Holocaust memorial in France defaced with swastikas

Hunt for vandals who scrawled Nazi graffiti at Drancy, wartime camp from where 63,000 Jews went to their deaths

The government of France vowed yesterday to hunt down the vandals who scrawled anti-semitic graffiti on the country's chief Holocaust monument. Large, black swastikas were painted on to the memorial at Drancy, the site of the second world war deportation camp from where tens of thousands of Jews were sent to their deaths.

Local authorities said one of the people behind the defacement was captured on surveillance cameras and was believed to be a man in his 20s "of European origin".

The train carriage that was once used by the Nazis for deportations, and a stone pillar, were daubed with swastikas. Shopfronts in the towns of Drancy and Bobigny were also attacked, according to the police.

In a statement, the interior minister, Michelle Alliot-Marie, said: "Everything is being done to identify those responsible for these unspeakable acts and to bring them to justice."

The vandalism, in the middle of the Passover celebrations, sparked anger and unease among France's Jewish population, the largest in western Europe. The Representative Council of Jewish Institutions said such acts were indicative of a prejudice "deeply engrained" in French society. In a statement, the umbrella group condemned the graffiti at Drancy, denouncing it as an "insult to the whole of France".

The statement said: "Those responsible wanted to spit on the Jews deported from Drancy to death camps … insult the Jews who are celebrating Passover, the Jewish Easter … and dirty the town of Drancy."

Raphael Chemouni, responsible for the upkeep of the memorial, said it was the first time since the inauguration in 1976 that it had been daubed with swastikas. "Until now there has been a very great respect for this monument," he said.

Situated on the north-eastern outskirts of Paris, the internment camp was the site to which French Jews were taken on route to concentration camps in eastern Europe. By the time the camp was liberated in 1944, 65,000 people had been deported on board its trains, 63,000 of whom died. Although under overall control of the occupying Nazis, the day-to-day running of the camp was the responsibility of the Paris police force.

Lucien Tismander, from the Auschwitz Memorial Association, said this weekend's vandalism was particularly hurtful because of Drancy's symbolic importance in the history of France. "This monument is in a sense the tomb of the 76,000 French deportees and it has been sullied," he said.

Observer

France responsible for sending Jews to concentration camps, says court

Jews arriving at Pithiviers, one of the French
camps from which they were deported, in 1941.

First legal admission of country's collaboration in Nazi atrocities

France's highest court put an end to decades of legal timidity and moral taboo yesterday when it issued a ruling recognising the state's responsibility in the deportation of tens of thousands of Jews during the second world war.

Citing "mistakes" made by the collaborationist Vichy regime, the council of state said the government's share of blame was clear in acts which had not been forced on it by the occupiers and which "allowed or facilitated the deportation from France of victims of antisemitism".

The ruling, which will be recorded in the official state legislative journal, marks the first time any French judicial body has acknowledged in such stark terms the government's role in Nazi-era atrocities.

Calling for a "formal admission of the state's responsibility and of the prejudice collectively suffered", the court said it had concluded that acts such as the arrest, internment and dispatching of Jews to transit camps were clear indicators of the government's guilt. "As they led to the deportation of people considered Jewish by the Vichy regime, the acts and activities of the state ... became its responsibility," it added.

The move was welcomed by historians and Jewish groups, many of whom have expressed disbelief at France's unwillingness to face up to its actions. From 1942 to 1944 a stream of Jews were rounded up by Vichy authorities, and by the end of the war some 76,000 had been deported to Nazi concentration camps. Although under the overall control of the SS, the main transit camp of Drancy, from which 63,000 people were sent to their deaths, was run by Paris's police force.

"It is a decision with which I am content," Serge Klarsfeld, the leading French historian of the Holocaust, told Le Figaro. "France is showing now that she is at the forefront of countries which are confronting their past, which was not the case even in the 1990s."

For decades after the war, the suffering of French Jews at the hands of their countrymen was buried, along with the shame of collaboration, at the back of national consciousness. François Mitterand, president from 1981 until 1995, insisted France "was never involved" in ill-treatment of its Jewish population, and it was not until Jacques Chirac in 1995 that a head of state admitted France's "inescapable guilt".

Yesterday's ruling, issued in connection with the individual case of a deportee's daughter requesting damages, did however find that the current French state had largely made up for the sins of its past. Apparently ruling out any reparations for victims or their families, the court said the acts had been "compensated for" through various means since 1945.

Klarsfeld, whose postwar research was the first to reveal the extent of France's complicity in the deportations, agreed that enough had been done in recent years. "The people asking now for other forms of compensation have often already got something with the measures in place," he said.

Guardian