(Jewish Group) Marking 80 years since deportation of French Jews, Macron vows to oppose antisemitism

[Behind the Aegis]

Marking 80 years since deportation of French Jews, Macron vows to oppose antisemitism today


French President Emmanuel Macron, crossing his arms, visits the Pithiviers Holocaust museum in France, July 17, 2022. (Christophe Petit Tesson/Pool/AFP via Getty Images)

Consecutive French presidents have followed Jacques Chirac’s 1995 lead in acknowledging their country’s complicity in the Holocaust.

But none did so more intimately than Emmanuel Macron on Sunday in Pithiviers near Paris, when he described the feelings of betrayal and shock felt by French Jews whom French authorities delivered to be murdered.

“In those introductory chambers to the camps,” Macron said of places like Pithiviers, an old train station used to keep and dispatch Jews to Auschwitz, “French-Jewish families whispered words in Yiddish to reassure themselves, saying that France would never do this to them. Yet that’s what France did.”

Macron was speaking at the inauguration of a new Holocaust museum in Pithiviers, a town 50 miles south of Paris whose train station was the second-largest point of deportation of Jews to Auschwitz. There, Macron reiterated acknowledgement that French authorities had been complicit in the murder of about 77,000 local Jews. He also vowed to continue to fight antisemitism today.

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