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Joseph Weismann was arrested during the Vel d’Hiv raid on July 16, 1942. At the age of 92, he gave his testimony as a Holocaust survivor.
On July 16, 1942, the Vichy police in Paris arrested 13,000 Jews, including more than 4,000 children. Among them was Joseph Weismann, 11 years old. He was taken with his family to the Vélodrome d’Hiver in Paris. “We make ourselves comfortable in our stands, where we sit for five days and five nights without moving, without eating.”, he testifies. On July 21, 1942, the families were crammed into cattle cars and taken towards the Beaune-la-Rolande camp (Loiret).
He tried to escape
In August 1942, Nazi dignitaries planned to deport adults from Beaune-la-Rolande to Auschwitz, Poland, but nothing was decided on for the youngest. Joseph tries to escape with his friend Jo. “We built a kind of tunnel by pushing aside the barbed wire so we could slip through. […] I took my beret, threw it over the barbed wire and said, “Look, Jo, my beret is free and we will follow.”remembers Joseph Weismann.
