association mémoire des enfants juifs

Association Landaise pour le Devoir de Mémoire

Cérémonie en mémoire d'Arlette Farhi - discours président de l'association

Transcript

00:00On June 14, 1940, as Hitler's troops entered Paris, little Arlette Farid came to bring her smile to the school that welcomed her.

00:12At eight years old, she could only imagine that monsters would lead her to the gas chambers a few years later.

00:19Brigitte, her mother, her aunt Clara, her grandparents, Rachel and Jacques, refugees in the commune, knew the ravages of anti-Semitism.

00:29They were what we called the Spanish Jews, the Sephardim.

00:34These Jews, whom the Catholic kings already had in 1492, left no other alternative than persecution, expulsion or conversion.

00:44These Jews were then refugees in the Mediterranean Basin or the Ottoman Empire.

00:49Arlette's parents of Turkish nationality were the descendants.

00:55When they emigrated to Paris in the mid-1920s, they gave birth to Arlette on September 17, 1932.

01:01The little girl acquired French nationality in November 1938, probably at the request of her parents.

01:08Feeling the new dangers of the occupation of France by the Nazis,

01:12he then took refuge in Misan, Villa-Plaisance, eight days before the armistice of June 22, 1940.

01:21France was divided into two parts, the occupied zone and the so-called free zone.

01:27The Fary Alfandari family was then in the occupied zone.

01:32In October 1940, the members of the family, who would then remain in the Villa-Logilandais, were resettled.

01:39The Nazi backs were tightened on Arlette and her family.

01:44In September, the SS commander Luther de Bordeaux asked for their expulsion from Misan.

01:50On October 24, the Prefect of the Langues pronounced the expulsion of the family.

01:55She lived in Bordeaux for a year.

01:58But on December 21, 1943, at 4 a.m., the Nazi security police,

02:04assisted by the General Commissariat on Jewish Issues of Vichy,

02:07arrested Arlette and her mother, the father the next day, during a large raffle of Bordeaux Jews.

02:13They were then incarnated at the camp of Mérignac.

02:17On December 30, 1943, 134 people, including 26 children from 1 to 13 years old, including Arlette,

02:25accompanied by her parents, were deported to France.

02:29On January 20, 1944, the wagons of convoy 66 carrying Arlette, Léon and Régine to the extermination camp of the Jews.

02:44In this convoy of horror, Arlette had to feel all the collective anguish in the eyes,

02:49the tears, the cries of the strangers who shared her furious journey.

02:54Among these strangers of convoy 66, Albert Samuel and Eden Falk,

02:59the parents of Raymond Samuel, nicknamed Raymond Aubrac, of his name of resistance.

03:05Let us remember that in 2006, Lucie and Raymond Aubrac, great resistance,

03:10had inaugurated the stele in memory of the Jewish children in Montmartre,

03:13the one on which now appears little Arlette Jarry.

03:17Arlette's calvary stopped in the gas chamber of Auschwitz,

03:21probably upon arrival, as was the case for the youngest or the most fragile.

03:26Her parents followed her to death.

03:29About the massacre of 33,771 Jews,

03:33committed in 1971 by the Nazis,

03:36of which the rabbi of Babi Yar in Ukraine, the poet Evtushenko, wrote,

03:41Babi Yar breaks the oak trees.

03:44These trees are witnesses and witnesses of the silence here.

03:49We had to, here too, in the lands, listen to the screams of silence,

03:54which covered the martyrdom of the Jewish children,

03:56now appearing on the steles of the places of memory

03:59in Montmartre, Saint-Pierre-du-Mont, Grenades-sur-Adome,

04:02and from now on, here, in Mimisan.

04:05But why such a long silence?

04:08Two collaborators played in the region,

04:10the active accomplices of the deportation of the Jews,

04:13the prefect of the Langues-Gazailles,

04:15who had helped in the deportation of the children,

04:18the secretary general of the prefecture of Giron, Maurice Papon,

04:22who organized the deportation of the Jews to Drancy.

04:26They then led first-rate administrative careers after the war.

04:31Maurice Papon himself was an ephemeral prefect of the Langues-Gazailles in 1944,

04:36a few months after the extermination of Arlette and her family.

04:40He then became prefect of police in Paris.

04:43How to be surprised then, with such recycling of collaborators,

04:47that it took him 60 years to break the silence

04:51that weighed on Arlette and the other children.

04:54So, to listen to the screams of silence,

04:57it took all the dedication of the founder of our association,

05:00André Curculos, and of our regretted Lucie Despinaud,

05:03who disappeared this year,

05:05who spent thousands of hours in the departmental archives,

05:08that of the Pedagogical Center for Resistance and Deportation,

05:12and its president, Cyril-Edouard Parcellet, here present,

05:16to exhume from the various archives

05:18these children who were locked up in the documents,

05:21the notes, and the reports.

05:28All societies have gone through critical economic or political periods,

05:33which the demagogues take advantage of

05:35to deliver human groups to the collective verdict.

05:39The rise of anti-Semitic acts in Europe and in France today

05:42is the expression.

05:44A little over a decade ago,

05:46Jewish little children were murdered in a Jewish school in Toulouse.

05:50Other Jews were killed in the hyper-cashier of Vincennes.

05:54And more recently, Mireille Dunol, a survivor of the Shoah, was assassinated.

05:59In 2023, all the figures of anti-Semitic acts and attacks have exploded.

06:042024 as well.

06:06This week again, justice has seized the horror of the rape of a little girl

06:10of the age of Arlette,

06:12with the aggravating circumstance of anti-Semitism.

06:15The filthy peace, high as ever.

06:18Today, the yellow star,

06:20symbol of the selective use of human beings,

06:22has not disappeared from all minds.

06:25The obsessive racist theory of the Great Replacement,

06:28nationalist and identitarian reprisals

06:30bear the seeds of other hatreds, other stars.

06:34By organizing this tribute,

06:36by erecting this plaque,

06:38Mr. Le Maire and his municipal council

06:40fulfill an essential mission,

06:42that of the memory of a little girl

06:44victim of anti-Semitic monsters.

06:47They also contribute, by this historical reminder,

06:50to the fight against all the resurgences of racist theories

06:53that have plagued Europe during these tragic years.

06:56Teachers and students here present

06:59also become precious passers-by of memory

07:03to recall this tragedy.

07:05Christine Cassagne mentioned the Pylône colony,

07:08where Christiane Colme hid Jewish children

07:11by changing their identities.

07:14Some of these children

07:16have certainly attended the same school as Arlette Varie.

07:19Together, they listened to the same teachers and teachers,

07:22shared the same games, the same laughs as Arlette,

07:25before Arlette left her empty seat on the benches of the class.

07:30During these tragic years,

07:32in this commune, at the risk of their lives,

07:35people of heart protected Jewish children,

07:38while the Nazis, with the help of a collaborator prefect,

07:41prepared the fateful journey of Arlette, Régine and Léon.

07:45The municipality envisages honoring the actions of these just,

07:49here again, a work of essential memory.

07:52These days, we have exchanged with Francine Alfandari of New York.

07:57Her grandfather was the cousin of Arlette's mother.

08:00She wanted to thank us all here present.

08:03Daniel Salogne, vice-president of our association,

08:06will read the message she addresses us.

08:08I will finish by quoting Elie Wiesel,

08:11Nobel Peace Prize winner and the only survivor of his family.

08:16I quote,

08:18In Auschwitz, in ashes,

08:21the promises of man are extinguished.

08:24So, dear little Arlette,

08:26it is up to all those who have gathered here

08:29to bring back from ashes new promises of humanity.

08:38Thank you.

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