Last update - 02:41 23/07/2007
French prime minister urges youth to remember wartime deportation of Jews
By The Associated Press
PARIS - Prime Minister Francois Fillon urged France's young people to remember the horrors of the Holocaust during a speech yesterday to mark the 65th anniversary of a World War II roundup of Jews.
Speaking at the former site of the Velodrome d'Hiver bicycle stadium - which was used as a transit camp for thousands of Jews on July 16-17, 1942 - Fillon said the French must not shrink from the memory of those hours of shame.
On those July 1942 days, 13,152 Jews were rounded up in the Paris region, and 8,160 - mostly children - were held at the stadium before being sent to Nazi death camps.
"It is by recognizing fully the lights and shadows of the past that the nation learns and grows," Fillon told an audience of hundreds.
In all, about 75,000 Jews were deported from France to Nazi concentration camps during the war. Fewer than 3,000 survived.
Leon Fellmann, 83, was one of the survivors who attended Sunday's ceremony. He said he was 17 when he and his 36-year-old mother were sent to the Velodrome d'Hiver. "I knew that we were done for," he said.
Fellmann said his mother urged him to try to escape. As they were being moved from the stadium to the first in a series of vehicles that would take the deportees to the death camps, Fellmann said he broke through a police cordon and ran to freedom.
Fellmann was active in the French Resistance through the end of the war. He never saw his mother again.
Patricia Anisten, the daughter of a survivor, said it was crucial to continue to mark the anniversary of the deportations "to show every year what happened at the site to make everyone aware that what happened here 65 years ago was very serious; it must not happen again."