Nazi camp casts shadow over French celebrations

AS France celebrated the 60th anniversary of its liberation from Nazi Germany yesterday, another anniversary - more sombre and shameful - was remembered only by those who lived to see the liberation of the notorious Drancy detention camp.

A few days before the liberation, Red Cross workers crossed into the camp outside Paris and began distributing ration cards to its starving Jewish inmates.

The Germans had fled Drancy a day before, just hours after burning their files and sending one final cattle train jammed with terrified prisoners to a Nazi concentration camp.

From the day Drancy opened on August 20, 1941, until its liberation on August 18, 1944, more than 70,000 Jews - including 11,000 children - were sent to Drancy to await deportation to Auschwitz. Only 2,500 would survive.

One who made it out alive was Andre Ullmo, a Jewish Resistance fighter who was arrested and sent to Drancy in May 1943 after an informer denounced him to the Gestapo.

At great risk, right under the nose of the Nazis, Ullmo and a small group of male prisoners clandestinely plotted to dig a tunnel underneath the camp so that its inmates could escape.

After World War II, Drancy's U-shaped complex was converted into cheap flats. Today, the place once known as "the Antechamber of Auschwitz" is home to about 400 families.

The celebration yesterday to mark the dramatic liberation of Paris six decades ago was huge, but there was nothing official for the 60th anniversary of the freeing of Drancy.

The tears, the joy and the euphoria that ushered in the liberation of Paris 60 years ago yesterday were relived in a grandiose fete to help Parisians relive the day they threw off the Nazi shackles.

Paris was also honouring its liberators - Resistance fighters who took their clandestine battle to the streets and French and American soldiers.

Shamed, hungry and on its knees for four years during the Second World War, Paris was standing again on August 25, 1944, still dodging bullets but spared Hitler's threat to demolish the French capital.

The voice of General Charles de Gaulle sounded anew at City Hall where he proclaimed the renaissance of Paris in a speech that is part of the public memory.

City Hall was the venue for the main ceremony of the multifaceted commemoration. There, President Jacques Chirac paid tribute to veterans and Resistance fighters present among the 4,000 guests.