Eighty years later, the city of Marseille, in the south of France, is organizing this Sunday, January 29, exceptional commemorations around the roundups of 1943 and the destruction of old neighborhoods during the Second World War, qualified by the mayor of the second French city of ” crime against humanity “.
“What happened 80 years ago is a tragedy that we must keep track of. Yet for too long it has been forgotten, almost erased from our collective memory.said Mayor Benoît Payan (union of the left) during a ceremony commemorating these roundups, deportations and destruction committed by the French Vichy regime on the orders of the Nazis.
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“It took 80 years for a mayor and ministers to recognize together this operation (Sultan) which bears a name, a crime against humanity”he added with emotion, in the presence of the French Minister of the Interior Gérald Darmanin, whose presence is experienced as a form of national recognition in the face of these events that have long remained in the shadow of history.
“It is at the personal request of the President of the Republic that the members of the government come here to repair this deficiency and sign here its national scope”explained the latter, acknowledging that these “Marseille roundups and the destruction of the old quarters are far too little told in the history books”.
Between January 22 and 24, 1943, a series of roundups, among the largest with that of the Vel’ d’Hiv’ six months earlier in Paris, was carried out in the old quarters of Marseille, on the decision of the Nazis who were occupying France. and with the active collaboration of the French Vichy regime.
Nearly 800 Jews, notably from the Opera district, were sent to extermination camps. Then a second raid targets “little Naples”, the historic heart of Marseille, behind the Old Port. This popular district was forcibly emptied of its inhabitants, many of them Italian immigrants.
1,642 deportees
Considered by the Nazis as “a pigsty” and a nest of resistance, these neighborhoods will then be dynamited and wiped off the map. In total, 20,000 people were affected, 15,000 interned in Fréjus (south of France) and 1,642 deported.
“I have been waiting for this moment all my life, for 80 years. It took a complaint for a crime against humanity in 2019 by Me Pascal Luongo” so that these dramas “emerge from oblivion”testified Antoine Mignemi, one of the last survivors of this episode, president of the Saint-Jean collective January 24, 1943, in front of a fed crowd of Marseillais gathered under a freezing sun.
The investigation, opened by a specialized center in Paris, is still ongoing but could be closed for lack of an identified living alleged perpetrator, according to Me Luongo.
When Cabu opened the eyes of the French to the Vél’ d’Hiv roundup
President Jacques Chirac was the first, in 1995, to recognize France’s responsibility in the roundups and deportations of Jews during the Second World War.
