Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: MONDAY, July 17, 1995 TAG: 9507190025
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-5 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PARIS LENGTH: Medium
President Jacques Chirac acknowledged Sunday what a generation of political leaders did not - that the French state was an accomplice to the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews during World War II.
At a ceremony to commemorate the 53rd anniversary of the roundup of at least 13,000 Jews at a Paris stadium - the biggest during the war years - Chirac said that French complicity with the Nazis was a stain on the nation.
``These dark hours soil forever our history and are an injury to our past and our traditions,'' Chirac told the gathering at the former site of the Velodrome d'Hiver stadium in western Paris.
Chirac, a conservative, is the first French president to publicly recognize France's role in the deportations of Jews under the Vichy regime of Marshal Philippe Petain, which collaborated with the Nazis.
In all, about 75,000 Jews were deported from France to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Only 2,500 survived.
Chirac's predecessor, Socialist President Francois Mitterrand, maintained that the Vichy regime did not represent the French republic and its actions were not those of the state.
``I won't make excuses in the name of France,'' Mitterrand said last September. ``The republic had nothing to do with that ... not France.''
That attitude pained France's large Jewish community, which has long pressed authorities to come to grips with the nation's collaborationist past.
At dawn on July 16, 1942, French police banged on doors throughout Paris, pulling men, women and children from their homes and rounding them up at the cycling stadium. The families were imprisoned for three days without food or water, then deported to Auschwitz. Only a handful returned.
The roundup was considered particularly heinous because of the French fervor in making arrests, a tactic aimed at appeasing the Nazis.
``France, the nation of light and human rights, land of welcome and asylum, accomplished the irreparable,'' said Chirac. ``Betraying its word, it delivered its dependents to their executioners.''
Noted Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld hailed Chirac for his ``courage'' and said that the president's words were ``what we had hoped to hear one day.''
``It is a turning point ... It is, finally, looking the truth in the face, lifting the veil,'' said Henri Hajdenberg, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France.
by CNB