The other day, French President Emanuel Macron talked about something that happened in a velodrome. The thing is, that velodrome hasn't stood in about 60 years, and the event wasn't a bike race.
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| Six-day race at the Velodrome d;Hiver, Photo by Henri Cartier-Bresson |
Eighty years earlier--on 16 and 17 July 1942--French police rounded up thousands of Parisian Jews (at that time, Paris was said to have the fourth-largest Jewish community in the world) in "Veldeev"--slang for le Velodrome d'hiver.
The track racing venue, which also hosted other sporting events, was so named because it was covered with a glass ceiling, which allowed races and other events to be held during the winter (hiver) and made the velodrome the first with that capability. That glass ceiling (as a feminist, those words trouble me, even when they aren't a metaphor!) was painted dark blue to make it less visible to bomber navigators.
"The glass ceiling" has become a metaphor for the ways in which women are not allowed to reach their potential in various professions and careers. For Parisian Jews, however, it became a literal trap: It kept the heat of one of Paris' hottest summers in a space where there wasn't enough room for them to lie down, let alone move around. Not surprisingly, many suffered from heat exhaustion and other illnesses; it is not known how many perished there. What is known is that 13,152--some really more dead than alive---were herded into buses that took them to the trains that delivered them to death camps, mainly Auschwitz. Only 400 captives survived.
I first learned of "Veldeev," like so much else, by accident: I heard someone mention it during my first European bike tour. I went in search of it only to find out that such a search was like a quest to see the prison that stood on la Place de la Bastille.
After the war, the Velodrome's was used less. Its condition deteriorated to the point that when the last six-day race was held there, in November 1958, the glass ceiling leaked and electrical cables hung from loops. (Jacques Anquetil, the first five-time winner of the Tour de France, participated in that race along with other top riders of that time.) Those conditions may have contributed to a fire that destroyed part of the building, which led to it being razed the following year.
Although there is a plaque commemorating the Velodrome and "Rafle"(roundup), few people seem to remember much, if anything, about them. The few who still can recall that terrible time were very young when they were detained--or witnessed the arrest of their friends and neighbors. One of them is Jeannine Bouhana (nee Sebanne), who received letters from her friend, Rachel Polakiewicz. How those letters reached Mademoiselle Sebanne is not exactly known: Anyone's best guess is that Rachel tossed those letters out the Velodrome and someone picked them up.
Hearing Jeannine talk about that time, and reading Rachel's letters, it's hard not to be struck by a couple of terrible ironies. One is, of course, that in a velodrome--a place where motion is celebrated,--people were confined. Another, related, is that in a place where athletes made or heightened their reputations, thousands of everyday people, in essence, had their lives taken away from them. Finally, events the "Vel" hosted its most celebrated events during the winter, while its most infamous episode unfolded during a heat wave.
Motion and confinement, celebration and defamation, life and death: all of them, under a glass ceiling.
