page_title: Vel' d'Hiv Roundup
section_title: Drancy
hierarchical_section_title: Vel' d'Hiv Roundup / Memorials and monuments / Drancy
caption_attribution_description: Le wagon de Drancy / Drancy's witness train-car (last symbol of Nazy's occupation) Photo de l'auteur / Self picture&#160;: Dominique Natanson. Licensing fr:Catégorie:Drancy
context_page_description: The Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup was a mass arrest of Jews in Paris by the French police, codenamed Opération Vent printanier, on 16 and 17 July 1942. The name "Vel' d'Hiv' Roundup" is derived from the name of the Vélodrome d'Hiver, where a majority of the victims were temporarily confined. The roundup, assisted by French Police, was one of several aimed at eradicating the Jewish population in France, both in the occupied zone and in the free zone. According to records of the Préfecture de Police, 13,152 Jews were arrested, including more than 4,000 children. They were held at the Vélodrome d'Hiver in extremely crowded conditions, almost without food and water and with no sanitary facilities, as well as at the Drancy, Pithiviers, and Beaune-la-Rolande internment camps, then shipped in rail cattle cars to Auschwitz for their mass murder.
  French President Jacques Chirac apologized in 1995 for the complicit role that French police and civil servants played in the raid. In 2017, President Emmanuel Macron more specifically admitted the responsibility of the French State in the roundup and, hence, in the Holocaust.
context_section_description: A memorial was also constructed in 1976 at Drancy internment camp, after a design competition won by Shelomo Selinger. It stands beside a rail wagon of the sort used to take prisoners to the death camps. It is three blocks forming the Hebrew letter Shin, traditionally written on the Mezuzah at the door of houses occupied by Jews. Two other blocks represent the gates of death. Shelomo Selinger said of his work: "The central block is composed of 10 figures, the number needed for collective prayer (Minyan). The two Hebrew letters Lamed and Vav are formed by the hair, the arm and the beard of two people at the top of the sculpture. These letters have the numeric 36, the number of Righteous thanks to whom the world exists according to Jewish tradition."
  On 25 May 2001, the cité de la Muette—formal name of the Drancy apartment blocks—was declared a national monument by the culture minister, Catherine Tasca.
  A new Shoah memorial museum was opened in 2012 just opposite the sculpture memorial and railway wagon by President François Hollande. It provides details of the persecution of the Jews in France and many personal mementos of inmates before their deportation to Auschwitz and their death. They include messages written on the walls, graffiti, drinking mugs and other personal belongings left by the prisoners, some of which are inscribed with the names of the owners. The ground floor also shows a changing exhibit of prisoner faces and names, as a memorial to their imprisonment and then murder by the Germans, assisted by the French gendarmerie.
  The Holocaust researcher Serge Klarsfeld said in 2004: "Drancy is the best known place for everyone of the memory of the Shoah in France; in the crypt of Yad Vashem (Jérusalem), where stones are engraved with the names of the most notorious Jewish concentration and extermination camps, Drancy is the only place of memory in France to feature."
caption: A railway wagon used to carry internees to Auschwitz and now displayed at Drancy
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