jews was scheduled for Thursday, July 16, and Friday, July 17, 1942.
13,152 Jews were arrested. Childless couples and single people were sent directly to the Drancy internment camp. Families were crammed into the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris. After several days of detention under barbaric conditions, they were transferred to the internment and transit camps at Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande.
Adults and teenagers were the first to be sent to their inevitable doom. Young children are torn from their mothers, transferred to Drancy, and then deported as well. All of them—women and men, old and young—will be crammed into cattle cars bound for Poland. Their destination: theAuschwitz death camp.
This roundup, known as the Vel’d’Hiv roundup, targeted women, the elderly, and children for the first time. More than 4,000 children.
They would be the first to be gassed. Not a single one would be spared. When school started again in October 1942 in Paris, many neighborhoods would be missing a great many children from their classrooms… In all, more than 6,000 Jewish children would be exterminated during the year 1942.
During the same period, Jews—both adults and children—were arrested throughout France, rounded up in internment camps, and then deported to Auschwitz.
After July 16 and 17, about a hundred young Jewish men and women from Paris who had escaped the roundup spontaneously joined the ranks of the FTP-M.O.I. The Jewish section of the M.O.I. was on the front lines of the political struggle and the armed Resistance.
The wearing of the yellow star and the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup marked a true turning point in the awareness—among both the Jewish and non-Jewish populations—of the barbarity of the Nazis and the Vichy regime.
