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Arlette Testyler survivor of the Vel d'Hiv roundup: "I tell this story so that we do not forget those who did not return"

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Arlette Testyler survivor of the Vel d'Hiv roundup.

© Archives of Arlette Testyler

By: Nathanaël Vittrant Follow

8 mins

It was just 80 years ago.

On July 16 and 17, 1942, on the orders of the Vichy government, French police arrested nearly 12,000 Jews.

In Paris, 8,000 of them, mainly women and children, will be locked up in the Vélodrome d'hiver before being deported to camps.

From this Vel d'Hiv roundup, there will be only a hundred survivors.

Among them, Arlette Testyler, at the time she was still called Arlette Reiman.

She was then 8 and a half years old.

Since then, she tirelessly tells her story, especially in classes, for those who have not returned.

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Arlette Testyler: 

On the night of July 16 to 17, 1942, we slept quietly at home, a little anxious, because my father had been arrested a day or two earlier.

And then two or three days earlier, I had to wear the yellow star.

Like every day, I was going to play in the square in the rue du Temple with my friends, and a guard stopped me.

He asked me: “do you know how to read”.

I answered him, that of course I could read, I was 8 and a half years old.

He said to me: “Look at what is written, and there was written 'forbidden to Jews and dogs'”.

And so that night, at 6 o'clock in the morning, my sister is still sleeping, mom gets up, me too and there is a knock on the door.

Violent blows.

It's the police.

She opens it and there, I see two policemen in capes with a list in their hands and saying to mum: we've come to arrest your husband.

Mom is a little indignant and tells them that he has already been arrested.

They, without getting upset, say: “so it's you and your children.

And then I saw mom fighting with them, she didn't want to be arrested.

She threw them vases, stools, chairs.

Obviously, it was useless and we were taken away like thieves.

The building I lived in was a very large building, four Jewish families lived there, all with children.

All were arrested that day.

When we went down the street, there were plenty of flatbed buses.

The women were crying, the children were screaming, it was horrible.

It was a hot and humid day.

It was July but it was raining a few drops.

It seemed like the sky was crying with us.

without getting upset, say: "so it's you and your children.

And then I saw mom fighting with them, she didn't want to be arrested.

She threw them vases, stools, chairs.

Obviously, it was useless and we were taken away like thieves.

The building I lived in was a very large building, four Jewish families lived there, all with children.

All were arrested that day.

When we went down the street, there were plenty of flatbed buses.

The women were crying, the children were screaming, it was horrible.

It was a hot and humid day.

It was July but it was raining a few drops.

It seemed like the sky was crying with us.

without getting upset, say: "so it's you and your children.

And then I saw mom fighting with them, she didn't want to be arrested.

She threw them vases, stools, chairs.

Obviously, it was useless and we were taken away like thieves.

The building I lived in was a very large building, four Jewish families lived there, all with children.

All were arrested that day.

When we went down the street, there were plenty of flatbed buses.

The women were crying, the children were screaming, it was horrible.

It was a hot and humid day.

It was July but it was raining a few drops.

It seemed like the sky was crying with us.

She threw them vases, stools, chairs.

Obviously, it was useless and we were taken away like thieves.

The building I lived in was a very large building, four Jewish families lived there, all with children.

All were arrested that day.

When we went down the street, there were plenty of flatbed buses.

The women were crying, the children were screaming, it was horrible.

It was a hot and humid day.

It was July but it was raining a few drops.

It seemed like the sky was crying with us.

She threw them vases, stools, chairs.

Obviously, it was useless and we were taken away like thieves.

The building I lived in was a very large building, four Jewish families lived there, all with children.

All were arrested that day.

When we went down the street, there were plenty of flatbed buses.

The women were crying, the children were screaming, it was horrible.

It was a hot and humid day.

It was July but it was raining a few drops.

It seemed like the sky was crying with us.

When we went down the street, there were plenty of flatbed buses.

The women were crying, the children were screaming, it was horrible.

It was a hot and humid day.

It was July but it was raining a few drops.

It seemed like the sky was crying with us.

When we went down the street, there were plenty of flatbed buses.

The women were crying, the children were screaming, it was horrible.

It was a hot and humid day.

It was July but it was raining a few drops.

It seemed like the sky was crying with us.

