At the end of July, the Vel’ d’Hiv roundup, initiated not so long ago by Jacques Chirac, is commemorated throughout France. During this event, over two days, 13,000 Jews were arrested in Paris by the French police to be handed over to the Nazi occupiers, who would then send them to death camps. Only about a hundred of them would return.
As every year, on platform number 1 of the station, the departure point for many Jews rounded up in Nice, the emotional ceremony organized on the third Sunday of July took place.
The Prefect himself presided over the sequence before an audience that included some survivors and — due to the pre-election year — more elected officials than usual.
The mayor’s representative, Martine Ouaknine, gave a meaningful speech in which she rightly denounced a danger even greater than blatant revisionism: banalization. She noted, for example, the frequent use of the phrase “never again” regarding anything and everything. She could have just as easily denounced protesters who claim to be “gassed” at the slightest use of tear gas.
But these sensible words were contradicted by the end of the ceremony, when the municipal band, after playing La Marseillaise and Le Chant des Partisans, performed Nissa la Bella.
A pleasant but profane song, it has no place in such a ceremony and even less in a ceremonial order that grants it a form of superiority. Doing so precisely contributes to the banalization that Martine Ouaknine criticized.
Patrick Mottard
