French PM urges youth to remember horrors of Holocaust

Prime Minister Francois Fillon urged France's youth to remember the horrors of the Holocaust during a speech Sunday to mark the 65th anniversary of a World War II roundup of Jews. Speaking at the former site of the Velodrome d'Hiver bicycle stadium - which was used as a transit camp for thousands of Jews on July 16-17, 1942 - Fillon said the French must not shrink from the memory of those hours of shame. On those July 1942 days, 13,152 Jews were rounded up in the Paris region, and 8,169, mostly children, were held at the stadium before being sent to Nazi death camps. "It is by recognizing fully the lights and shadows of the past that the nation learns and grows," Fillon told an audience of hundreds that included a handful of aging Holocaust survivors.Faced with the ever-dwindling numbers of French survivors, Fillon called on the country's youth to keep the memory of France's deportations alive. "Once the voice of those who lived this tragedy is gone, it will be up to you, the young people of France, to take up their words, their memories," he said. "You will do it for them; you will do it for France." In all, about 75,000 Jews were deported from France to Nazi concentration camps during World War II. Fewer than 3,000 survived. Leon Fellmann, 83, was one of the survivors who attended Sunday's ceremony in Paris 15th arrondissement, or district. He said he was 17 when he and his 36-year-old mother were sent to the Velodrome d'Hiver. On arriving in the bicycle stadium, "I knew that we were done for," he said. Fellmann said his mother urged him to try to escape. As they were being moved from the stadium to the first in a series of vehicles that would take the deportees to the death camps, Fellmann said he broke through a police cordon and ran to freedom. Fellmann was active in the French Resistance until the end of the war. He never saw his mother again. "My mother created me twice, the first time when I was born and the second time when she forced me to escape," he said. Patricia Anisten, the daughter of survivor Raymond Anisten, who was also at Sunday's ceremony, said it was crucial to continue to mark the anniversary of the deportations. "It is important to remember, to repeat and to show every year what happened at the site to make everyone aware that what happened here 65 years ago was very serious; it must not happen again," Patricia Anisten said.(Associated Press/22 07 2007)