Macron, Netanyahu mark 75 years since Paris roundup of Jews

French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday marked 75 years since the roundup of 13,000 Jews to be sent to Nazi death camps, calling France’s responsibility a “stark truth” at a ceremony attended by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

Speaking near the former site of the Velodrome d’Hiver, the indoor cycle track from which the Jews were deported in 1942, Macron said: “It is indeed France that organised” the roundup. “Not a single German” took part.

Netanyahu’s presence at the ceremony sparked controversy, with the Union of French Jews for Peace (UJFP) calling the invitation “shocking” and “unacceptable”. The UJFP accused the Israeli government of “usurping the memory of the victims of Nazism to make people believe that Israel represents all the world’s Jews”.

The ceremony recalled the day when officials of the Vichy regime in Nazi-occupied France began rounding up 13,152 Jews and taking them to the Velodrome d’Hiver, an indoor cycle track in Paris.

Fewer than 100 of those who were detained at the so-called Vel d’Hiv and then sent to the Nazi death camps survived. Macron was the fourth French president to accept blame for France’s role in the deportations -- which totalled more than 75,000 -- since Jacques Chirac first did so in 1995.

“Time does its work,” Macron said. “Archives open and the truth comes out. It’s stark, irrevocable. It imposes itself on us all,” Macron said of one of the darkest chapters in France’s wartime history.

In a clear reference to far-right leader Marine Le Pen, the rival he defeated in May, Macron denounced “politicians who are prepared to reverse the truth”. Le Pen had insisted during the campaign that today’s France could not be accountable for the Vichy regime’s actions.

Netanyahu hailed the “special heroism” of the French resistance to the Nazis, praising the “noble French citizens who at great risk to their own lives” saved thousands more Jews from perishing in the death camps where at least six million would die overall between 1941 and 1945.

“For the sacred honour of those who perished... let us remember the past, let us secure tomorrow,” he said. “The strength of Israel is that it is the one certain guarantee that the Jewish people will never undergo a Holocaust again.”

Among other critics of Netanyahu’s presence was former Israeli ambassador to France, Elie Barnavi, who told AFP it made him “a little uneasy”. Barnavi, now a Peace Now activist advocating a two-state solution to end the Middle East conflict, added: “This story has nothing to do with Israel.”