The buses directed us to the winter velodrome.

Me, I didn't know.

My parents were not sportsmen, rather musicians.

We arrived in front of this iron building: there were plenty of buses.

You know, I've never seen Germans.

Never.

Only French policemen.

We were dumped in this winter velodrome, it was daunting.

There were bedridden, crippled, women, some pregnant and children.

RFI: But very few adult men?

No, apart from a few old men, all the boys were under 16.

Many men had already been arrested.

We were rounded up but my father was arrested on being summoned: “report to the police station in your district to verify your identity”.

That's why he went there.

He thought that in France he risked nothing.

RFI: Do you have any idea how many people there were with you at the velodrome d'hiver?

No.

For me, it could be thousands, millions or hundreds.

We piled into the bleachers with other families.

You could hear the microphones screaming all the time, and day and night the buses were dumping people.

There was no water for the toilets, so people relieved themselves as modestly as possible against a wall.

This smell is still with me.

And I remember the blood, the women who were menstruating.

I went to my mother screaming that we were all being killed.

I also saw a suicide.

People who mutilated themselves, women who had abortions with knitting needles in the hope of being evacuated to a hospital.

In vain.

It was horror.

RFI: How long did you stay with your family in this winter velodrome?

AT:

 It's very nebulous in my head.

I do not know.

They called people to the microphone in alphabetical order.

As our name starts with an “r” I think we stayed among the last.

When we were finally called, we were put on a bus, heading for the Gare d'Austerlitz.

You won't get me into the Gare d'Austerlitz today.

I can not anymore.

It's tied to too many painful memories.

When we arrive, the station is empty of non-Jewish passengers.

The quays are white-hot by the sun, it is very hot.

And I see cattle cars, do you realize?

Cattle wagons!

We're going to get in.

There is no window, no door.

Only a fence on each side, at the height of the horses' nose, but it's not made for children, you can't breathe.

So my mom yells at everyone's adults to hug a child so we can breathe.

My mum also wrote a note to a neighbor to warn him that we had been arbitrarily arrested.

She took a piece of paper, a pencil and she wrote to him.

She rolled up the paper like a cigarette, she added a note to it.

She rolled up all some of my hair and she threw it on the tracks,

I still see her.

A railwayman or a quidam must have picked it up because we learned later that this word had reached him.

I'm telling you because that's when France woke up to save the Jews.

Because when my father left, they said to themselves: well, they are going to work in Germany.

But when they saw these cattle cars with the little hands of children sticking out, old people, bedridden, sick people, they understood that those weren't going to work.

And it is from there that France woke up.

You know, I testify a lot in schools, and I tell them: “that certainly France has collaborated, but of all Europe, it is in France that we have saved the most Jewish children.

»

Arlette Testyler survivor of the Vel d'Hiv roundup.

She was abducted with her parents at the age of 8 and a half.

© Personal archive of Arlette Testyler

RFI: Does that mean that you are angry with the State, with the Vichy government in this case, with Marshal Pétain, but you are not angry with France?

Of course I am angry with Marshal Pétain and all those who actively collaborated, you will find their names easily.

With my husband, who was deported to him for three years, we wrote a book called

.

Because during the Vel d'Hiv roundup, the Germans did not ask that children under 16 be arrested.

It was Pétain who added this instruction in his own hand.

But you know, my parents loved France.

They had chosen to live in France.

My father had left Poland when he was very young because it was the country of human rights, as he said.

And I also love this France, even now.

RFI: This is a story you have often told, why is it so important to tell it again and again?

AT:

 First, I tell it because the teachers ask for it.

So if they have the courage to teach what collaboration is, what it is to know how to make the right decision, to be on the right side of history, but if I do it above all, it's not It's not for me, it's for those who didn't come back.

So that we don't forget them, so that they don't die a second time.

And then I also do it by telling myself that if only 10%, -without being very demanding-, if even only 10% of the children to whom I tell my story growing up to respond to the revisionists (there are and there are will still be), to Holocaust deniers (there are some and there will still be some), if 10% of them say "oh no, I've seen some, they've existed", I think that those who have been murdered in Auschwitz and elsewhere because they were born Jews,

►

 : The roundup of the Vél 'd'Hiv: 80 years later, tell "the irreparable"

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