French President Emmanuel Macron will on April 7 mark 80 years since Nazi forces raided a Jewish orphanage in the southeast of France and sent almost all its occupants to extermination camps.
A handful of former residents of the orphanage in the village of Izieu are to attend the ceremony headed by Mr. Macron, one of a string of events he is leading this year as France marks eight decades since the key penultimate year of the Second World War.
On April 6, 1944, 44 Jewish children aged four to 12 then hosted in the orphanage were rounded up by the Gestapo with their seven instructors, also Jewish.
The raid was carried out on the orders of Klaus Barbie, the notorious Nazi known as the “Butcher of Lyon”.
Barbie fled to South America after the war but was extradited from Bolivia to France in 1983 and in 1987 was sentenced to life imprisonment on charges of crimes against humanity. He died in prison in 1991.
All the Izieu victims were deported to the death camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland or Reval in Estonia. Only one instructor survived.
Until then it was “a magnificent place”, where the children could be “among friends”, take classes or take a walk as in peacetime, remembered Roger Wolman, 85, who left the orphanage in 1943.
Between May 1943 and April 1944, the Izieu colony, founded by Sabine Zlatin, a Jewish resistance fighter of Polish origin, took in around 100 children whose parents had been deported. Until the raid, it had been left relatively unmolested.
The event will see the celebration of “the commitment of those who stood up against Nazism by welcoming the victims of persecution, and of those who opposed the abomination of republican values, by bringing the executioner Klaus Barbie to justice,” the French presidency said.
