One of the most fascinating things I came upon in Paris was the Vel d’Hiv memorial. It’s strange that that was my favorite part of Paris. The Eiffel Tower was beautiful, the Louvre fascinating, and the Arc de Triomphe was everything I hoped it would be. But somehow, doing everything I’ve seen people do in movies and acting out all of my adolescent fantasies of exploring Paris wasn’t as exciting as I thought it would be in the end. It was all great, but nothing beats visiting specific sites that are rooted in the topics we are studying.
On our last night, some of my colleagues and I were walking back from our last visit to the Eiffel Tower and we stumbled across a sign that pointed us in the direction of the Vel d’Hiv memorial. We had no idea that there was even a memorial dedicated to Vel d’Hiv, so I instantly grabbed the person closest to me and ran in the direction the sign led me. It was a small memorial, depicting the poor men, women, and children that were rounded up on July 16th and 17th of 1942 and sent to the Velodrome d’Hiver: a stadium where over 13,000 victims were held before they were deported to other work camps throughout Paris such as Drancy.
The Vel d’Hiv roundup was just one of the many roundups that occurred throughout France during the German occupation. It’s an example of French compliance and collaboration with the Nazi regime’s racist laws and attitudes. Being on this trip has put me in a specific mindset, and it’s hard to separate my purpose of study from the various sights I’ve seen. We studied in London because it was heavily bombed during the war, we studied in Normandy because of the D-Day invasion, and we will be traveling to Berlin in a couple of days in order to examine the German side of the war and witness the sights where so many crimes against humanity were committed.
But why study in Paris? After all, Paris was technically preserved during and after the war, it was in the occupied zone, and the Germans spared it. Paris is a place you visit in order to find love, shop, and eat exquisite food and drink champagne on the Eiffel Tower. Yet in the tiny little corners of Paris, we found sites such as the Vel d’Hiv memorial and the Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation, stashed away as dark reminders of a terrible past.
Our work here is important because our job as young historians is to discern which parts of the past are being silenced. While many of the French museums and memorials we visited in Paris include information about Vichy collaboration, there is always far much more information and emphasis on the various resistance movements than the actual collaboration of Vichy. So why is this past not a major part of the discourse in France? Why was the Vel d’Hiv memorial placed in a hidden spot within the city? These are the questions my colleagues and I ask ourselves as we continue our journey throughout Europe studying the Second World War. We’re coming to the understanding that this war story is a lot more colorful than we once thought. Germany isn’t the only country that has a dark past rooted in the war.
The Vel d’Hiv Memorial