Opinion | The First Roundup of Jews in Paris, 1941

At first the photographs had been stored on file by the German Propaganda Unit in Paris. After the conflict, six of the 98 photographs had been discovered within the archives of the N.I.O.D. Institute for War, Holocaust and Genocide Studies in Amsterdam, a sign that they had been shared among the many varied propaganda items throughout Western Europe. Just a few others circulated amongst archives. But the overwhelming majority had been languishing, unseen, on contact sheets, till 2020, when two beginner collectors came across them at a flea market. They introduced the sheets to Ms. Lalieu, the director of photograph collections on the Shoah Memorial in Paris, who analyzed the photographs in an effort to establish as many individuals as potential. Ms. Lalieu additionally recognized the photographer as Harry Croner, a person from Berlin, who had gone on to have a stellar profession in postwar West Berlin, as a well-known cinema and opera photographer. (Half Jewish himself, he spent the tip of the conflict in a labor camp.)

After the photographs had been discovered, Ms. Lalieu invited first and second-generation survivors to the memorial in an try to establish their mother and father or grandparents within the photos. There had been some terribly transferring moments. Though solely 5 makes an attempt at identification had been profitable up to now, every marks a small victory towards the backdrop of Nazi cover-up and of the looming lack of reminiscence. Just a few of the images had been shared publicly for the primary time in 2021.

One 12 months after these photographs had been taken, in mid-July 1942, about 13,000 Jews — principally girls and youngsters — had been rounded up, pulled out of Paris residences and brought to an indoor sporting enviornment, the Vélodrome d’Hiver, in southwestern Paris. They acquired little meals or water and had been topic to abject situations. Depleted and distraught, they had been despatched from there to the internment camps of Drancy, Pithiviers and Beaune-la-Rolande. Later, a majority were despatched on to Auschwitz.

It was an arrest of mass proportions, a stain on French historical past. We know this historical past from eyewitness testimonies, from memoirs of the few survivors and from the mass of police paperwork. Only a single {photograph} of the roundup is thought. In it 5 buses are parked alongside the Vélodrome d’Hiver. The picture was most probably taken clandestinely from an overlooking window. With the invention and exhibition of this new group of images, the image and understanding of the Holocaust in France have deepened.

The worth of a picture is completely depending on context. Taken to show racial superiority, these 98 photographs on show by way of December now present depravity. They additionally jar awake reminiscence, shore it up towards time. In an ephemeral period of mass documentation — of our personal lives, of our private and non-private existence — the re-emergence of those images is a tangible reminder that some photographs refuse to be erased from our collective previous.