On July 15, 1942, around 7 p.m., nine-year-old Victor Perahia was at the table with his mother, Jeanne, in the family apartment in Saint-Nazaire, in Loire-Inférieure, when a truck was heard.
The father, Robert, a Jewish peddler of Turkish origin, has not yet returned.
“He stopped in front of our house. Germans got out and entered the building. They came up the steps very loudly and knocked hard on our door,” Victor recalls, as if it were yesterday .
"My mother and I were scared, but we opened the door. They broke into our apartment."
The Felgendarmes ask where Robert is.
Under duress, his wife has to pick him up.
The whole family is trapped.
Paralyzed, the young boy rocked in a few seconds in horror: "The Germans spoke very loudly in an authoritarian way. There was one who had a small submachine gun. I felt my parents who were very worried and who did not know what attitude to take. They wanted to protect me, but they couldn't do anything to prevent my arrest", he recalls, 80 years later.
Young Victor Perahia.
© Perahia Family Archives
The Perahia are among the hundreds of Jews arrested on July 15, 1942 in the occupied zone.
On the eve of the most infamous Vél d'Hiv roundup, organized in Paris and its suburbs, arrests took place in western France.
As historian Jean-Luc Pinol reports in his book "Convois. The deportation of Jews from France" (Éditions du Détour), 473 people were arrested in 82 different towns in Loire-Inférieure, Sarthe, Maine et Loire , Mayenne and Indre et Loire.
List of arrests featuring the Perahia family.
© Departmental Archives of Loire-Atlantique
"There is no visibility of the roundups made in Paris"
These raids are part of the negotiations between the German authorities and the French government.
At the beginning of July 1942, an agreement provided for the total deportation of approximately 30,000 to 40,000 Jews aged 16 to 45.
The effort must be focused on the Paris region where they mainly reside, but arrests are also planned in the provinces.
"Contacts take place by telephone between the German authorities and the regional prefects who transmit them to the prefects of the department. The programming of the raids is then done at the local level according to the availability of police personnel in relation to the number of Jews to be arrested and the number of places to lock up those arrested", describes the historian Annie Lambert, co-author of "The Jews in Brittany" (University Press of Rennes).
"In principle, only the French police and gendarmes should carry out the arrests. However, in certain towns, the Feldgendarmes also carry them out.
Unlike the operations of the Vél d'Hiv roundup, the Perahia family was therefore not arrested by the French police.
These roundups in the occupied zone also went more unnoticed than in Paris, as Annie Lambert points out: "In the West of France the Jewish population is not very numerous, about 2,000 people recorded in October 1940. The roundups are relatively discreet. There is no visibility of the arrests made in Paris and the Paris region, carried out by several thousand gendarmes, with buses, nor the concentration of most of the victims in a single place like the Vélodrome d'Hiver where more than 8,000 people, half of them children, were crowded".
Convoy No. 8 left Angers
After being taken to Nantes, Victor and his parents were transferred to Angers, where the arrested Jews were gathered.
But there, they are not directed to the Drancy camp, in the Parisian suburbs, already saturated because of the massive raids.
A convoy to Auschwitz-Birkenau was organized from the very station of the Maine-et-Loire prefecture.
This convoy, called convoy number 8, is the only one leaving from the provinces, according to the agreements provided with the German authorities.
It is made up of 824 Jews, 201 of whom have French nationality.
They shouldn't have been arrested.
The dispatch note concerning convoy No. 8 which left Angers on July 20 and was addressed to the main office of Reich security in Berlin, to the inspector of the concentration camps in Oranienbourg and to the headquarters of the concentration camps in Auschwitz.
© Archives Annie Lambert
On July 20, Robert Perahia took his place in one of the wagons.
His wife and son temporarily escape deportation.
"The men were taken away directly, but at the time we weren't deporting the children yet," explains Victor Perahia.
With his mother, he was interned in the Lande de Monts camp, in Indre et Loire, then in Drancy for almost two years.
Jeanne Perahia manages to make believe that her husband is a prisoner of war and enjoys relative protection.
But in June 1944, a few weeks before the Liberation, they were both deported by convoy 80 to Bergen-Belsen.
Victor and Jeanne were finally repatriated to France in the spring of 1945. The father of the family was not so lucky.
He will not return from Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Only 19 people from convoy no. 8 survived their deportation.
Eighty years later, Victor Perahia continues tirelessly to testify so as not to forget those of the roundup of July 15: "We talk more about the Vél d'Hiv, because it was the most important roundup, but there were other arrests in France. It was a national roundup, not just in Paris".
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