30 Mar La Rafle
La Rafle, World War II movie about the Vel’ d’Hiv Roundup
(2010) La Rafle (translated The Round Up) is a French film about the July 1942 arrest of Paris Jews. The Nazis ordered the French police to first take the Jewish families to the Vélodrome d’Hiver, the huge Paris indoor bicycle track. This is the same velodrome featured in Sarah’s Key, the book and the film that also came out in 2010.
From the velodrome, the families were taken to internment camps inside France, then to extermination camps.
This was an emotional movie to watch. The focus is on one family. The young son managed to escape and is alive today to talk about the horrors. In an interview more than twenty years ago he said that no one would dare to make a film about the incident … what happened to the children was just too inhumane.
Yes, in the scenes where the children were taken away I was on my treadmill with tears streaming down my face. The actors were excellent. I recognized that the nurse who stayed with the children until they were carried to their deaths was played by Mélanie Laurent, the French actress who played the lead role in Inglourious Basterds. The actual nurse, Annette Monod, died in 1995, but she was recognized by the State of Israel for her actions as “Righteous Among the Nations.”
This was a damning episode of French history. The prologue of the movie gave these statistics: “Out of 13,000 deportees, only 25 survived. None of the 4051 children put on the train ever came back. Vichy and the Germans aimed to round up 24,000 people. But on the morning of the round-up brave Partisans helped hide 10,000 Jewish men, women and children.”
It wasn’t until 1995 that President Chirac gave an official apology. Fifty years late.
La Rafle (The Roundup) at amazon.com
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