The tragedy of the massive roundup of Jews in Paris in 1942, through the eyes of Cabu

In 1967, the French cartoonist Jean Cabut, Cabu, discovered, like many other French, through the publication of a book, an episode of his recent national history, but which had been conveniently relegated to the most remote drawers of collective memory : the massive arrest operations of Jews perpetrated in the summer of 1942 in Paris, known as the Winter Velodrome Raid.

Cabu, then a 29-year-old cartoonist of incipient but not yet established fame, participated in the reconstruction of that memory by illustrating that somber episode of the national narrative for a magazine.

On the 80th anniversary of the tragic raid, an exhibition in Paris shows the public for the first time the powerful illustrations of an author who would end up being, himself, a victim of hatred for the other:

Between July 16 and 17, 1942, almost 13,000 Jewish men, women and children were arrested throughout Paris in a French police operation that responded to an agreement between the collaborationist Vichy regime and the German authorities to apply, also in France, the “final solution to the Jewish question”, that is, their extermination, decided by the Nazis.

Some 4,500 police officers took part in the extensive raid.

Most of the detainees, especially their families, ended up crammed into the Velodrome d'Hiver in Paris, a first step for nearly everyone toward deportation to the Auschwitz death camp, including more than 4,000 children.

Only a few survived.

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Cabu, that is Satan

Of the Vel d'Hiv raid, for its French abbreviation, only one photograph has survived: an image taken from an imprecise location that shows several buses stopped in front of the velodrome, a sports pavilion near the Eiffel Tower.

The documentation and, above all, the testimonies of the raids during those two terrible summer days throughout Paris, are abundant.

But there were no more images.

That changed in 1967. That year, the magazine

decides to publish extracts from a book that has just been published and that promises to shock a French society that, until then, had kept the terrible event of 1942 in oblivion:

(The Great Winter Velodrome Raid, July 16, 1942), by Claude Lévy and Paul Tillard.

Le Nouveau Candide

asks Cabu to illustrate the series.

The commission will mark for life one of the sharpest and most well-known graphic designers in France and will leave a key testimony of the raid, which the Paris Shoah Memorial has now recovered in an exhibition dedicated to Cabu's illustrations as part of the commemorations for the 80th anniversary of the terrible episode, which to this day generates political controversy.

“A punch in the mouth”

The exhibition shows for the first time the 16 illustrations, one of them unpublished, that Cabu produced in 1967. Although his famous style is present in all of them, the result is different from his other works.

It shows the impact caused by the cartoonist himself — “like a punch in the mouth”, he said — an episode that he was not even aware of until he received the commission that, as he also recounted on several occasions, gave him nightmares while he was completing it.

His widow, Véronique Cabu, insists on the distinction that the cartoonist made of this work from the rest of his extensive oeuvre.

"He was talking about illustrations, he is not the Cabu of drawings with speech bubbles, he is a Cabu that illustrates a scene from life, from tragedy," he explained during the presentation of the exhibition, which can be visited in Paris until 7 november.

In black and white, "without words, but understandable to everyone", through the force of strokes capable of portraying the anguish, the desperation of the victims, the designer conveys their state of mind in the face of a threat that many are not yet capable of calibrating in its just and terrible measure.

Report from Paris on an exhibition by the cartoonist Cabu

The curator of the exhibition and a specialist in the Vichy regime, Laurent Joly, points out that among Cabu's illustrations, which are accompanied by a broad historical context and testimonies of the raid, there are "designs that are strictly faithful to reality and others that are destined to strike the imagination, to understand the immensity of the crime that was perpetrated in Paris on July 16, 1942″.

The latter, points out the historian, who has just published the book

, occurs especially in illustrations such as the one that confronts a Jewish man —in all the drawings, the disastrous Star of David is clearly visible on the victims—walking alone down a street of tightly closed doors and windows (many did not want to see, or know, what was happening) toward several men dressed in various uniforms representing French and German authorities.

In reality, Joly points out, the arrests were made by French policemen, but that image conveys the loneliness, and the fear, of a victim before her executioners.

For both the cartoonist's widow and the historian, who have worked closely for months to prepare the exhibition, it is important that it be shown now, at a time when the revisionist temptations of history are returning, and that it be held in a place like the Paris Shoah Memorial, the largest archive center in Europe on the history of the Jewish genocide on this continent during World War II.

The center, opened in 2005, is regularly visited by schoolchildren and their teachers.

The transmission of history, knowing it, both agree, is the first step so that it does not happen again.

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