French President Emmanuel Macron on Sunday, April 7, marked 80 years since Nazi forces raided a Jewish orphanage in the southeast of France and sent almost all its occupants to extermination camps. The event is among the first of a sequence of ceremonies Macron will lead this year to mark eight decades since the penultimate year of World War II that in the summer of 1944 saw D-Day followed by the liberation of Paris from Nazi occupation.
A handful of former residents of the orphanage in the village of Izieu were due to attend the ceremony headed by Macron late Sunday afternoon. Earlier in the day, he also visited a remote Alpine plateau to pay tribute to heroes of the resistance who, in early spring 1944, were killed or captured by Nazi forces with the help of French collaborators.
On April 6, 1944, the 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 camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland or to German-occupied Estonia. Only one instructor survived.
The event was intended to celebrate "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.
Macron earlier paid tribute to 106 resistance fighters buried in the mountain plateau of Glières, also in the Alps, which was an important hub for the French resistance against Nazi rule. From January to March 1944, 465 resistance fighters gathered at Glières to receive airdrops of weapons in the run-up to the Allied landings in the south of France in August 1944. But the German army – with the assistance of a French collaborationist militia – decided to attack in late March of that year. Two-thirds of the resistance fighters were taken prisoner and 124 were killed during the fighting or shot. Nine disappeared and 16 died in deportation.
"At an altitude of 1,400 meters, France rose up. It lived as it should never have ceased to live, as it should never cease to exist," Macron said. He emphasized that the battle could not simply be seen as French on one side, fighting Germans on another. "French people imprisoned French people, French people murdered French people," he said, referring to the collaborators and describing this as a "French tragedy".