Eighty years later, the city of Marseille, in the south of France, organizes Sunday exceptional commemorations around the roundups of 1943 and the destruction of the old districts during the Second World War, qualified by the mayor of the second city of France of a "
crime against humanity
".
“
What happened 80 years ago is a tragedy that we must keep track of.
Yet for too long it has been forgotten, almost erased from our collective memory
,” said Mayor Benoît Payan (Left Union) at a ceremony commemorating the roundups, deportations and destruction committed by the French Vichy regime in Nazi order.
Read alsoRafles de Marseille in 1943: “We were piled into cattle cars”
"
It will have taken 80 years for a mayor and ministers to recognize together this operation (Sultan) which bears a name, a crime against humanity
", he added with emotion, in the presence of the Minister of French interior Gérald Darmanin whose presence is experienced as a form of national recognition in the face of these events that have long remained in the shadow of history.
"
It is at the personal request of the President of the Republic that the members of the government come here to repair this shortcoming and sign here its national
significance ", explained the latter, acknowledging that these "
roundups in Marseilles and the destruction of the old quarters is far too little recounted in the history books
”.
Between January 22 and 24, 1943, a series of roundups, among the largest with that of the Vel' d'Hiv' six months earlier in Paris, was carried out in the old quarters of Marseille, on the decision of the Nazis who were occupying France. and with the active collaboration of the French Vichy regime.
extermination camp
Nearly 800 Jews, notably from the Opera district, were sent to extermination camps.
Then a second raid targets "
little Naples
", the historic heart of Marseille, behind the Old Port.
This popular district was forcibly emptied of its inhabitants, many of them Italian immigrants.
Considered by the Nazis as "
a pigsty
" and a nest of resistance, these neighborhoods will then be dynamited and wiped off the map.
In total, 20,000 people are affected, 15,000 interned in Fréjus (south of France) and 1,642 deported.
“
I have been waiting for this moment all my life, for 80 years.
It took a complaint for a crime against humanity in 2019 by Me Pascal Luongo
"for these dramas"
to resurface from oblivion
", testified Antoine Mignemi, one of the last survivors of this episode, president of the Saint-Jean 24 collective. January 1943, in front of a fed crowd of Marseillais gathered under an icy sun.
The investigation, opened by a specialized center in Paris, is still ongoing but could be closed for lack of an identified living alleged perpetrator, according to Me Luongo.
French President Jacques Chirac was the first in 1995 to acknowledge France's responsibility for the roundups and deportations of Jews during World War II.