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The visual void surrounding the 1942 Vel d'Hiv roundup has become an obsession in France rather than a point of departure for reflection on narrative and visual silence in the face of the Holocaust. This study highlights the shifting paradigms around which French television has constructed narratives about the Vel d'Hiv roundup. Whereas scholars have analyzed the politics behind its commemorations in the context of broader debates on national identity and anti-Semitism, this article rethinks this event in terms of postwar televised mythologies, de/constructions, representations and national discourses.
INTRODUCTION
From its creation in the early twentieth century to its demolition in 1959, the Parisian Vélodrome d'Hiver (popularly known as the Vel d'Hiv) earned its reputation through its famous sport rallies and cycling competitions, which made this site a symbol of French popular culture and tradition. Nothing predestined this space, devoted to leisure, sport and political activities, to become a site of mourning, shame and obsession in postwar France.
The events that occurred on the site in July 1942 would dramatically change its aura in later years. On July 16 and 17, 1942, the French police carried out a mass arrest of more than 13,000 Jews in Paris and its suburbs. Jewish families were herded into the Vel d'Hiv stadium, housed there in inhuman conditions until July 22 and eventually transported to the French internment camps in the Loiret, where the French gendarmes wrested children from their parents before their deportation to Auschwitz.1 The French state apparatus played a major role in both the planning and the implementation of this mass arrest. The Vel d'Hiv roundup targeted children and women for the very first time. The Vichy Regime spared no one and even insisted on deporting more than 4,000 children under the age of sixteen, most of whom were French by parental declaration at birth. From among all the deportees, fewer than 100 returned, none of them children.
The Vel d'Hiv arena burned down in 1959, burying with it the memory of thousands of Jewish men, women and children. Effaced from the Parisian urban landscape, the space located on Rue Nélaton in the 15th arrondissement has evolved today, ironically, into an annex of the French Ministry of the Interior. Like a palimpsest of memory, multiple...