And then there was further disorientation, as another three women came in including ‘a stout vulgar blonde’ with ‘a dark-skinned Italian Jew’, the foursome probably involved in black-marketeering. ‘The four of us were so distant from those poor folk that we could hardly conceive that Papa was a prisoner too.’ Raymond Berr was sent to Drancy, although he was eventually released after établissements Kuhlmann, the giant French chemical company to which he had devoted his entire career since 1919, negotiated his release and paid a substantial ransom. The family knew it was but a reprieve. From now on he was obliged to work from home and could no longer travel, but even that was an extraordinary privilege for a Jew – Berr was the only one in France to whom it was granted.
Less than a month later, on 16 and 17 July, the Vichy government, aiming to satisfy German demands to reduce the Jewish population, arrested some 13,152 Jews, including more than 4,000 children, mostly from Paris, in an operation which they were calling ‘Spring Wind’. René Bousquet, Secretary General of the French National Police, knew that using French police in the round-ups would be ‘embarrassing’ but hoped that this would be mitigated if those arrested were only so-called foreign Jews.* However, as the historian Serge Klarsfeld has revealed (making use of telegrams René Bousquet sent to the prefects of departments in the occupied zone), the police were ordered to deport not only foreign Jewish adults but children, whose deportation had not even been requested, nor planned for, by the Nazis. Pierre Laval maintained that including children in the round-ups was a ‘humanitarian’ measure to keep families together, a clearly fallacious argument since many of the parents had already been deported. The reality was that this way he not only raised the total numbers but would, he calculated, avoid the awkward situation of leaving Jewish children without parents, who would then be the responsibility of the state. The youngest child sent to Auschwitz under Laval’s orders that month was eighteen months old. So terrified were the children that some of them invented the name ‘Pitchipoi’ for their imagined, unknown destination. The adults accepted it in a feeble attempt to convince them they were going somewhere exciting. Everyone was taken on French buses to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a bicycle stadium in the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, where most of the victims were temporarily confined for five days in extremely crowded conditions, almost without water as there was only one available tap, with little food and with inadequate sanitary facilities. They were then moved to Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaunela-Rolande, internment camps managed by Vichy in collaboration with the Germans, before being sent on by train to Auschwitz for extermination. The round-up has been a source of enormous grief in France. It was not until 1995 that French President Jacques Chirac admitted French complicity as French policemen and civil servants had been used for the raid. He urged that 16 July be commemorated annually as a national day of remembrance. It was a ground-breaking moment in French history.
Rachel Erlbaum still lives today in the same apartment in the Marais just across from the Rue des Rosiers where she grew up with her parents and younger brother, a street with many other Jewish families. Her mother took the precaution of hiding during the day, living in the coal cellar, and only going back up to the apartment most nights to see her children. She was there on the day of the round-up. ‘At dawn, as soon as they realised something was going on, my parents closed the shutters and told us to keep quiet. By some miracle the police did not enter our building.’ Rachel pauses before continuing. ‘I can still hear the screams and cries of the babies and other children thrown into the green and yellow buses by French police.’
‘La police fran?aise,’ she repeats, in case there is any doubt about the significance of what she has just said. And then she says it once again with more vigour, so hard is it to comprehend. ‘French buses on every street corner. The Germans may have been waiting behind the cordoned-off area but they did not show their faces.’ They did not need to. Her schoolfriend Sara Lefkovich was arrested that day. She had been in hiding with her father while her mother was in a different hiding place with her brother. When her father was taken, Sara ran to him and he shouted at her, ‘Run away, go, run away, Sara,’ but she, wooden, could not move, rooted to the spot in an embrace with her father. She did not want to leave without him. Neither came back. It’s a memory Rachel Erlbaum will never forget and which lives afresh whenever she talks about it.