Final testimony of Holocaust victims presented to Jewish Center

The files, 150,000 names, were compiled by French bureaucrats starting in 1941 when the pro-Nazi Vichy regime passed the first anti-Jewish measures banning Jews from medicine, law, civil service, universities and commerce.

The files facilitated police roundups and eventually led to the deportation and deaths of 76,000 Jews, including 12,000 children, in Nazi death camps. Only about 2,000 survived.

Now the files are on permanent display behind glass, arranged in 150 wooden boxes stuffed with small cards of different colors depending on a person’s country of origin, age or family status.

The exhibit also features 40 photographs of victims, among them feature newly weds embracing and small children dressed in holiday finery.

Chirac said the files bear witness to Vichy’s commitment to exclude Jews from French society. One set of files lists Jewish owners of bicycles and radios while another names shops frequented by Jews.

Meanwhile in Bordeaux on Friday, in the ongoing saga of identifying the perpetrators of crime against the Jews, prosecutors tried to connect former pro-Nazi Vichy official Maurice Papon with Bordeaux’s Wartime Office of Jewish Questions. Papon is charged with signing arrest orders that led to the deportation and deaths of 1,690 Jews, including 233 children, while he was a Bordeaux police supervisor during World War II. Part of his responsibilities as deputy prefect was overseeing the Office of Jewish Questions.

Prosecutor Henri Desclaux grilled Papon on his role for three hours, expressing ironic respect for the office’s “admirable account” of all Jews in the southwest Aquitaine region, and calling it a “decisive instrument for the persecutions.”

Papon, repeating the defense he has used since the trial opened in October, said he helped saved Jews and was not personally behind the ordered arrests.It was completely necessary that the office of Jewish questions have an “ordered file,” he said. “It was thanks to this file that the office could seize on even the slightest opportunity to intervene to save individuals.”

Papon went on to say that when the court soon examines the railway convoys that transported Jews to transit camps, from where they were taken by the Germans to Auschwitz “we will show that the office of Jewish Questions intervened to save men, women and children,” he said.

In the past, Papon also has claimed his boss, prefect Maurice Sabatier, bore responsibility for any use of the French police in rounding up Jews.

Papon rose to high government posts after the War, including Budget Minister, and is the highest-ranking official of the pro-Nazi Vichy regime to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

The trial was scheduled to resume on Monday with questioning of Papon by civil parties to the trial, including lawyers for families of his alleged victims.

The trial has been delayed several times by Papon’s ill health and is not expected to finish before March.