Vel d’Hiv monument for Jewish children; Wikimedia Commons Parts of a text commemorating the murder of Jewish children in the Holocaust were painted over at a memorial park in Paris for victims of the genocide.
Police received reports this week of the unusual vandalism at the memorial space that opened in 2017 near the main Vel d’Hiv monument for Jewish children who were murdered by the Nazis with help from French authorities.
Among the words painted over was the assertion that victims were “killed in terrible and cruel conditions” as well as “extermination” and that the Nazis wanted to “annihilate” Jews.
Also painted over was 4,115, the number of French Jewish children who were picked up by the French police of the Vichy regime in the Vel d’Hiv roundup in July 1942, separated from their parents, deported and killed at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, the Le Parisien magazine reported Wednesday.
“Can you imagine something more lowly,” the French Jewish philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy wrote on Twitter Thursday about the incident.
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