La Shoah à Paris - Remembering The Holocaust Through Memorials. 1280x720 HD

On 16 July 1995, French President, Jacques Chirac, ruled it was time that France faced up to its past and he acknowledged the role that the state had played in the persecution of Jews and other victims of the German occupation:
"These black hours will stain our history for ever and are an injury to our past and our traditions. Yes, the criminal madness of the occupant was assisted by the French, by the French state. Fifty-three years ago, on 16 July 1942, 450 policemen and gendarmes, French, under the authority of their leaders, obeyed the demands of the Nazis. That day, in the capital and the Paris region, nearly 10,000 Jewish men, women and children were arrested at home, in the early hours of the morning, and assembled at police stations... France, home of the Enlightenment and the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, land of welcome and asylum, France committed that day the irreparable. Breaking its word, it delivered those it protected to their executioners."

A statue representing all deportees but especially those of the Velodrome' d'Hiver was inaugurated in 1994 and Chirac made those comments the following year. The statue includes children, a pregnant woman and a sick man. They sit upon a sloped base representing the bicycle-racing track housed in the Velodrome. The words on the monument read: "The French Republic in homage to victims of racist and antisemitic persecutions and of crimes against humanity committed under the authority of the so-called 'Government of the State of France.'"

[paulburgess]

Thank you, this is very moving and informative.