On Vel d’hiver’s anniversary, Macron says French State ‘deliberately’ failed to protect Jews

By Shweta Desai

PARIS (AA) - The French State "deliberately" failed in its duties to protect the Jews, the country’s president said on Sunday at the 80th commemoration ceremony of the Vel d’hive deportation.

Emmanuel Macron is the second head of the state after Jacques Chirac in 1995 to recognize the failure of the state’s responsibility toward the Jews who were rounded up and deported to Auschwitz.

In a similar speech, after coming to power in 2017, Macron said that “France organized the round-up and subsequent deportation” of the 13,152 Jews on July 16 and 17, 1942, almost all of whom died.

More than 8,000 people including children were held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver or winter stadium before being deported to internment camps.

“The French state deliberately failed in all the duties of the homeland of the Enlightenment and of human rights,” Macron said during the inauguration of a new memorial site at the old station of Pithiviers, from where eight convoys departed for Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Taking a jab at far-right conspiracies that French leaders like Gen. Philippe Petain or Pierre Laval, head of the Vichy government, tried to save the Jews, he said those spreading such lies were indulging in “falsification of history.”

He emphasized that no Nazi soldiers took part in gathering the Jews.

Macron also said that France and Europe were “not done with anti-Semitism” yet and called on the people to maintain vigilance with force.