LA RAFLE (“THE ROUNDUP”) A film by Rose Bosch

My family never held back in retelling their horrific experiences of the Holocaust. Stories my dad and my uncles would tell me have been retold to my own children, by me. Hopefully these stories will be passed on to theirs. But for every account I heard, I knew there were at least 6 million more than would never get told.

At some point early in my life, my love for cinema intertwined with my thirst for more information, more stories about the dreadful tales our people went through during the Shoah. It may have been a screening of Night and Fog at my High School that was my entry into this side of film. I really can’t remember but my partiality to foreign films allowed me to appreciate a wider range of movies related to the Holocaust.

“La Rafle” (The Roundup), directed by Rose Bosch, opens in NYC on November 16th. It relates the tale of the horrifying moment in Occupied France when over 13,152 Jews (among them 4,115 children) were rounded up by the French police. They were kept in oppressive conditions at the Vélodrome d’Hiver, a glass domed sports arena not too far from the Eiffel Tower. Ultimately they were sent to transient camps and then to their extermination in Auschwitz. The heat, hunger, thirst and sanitary conditions during the week they were detained at the Velodrome, were just too much to bear

The story involves a series of events seen from the point of view of children. We follow the kids as they play and interact with their families, yellow stars intact. By the time they are imprisoned, they are children we have come to know, not just anonymous figures. Understandably they are even more confused than the adults, their main anxieties raised when separated from their parents.

It’s a straightforward, heartfelt drama, well acted and well produced. It stars Jean Reno as Dr. David Sheinbaum who tends to his fellow victims. He shows a kindness and love for what he does, even as he is subjected to the same lot as his fellow Jews. Melanie Laurent of Inglorious Basterds fame (au revoir, Shoshana), is excellent as Annette Monod, a Protestant nurse who assists Jews in escaping, labors tirelessly in the medical ward and intimidates the French police for more assistance. I found scenes involving Adolph Hitler and Eva Braun cartoonish but telling at the same time.

For almost 70 years, practically nothing was known in the U.S. about this shameful subject, one that many historians call the darkest moment in modern French history. This unique event of the Shoah in France, began as a psychologically painful moment of disgrace, then one of amnesia, then of commemoration, and now, for us, of introduction.

La Rafle reveals the complicity of eager French politicians and police to round up Parisian Jews. Although it should be noted that around 10,000 Parisian Jews were hidden from the Nazis during the roundup, there was a tremendous amount of impassivity among the French officials and many French citizens. Watching this splendid film, one can better understand Elie Wiesel’s quote: “The opposite of love is not hate. The opposite of love is indifference.”

Jerry Richter is a resident of West Hempstead, a High School Global Studies teacher and an Alfred Lerner Fellow for the Jewish Foundation for the Righteous, an organization that gives financial assistance to Gentile rescuers of Jews during the Holocaust. La Rafle is currently being shown at the Malverne Theater.