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