This month marks 80 years since the Vél d'Hiv roundup, when French police detained 13,000 Parisian Jews, including 4,000 children, acting on orders from occupying German forces and their French allies in the Vichy Regime. Many were first sent to the Vélodrome d'Hiver stadium, which gave its name to this sinister chapter of French history, before being deported to Auschwitz, never to return. FRANCE 24’s Claire Paccalin and Stéphanie Trouillard met with survivors who managed to escape.
They were children then, and today are the only people left who remember the shock of July 16-17, 1942. They recall the horror of those days and the extraordinary circumstances that allowed them to avoid deportation to Nazi death camps.
