Eighty years ago this month, German police, aided by French police, rounded up thousands of people from the city's Old Port area, many of them Jewish, for deportation to labor and death camps.
This year, Marseille is sponsoring a series of events, including photo exhibitions, to keep the memory of those events alive, even as fewer and fewer are alive who remember the raids and the subsequent dynamiting of the entire Panier quarter next to the Vieux Port, considered by the German occupiers to be a troublesome area of resistance and sabotage.
A group of survivors and others filed a complaint for “crimes against humanity” with the prosecutor general in Paris in 2019; while they don't expect an investigation to turn up any living war criminals, they see it as part of ensuring that new generations will understand what happened.
Image: The Vieux Port, seen through an archway in the rebuilt Panier quarter of Marseille (PHeymont/TravelGumbo
Comments (0)