The Vél d'Hiv Raid: The French Police at the Service of the Gestapo
Beginning in the early morning hours of July 16, 1942, and lasting for two days, the French police went beyond Nazi ordinances and took it upon themselves to arrest and imprison more than 13,000 Jews at a Paris sporting arena, the Vélodrome d'Hiver.
For most of the Jews, this detention without water, food, or sleep was the first horrific step toward death in the concentration camps. Using recently opened police files, Maurice Rajsfus details the internal organization of the police, showing the mechanisms of this raid in particular and of raids in general, making the book an indispensable micro-history of the Holocaust. A uniquely detailed study of a notorious incident of cooperation between xenophobic and anti-Semitic forces. Shocking, large compilation of published articles in the collaborationist press that promoted social discord and hatred of Jews, distorted or obscured the raids on immigrant Jews in Paris under Nazi occupation, and used emotional appeals to nationalism to justify persecution. A companion piece to Rajsfus's Operation Yellow Star / Black Thursday (DoppelHouse Press, 2017), The Vél d'Hiv Raid, is the only contemporary analysis of the roundup, its precursors and its aftermath, including witness and police reports, shocking excerpts from the collaborationist press, and speeches by contemporary French politicians whose official apology is still not complete and terribly overdue.
With a foreword by Israeli activist and author Michel Warschawski.
Maurice Rajsfus (b. 1928), a former investigative journalist for Le Monde, survived the Vél d'Hiv roundup. He has written thirty books, including many examining the Vichy regime and its legacy in French police culture. Several of his books about his World War II experiences are the basis of a YA comic published by Tartamudo editions, as well as a theatrical production and a film. He lives in Paris with his family.
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Maurice Rajsfus (1928-2020) was an author and activist who worked as an investigative journalist at multiple French outlets, including at Le Monde. Of his many books, many dealt with the Vichy regime and its legacy in French police culture, focusing on police violence against immigrants and people of color. He also wrote about Drancy concentration camp and Israel-Palestine, as well as co-authoring several illustrated books about history. In 1990, Rajsfus and several friends founded "Ras l'Front," the anti-racist association of far-left-wing organizations extremely active in the 1990s against the rise of Le Pen and fascist/nationalist parties in France. They worked together and promoted leftist causes through a monthly publication as well as actions. He served as chairman from 1991-1999. From 1994-2012 Rajsfus created and circulated Que fait la police?, a "Cop Watch" bulletin with selections from his archive of over 40,000 press clippings detailing human rights abuses by French police. His books about the Vél d'Hiv raid and his experiences during WWII have been brought together to form the basis of a YA comic (Tartamudo editions) as well as a play written and directed by Philippe Ogouz, which was then adapted for film in 2010, Souvenirs d'un vieil enfant: La rafle du Vel' d'Hiv (Memories of an Old Child: The Roundup of the Vel' d'Hiv), directed by Alain Guesnier. Maurice Rajsfus is survived by two sons as well as several grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Read more about Rajsfus and his legacy at the link posted in our tribute.
- Ekaitza
Maurice Rajsfus has devoted his life to denouncing and combating racism, fascism, intolerance, and police brutality, while putting in his texts a good dose of caustic irony.
- Jakilea, Basque Human Rights Defense League
This episode represents a stain on the honor of the French nation, with its principles of liberty, fraternity, and equality and, in particular, the French police as it does other complicit nations and peoples. [...] As a Vél d'Hiv survivor himself, author Maurice Rajsfus has made a point of documenting, what is now effectively a trilogy, the entirety of France's ill-starred history with respect to its responsibilities regarding Jews and others who suffered in the Holocaust.
- Thomas McClung, New York Journal of Books
With passion and indignation, Maurice Rajsfus recounts the worst single crime of the Vichy regime in France: the pre-dawn arrest by French police, at German instigation, on July 16-17, 1942, of 13,152 Jewish men, women, and children, and their ordeal on the way to extermination. Rajsfus brings this terrible experience to life with contemporary texts - high-level Franco-German haggling, detailed police instructions, eye-witness testimony, and press commentary.
- Robert O. Paxton, author of Vichy France and the Jews
Maurice Rajsfus, a French Jewish survivor who witnessed this infamous roundup, dissects it in a workmanlike book, The Vel D'Hiv Raid: The French Police at the Service of the Gestapo, which was originally published in France 15 years ago. [...] Rajsfus, a former investigative reporter for Le Monde, was 14 years old when thousands of police, at Germany's request, arrested the Jews. His parents, immigrants from Poland, were swept up in the net and sent on to Auschwitz. He discusses this personally painful and unforgettable aspect in another book, Black Thursday: The Roundup of July 16, 1942.
- Sheldon Kirshner, The Times of Israel
