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to go from Avenue Foch to Drancy to see the concrete
results of their work. That morning, mingled with adult deportees from the Les
Milles camp, 323 young girls and 207 boys under the age of 16 leave Drancy
without their parents, huddled in the boxcars of
convoy 20. Two days later they are gassed
and burned in the immense Jewish slaughterhouse built in the center of Europe
and named Auschwitz.
August 18, 1942. Regional prefects are
informed of the date of the planned Vichy Zone roundup, Wednesday, August 26,
and are told to keep it "strictly secret." The same day, Bousquet, in his
telegram number12,519, cancels 11 of the exemptions from arrest set out on
August 5, keeping only 6. He doubtless fears there will be too few arrests. The
exemptions remaining are: people over 60 years of age, those considered
untransportable [sic], pregnant women, parents of children under two years of
age (the original exemption applied to those with children under five; Bousquet
thus sacrificed children between the ages of two and five), and adults with a
French spouse or child.
Learning from the experience of the first four
convoys from the Unoccupied Zone, in which all except 11 families left their
children behind, Bousquet cancels permission for parents to choose whether
children under 18 will leave with them or stay in the Vichy Zone, deliberately
condemning to death the children of those who will be arrested. From now on all
children over two years of age will be made to go with their parents. (Bousquet
will never be criticized for this decision at his trial after the war.) The
exemption is also withdrawn for the children whose parents were on the five
convoys dispatched earlier in August. Bousquet thus condemns these children,
who were released to Jewish shelters and whom French gendarmes will hunt
throughout the Vichy Zone to send to the Rivesaltes camp. Between August 18 and
26, 134 Jewish children are arrested in this way, some, for example, at
Chabannes in the Creuse Department. Furthermore, Bousquet demands as quickly as
possible lists of the Jews made subject to arrest by his cancellation of
exemptions. His telegram to the prefects ends with the warning: "You will
recall the pressing need to take extremely severe police measures with a view
to making the planned operations effective and to avoid any incidents."
August 19, 1942. The first children's transport from
Beaune-la-Rolande, carrying 965 children, 233 women, and 1 man, leaves the camp
for Drancy. (At Beaune-la-Rolande, four children have already died from
diphtheria and one from peritonitis.) They will be deported to Auschwitz on
August 31.
The police administrator of Orleans reports on the convoy:
This convoy was composed entirely of women
and of children of a very young age. A large number of the children were
without parents, who had left the camp in prior convoys. Identification of very
young children separated from their parents was assured by a metal identity
disc of the type used by French servicemen, sewed to their clothing at breast
height. In addition to the of disc, pieces of white cloth with their identities
written in indelible pencil were also sewed to their clothing
August 20, 1942. Pastor Marc Boegner of the Reformed
(Protestant) Church of France writes Marshal Pétain to express "the
inde- […scribable]
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FRENCH
CHILDREN OF THE HOLOCAUST A memorial
Serge Klarsfeld
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