A Nazi Roundup, Chaotically Evoked In 'La Rafle'
On June 23, 1940, the day after France signed the armistice that marked the country's official capitulation and partial occupation, Adolf Hitler toured Paris. In black-and-white footage taken on the day that opens the earnest and unconventional French docudrama La Rafle, the visiting Nazi leaders and their military escorts are more or less sightseeing.
They go by the Paris opera, the Arc de Triomphe, the Eiffel Tower; all are conspicuously empty of Parisians. Unsurprisingly, the Paris Hitler surveys and even awkwardly marvels at on his first and only visit to the city is one without its people — a grim image that foreshadows the unnaturally vacant apartments after a citywide purge that will follow two years later.
La Rafle ("the roundup") chronicles the Vel' d'Hiv Roundup of July 1942, in which roughly 13,000 Jews living in Paris (4,501 of them children) were removed from their homes by French police and sent to detention camps in the countryside, before being deported to Auschwitz. While approximately two-thirds of France's Jewish community survived the Holocaust, La Rafle focuses on a grave moment of extreme complicity and betrayal by the Vichy government and French police — a stain of the war that went unacknowledged by the French government until the 1990s.
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Annette Monod (Melanie Laurent), a Protestant nurse, volunteers to help a Jewish doctor during World War II.